HONOLULU (KHON2) — Chickens are abundant in Hawaiʻi, but they are more than just a familiar sight along the islands’ roads — they are actually a key component in making a textile that could change the course of Hawaiʻi’s economy and environment.
Chicken feathers have a component called keratin in them, a component found in human hair, nails, animal horns and other strong naturally-occurring materials.
With this in mind, Hawaiʻi born-and-raised engineer Dr. Tarah Sullivan Suiter was inspired to use chicken feathers for something more, something that could be used in the daily life of everyday people.
So, she made KERTEX: a textile made entirely out of chicken feathers.
KERTEX doesn’t just make a new, unique alternative for your next t-shirt or sweater, it is actually a sustainable fabric that directly addresses a large waste problem in the country.
“We have a pretty big poultry industry in the US, and because of that, there’s so much of this poultry waste material,” Sullivan Suiter said. “We were trying to see if we can do something useful with that, because we already have [feathers] here really not going to much.”
According to Sullivan Suiter, the American poultry industry produces approximately four billion pounds of feathers as a byproduct of selling chicken for consumption.
These feathers would normally end up in a landfill — but KERTEX looks to use them to make sustainable clothing. And in comparison to the four billion pounds of feathers, a relatively small amount of feathers can go a long way.
“We estimate two chickens per sweater,” Sullivan Suiter said. “So two of your standard broiler chickens, if you were to take all of the feathers off of them, that’s the number that you’d need to make a sweater.”
KERTEX is aiming to be a versatile fabric, with a demo piece presented by Sullivan Suiter being similar to wool, with a bit of stretch to it.
Sullivan Suiter conducted her work through Oceanit, a Honolulu-based tech company looking to make groundbreaking advancements for problems from sustainable clothing all the way to space armor.
At Oceanit, Sullivan Suiter and her fellow scientists extract the keratin from the feather, and then turn the keratin into a yarn that can be woven into a versatile textile that can be used in things such as seatbelts, clothing, defense materials and more.
The company looks to make practical solutions not necessarily originally designed by the human mind. For Oceanit, a lot of their inspiration comes from one of the brightest beings in the world: Mother Nature.
Chicken feathers naturally provide the ingredients required for a sturdy textile, made perfectly by our environment. Additionally, the company is designing space armor that can withstand strong impacts, modeled after a near-perfect invention that has an eternity of evolution behind it: bug exoskeletons.
“Over millions of years, nature has had to figure out the best way to use materials and the most efficient way to create lightweight, strong materials,” Sullivan Suiter said. “And we’re kind of using those concepts to then create something we can use for a practical application.”
The demand for a textile of this natural quality is already high — Sullivan Suiter says that she has been contacted by multiple major companies, including some high-fashion houses, to see how KERTEX can be implemented into the products that people use or wear on the daily.
But the demand goes beyond just what someone wants to buy. The greater economy of the country and Hawaiʻi has a demand for a textile that is able to be completely made domestically from start to finish.
“Our textile industry has moved to mostly India and China, and we need to figure out how to get back into making textiles here. That’s really important for the federal government,” Sullivan Suiter said.
With a textile like KERTEX that is naturally sourced, biodegradable and able to be entirely American-made, Sullivan Suiter looks forward to the textile someday being Hawaiʻi’s next big export, in turn helping locals.
“Unfortunately, a lot of my friends moved away and never came back… it’s hard to find a good job here that’s interesting,” she said. “Being able to make something with the waste material we already have, making it in the US, in Hawaiʻi, is going to help with all of that.”
As KERTEX is refined and integrated into the mainstream, Sullivan Suiter looks forward to being able to making sustainably, eco-friendly fashion accessible.
“I think that being able to get to the point of really mass manufacturing this material gets me really excited,” she said. “If I were to go down the street and be able to buy a shirt that was made out of this material, that would be really neat, thinking about the end products at the end of this textile manufacturing chain.”
Beyond being a cool, maybe even “weird” new material, KERTEX represents a future for locals that want to be able to establish themselves in their home islands, and not have to worry about economic uncertainties like the cost of living or impact of things like tariffs.
“The biggest message is that we want to get young people excited about what we’re doing here in Hawaiʻi, and to understand that there is a possibility that you don’t have to go to the mainland… You don’t have to go away to do cool stuff like this,” Sullivan Suiter said. “You can do it here.”