Against your skin, cotton feels smooth and soft — but on the microscopic level, it is a scraggly mess. Viewed at 100x magnification, a cotton thread looks like bundles of straw or clumps of hair. This quirk of nature is what led Dr. Luke Haverhals, the founder of Natural Fiber Welding, to ask a question few scientists had pondered before: what if you could take natural materials such as cotton and make them look and act like the technical fabrics we’ve grown accustomed to, down to the molecular level?
Haverhals’ answer is technology he calls Clarus, which turns cotton, hemp, wool, or any other natural fiber into sustainable, biodegradable super-threads that perform as well, or even better, than the synthetic competition.
