Two 22-year-old industrial design students making a low-carbon fibreglass alternative out of harakeke are raising $2m to start taking their product global
Ben Scales knew harakeke was tough. He remembers running over a bush as a teenager the first time he got to use his parents’ ride-on mower. He blunted a brand new blade.
So when as an industrial product design student at Canterbury University he and fellow student William Murrell started looking for natural, carbon-friendly alternatives to materials like fibreglass and carbon fibre, he thought about the humble plant known as New Zealand flax.
“I was doing a materials engineering paper and learning about composite materials and I got a carbon fibre splinter and a headache from all the resins we were using and thought ‘This is a horrible industry’. And being a Gen Z perfectionist I’m like ‘How can we make some changes?’”
Fibreglass and carbon fibre are seemingly miracle materials. Lightweight and super-strong, they are used in everything from waterslides and tennis rackets to boats and rockets.
But they aren’t great for the environment. Making both is energy intensive and a significant source of greenhouse gases.
Scales and Murrell wondered about plant-based fibreglass-type materials and started toying with the idea of harakeke, labelled by early European botanists as flax, but actually part of the lily family.
“I learnt they were making boats out of hemp in Europe,” Scales says. "I realised we had something even stronger."
Harakeke is also a seemingly miracle material. Māori used parts of the plant for rafts, sweeteners, poultices and medicine, and harakeke fibre made fishing lines, nets and rope.
Harakeke rope was so strong, in fact, early Australian traders wanted it - and as much as Māori could make. They bartered harakeke for muskets, in the process turning tribal conflict into full-scale war.
Later, flax milling was one of the young colony’s biggest industries. By 1870 there were 161 flax mills nationwide, with 1766 workers, according to Te Ara, the Encyclopedia of New Zealand.
A century and a half later, and Murrell and Scales, both 20 and in the early stages of industrial product design degrees, started experimenting with harakeke, making rope from the fibres and a skateboard from a mix of harakeke and plastic 3D print waste.
"We thought sustainability was going to be our foot in the door. We were completely wrong." Ben Scales, KiwiFibre Innovations
They formed a company called KiwiFibre Innovations and within a year or so, started taking their product to potential customers. The pitch: we can supply materials with a carbon footprint 80-85 percent smaller than glass and carbon fibre composites.
Companies were unimpressed.
“We thought sustainability was going to be our foot in the door. We were completely wrong. The conversation with marketers and management was the second one. First you had to get past the engineers. They went ‘So, is it stronger than fibreglass?’ and we went ‘No'.”
And that was it. End of pitch.
“It was an eye opener for me. We thought they’d be ‘Oh cool, it’s a swap for fibreglass and it’s sustainable. We’ll buy it.’ Instead, sustainability was an afterthought. We had to go back to the drawing board.”
The latest iterations of KiwiFibre materials have a strength to weight ratio better than fibreglass and carbon fibre, Scales says. They also solve other problems facing engineers and designers - a better ability to absorb vibration absorption, for example, and fewer issues with interference from radio waves.
Scales says KiwiFibre has had interest from potential customers, including a $25 billion Nasdaq-listed geospatial engineering company set to become the first to use KiwiFibre materials to replace carbon fibre and fibreglass in a range of products.
Scales was a finalist in the KiwiNet Research Commercialisation Awards earlier this month, and has just been asked to give a TEDx talk next year.
The pair are also in the final stages of a $2 million capital raise, Scales says, with what seems like thousands of investment pitches under their belt.
There are angel investors interested, Scales says, but getting a tie-up between a potential investor’s desire to make money, and the company’s cultural, social and environmental goals isn’t easy.
“We have a profitable business model, but for us it’s a balance between short-term profit and setting ourselves up for environmentally-sustainable growth."
That goal also means working with iwi and farmers to set up a sustainable harakeke supply chain, and Scales would like to see the company replace the chemical-based resins mixed in with the hakakeke fibres with natural products.
Meanwhile, “We’ve set ourselves the goal to be profitable late next year”.
Oh, and there are those industrial product design degrees to finish.
