3 July, 2026

Fashion has long had a padding problem, with the warmth in most jackets coming from goose down or petroleum-based synthetics, neither of which is doing the planet any favours. Ponda, a Bristol biomaterials company, has found a neat solution in the form of the humble wetland plant: Typha.

Better known as bulrush or cattail, it’s a plant with a sausage-shaped seed head, whose fluffy seed fibres are used to make Ponda’s BioPuff® insulation. Ponda says the material outperforms premium synthetics on warmth, and that each BioPuff-insulated jacket supports four square metres of healthy wetland, stores 800 litres of water, and avoids around 9kg of carbon emissions a year.

The real innovation, though, is the supply chain. Typha is grown through paludiculture: farming on rewetted peatlands. Drained peatlands release around 1.9 gigatonnes of CO2 a year, comparable to the fashion industry’s entire annual footprint, so every hectare brought back into wet production turns an emissions source into a carbon sink.

Big names are taking note, with Stella McCartney, Berghaus and Ahluwalia all featuring BioPuff in their products. Now Ponda is crowdfunding to scale manufacturing and broaden the ownership of regenerative fashion innovation, letting anyone invest in the wetlands keeping them warm.

By Budd Nicholson