We’re all aware of the huge amounts of post-consumer textile waste – that’s used items like old clothes – ending up in landfills but it’s less common to hear about the waste generated from pre-consumer textiles. These are all the offcuts created during the production process that don’t make it into finished pieces, and up to 15% of textiles intended for garments end up on the cutting room floor. That adds up to hundreds of thousands of tonnes of wasted fabric.
With London-based brand Cutting Floor Cushions, founder Jacqui Braganza has created a way to save some of this waste from going in the bin by putting it onto your sofas instead. Pre-consumer textile offcuts (which have been turned back into fibres) are transformed into eco-friendly cushion inners. Not only do these inners give the old textiles a new lease of life, they take less energy and water to produce an inner made with brand new materials.
And Cutting Floor Cushions doesn’t stop at inners, it produces entire eco-conscious cushions with limited-edition covers made from roll-ends and deadstock fabric. Like the inners, these are handmade in unique sizes to ensure every bit of material gets used.
Cutting Floor Cushions even runs a Restuff & Refluff service where you can send back any cushions purchased from the brand that have lost their squish to get fluffed up, filled out and ready for another round of lounging. Any bits of stuffing that need replacing, along with any offcuts from the cushion covers, are reused in other products like rags-and-remnants draught excluders. Zero waste baby.