Coastal municipalities across Europe spend millions every year hauling beached seagrass to landfills. Once there, it decomposes and releases methane. Salt & Fiber, a Malmö-based ClimateTech startup, is turning that same discarded seagrass into sustainable textile yarns. The idea is straightforward: one industry’s waste problem becomes another industry’s raw material.
Founded in 2025 by Annika John, the company is currently raising €300,000 pre-seed funding and launched a €45,000 crowdfunding campaign. John, a community designer by background, left a corporate career to build Salt & Fiber, bringing a material design sensibility to a problem that had previously been treated purely as a municipal logistics issue.
The Problem it Solves:
The textile industry and coastal waste management don’t usually show up in the same conversation. Salt & Fiber connects them deliberately.
Conventional textile production is one of the world’s most polluting industries, and European brands are facing growing pressure to reduce supply-chain emissions and comply with sustainability regulations such as CSRD (the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive) and extended producer responsibility frameworks, while needing local, traceable, low-impact materials. Seagrass, sitting in abundance on shorelines, fits that brief without requiring farmland, fresh water, or synthetic inputs.
What Makes the Fiber Different:
Salt & Fiber’s processing avoids harmful chemicals and produces no toxic byproducts. The fibers are 100% plant-based and biodegrade naturally, with no synthetic polymers and no microplastic shedding throughout the product lifecycle.
Seagrass fibers also carry natural fire-retardant properties, which is a meaningful functional advantage, especially for home goods and interior textiles. The material doesn’t need chemical fire treatments to meet safety standards, which keeps the production process cleaner.
The fibers require no fresh water, fertilizers, or land, which makes the input cost structure quite different from cotton or even linen. The raw material is already on the beach, essentially waiting to be collected.
Where the Company Stands Now:
Salt & Fiber is in pilot production as of May 2026. The ClimateTech startup has secured a supply agreement with a Swedish municipality on the country’s southern coast and is part of the Älmhult x IKEA incubator. Being inside the IKEA ecosystem is particularly relevant given the volume at which IKEA sources home textiles and its public sustainability commitments.
Commercialization is targeted between 2027 and 2028. That timeline gives the team roughly two years to refine production, test at scale, and build out brand partnerships.
The Crowdfunding Angle:
The €45,000 crowdfunding campaign running alongside the pre-seed round serves a dual purpose. It raises additional capital while building a community of early supporters who are directly invested in the company’s success. Salt & Fiber will donate 5% of proceeds from the crowdfunding campaign to seagrass restoration, partnering with a local actor to replant seagrass along the coast.
That 5% restoration commitment ties the business directly to the ecosystem it sources from. Healthier seagrass meadows mean more coastal supply, which reinforces the raw material pipeline over the long term. It also strengthens the brand story for conscious buyers and brand partners evaluating material traceability.
Why This Matters for the Textile Industry:
European fashion and home goods brands are actively looking for materials that tick the CSRD compliance box without greenwashing. Seagrass textile as a category is still very early, which means Salt & Fiber has a realistic opportunity to define how that material is sourced, processed, and positioned commercially.
The supply structure also deserves attention. Most sustainable textile startups deal with agricultural inputs that compete with food production for land and water. Beach-cast seagrass sidesteps that entirely. It’s a material that municipalities are already paying to remove, so the startup’s procurement process aligns with municipal cost savings rather than competing against them.
