When corn meets comfort: Arnaud Ruffin on how LYCRA® EcoMade is rewriting the elastane playbook

For more than six decades, The LYCRA Company has built its reputation as the ultimate ingredient brand, the invisible technology underpinning everything from denim and swimwear to intimates and performance wear. Today, the company is pushing that legacy into a lower-impact future with a major bio-derived innovation: LYCRA® EcoMade fiber with QIRA™, made from industrial corn feedstock rather than fossil fuels. In conversation with FashionUnited, Vice President of Brands & Retail Business Arnaud Ruffin covers the impact of the new bio derived innovation, The LYCRA Company’s broader Planet Agenda and future innovation developments.

“We’re not talking about a niche capsule,” stresses Ruffin, who has been with The LYCRA Company for 15 years and now leads its global downstream organization from Geneva. “We’re talking about converting roughly 30 percent of our total LYCRA® fiber production to bio-derived feedstock.” For mills and brands, that makes this less of an experiment, but more a strategic shift in how stretch contributes to meeting sustainability goals across categories.

From idea to industrial scale: why bio-based elastane now?

The road to LYCRA® EcoMade started more than a decade ago. “Ten years ago, we already produced a first generation of corn-derived LYCRA® fiber,” Ruffin explains. “Everything worked on a technical level, but the market simply wasn’t ready. Sustainability wasn’t yet a driver, and that pilot volume ended up sold as standard LYCRA®.”

That early trial turned out to be a crucial stress test. It proved that LYCRA® made from corn-based feedstock could deliver identical performance to conventional LYCRA® fiber, giving the company confidence to scale once demand and regulatory pressure caught up.

Fast forward to today and the context has shifted dramatically. Both The LYCRA Company and most of its key brand partners have set Science Based Targets (SBTi) to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. For The LYCRA Company, that means ambitious reductions in Scope 1 and 2 emissions, and a 25 percent reduction in Scope 3, which represents roughly 80 percent of its footprint. For brands and retailers, Scope 3 can account for as much as 95 percent.

“Textiles are material-intensive, and elastane is a critical ingredient,” says Ruffin. “If we want to decarbonise our value chain and help customers meet their own targets, we have to change what our fibers are made from.” What “70% bio-derived” really means

From a polymer science perspective, LYCRA® EcoMade retains the same architecture as standard LYCRA® fiber. Elastane is typically built from two key components:

• PTMG, the “elastic engine” that gives fiber its stretch and recovery, and
• MDI, which anchors those chains and builds the final polymer structure.

In LYCRA® EcoMade, the PTMG portion, representing roughly 70–75 percent of the fiber by weight, is produced from industrial corn rather than oil or coal. The process uses fermentation of glucose syrup derived from corn, followed by distillation to obtain the required chemical building blocks. Functionally, the resulting polymer is indistinguishable from its fossil-based counterpart.

“The only difference you can find is if you do carbon-14 dating, like in archaeology,” Ruffin notes. “You can tell the carbon is ‘young’ because it comes from an annual plant, not from fossil resources millions of years old. In terms of stretch, recovery, hand feel, it’s exactly the same.”

To validate that claim, The LYCRA Company has run extensive lab testing as well as mill and brand trials across multiple application-specific grades, from denim and shapewear to swim, hosiery and performance leggings. Fabrics made with bio-derived LYCRA® have been benchmarked against those made with conventional LYCRA®, with no differences in performance characteristics.

Quantifying impact: up to 45% lower carbon footprint

A third-party-reviewed life cycle assessment shows that LYCRA® EcoMade can reduce the fibre’s carbon footprint by up to 45 percent. The impact on a product level is tangible: “If you have around 100 grams of LYCRA® in a compressive legging, you can save roughly 1 kilogram of CO₂ per garment,” Ruffin explains.

To support brands in meeting growing documentation requirements, The LYCRA Company pairs these claims with a full suite of verifications, including recognised certifications and in-fiber tracing systems that confirm bio-based content throughout the supply chain. Brands have also been invited on-site to Iowa to see the fields and the feedstock processing first-hand, reinforcing transparency and traceability.

Plug-and-play for mills, real numbers for brands

LYCRA® EcoMade has been engineered as a “drop-in” solution. Mills do not have to change their knitting, weaving or dyeing processes; the fiber behaves like conventional LYCRA® in spinning and fabric formation. That makes adoption faster and less capital-intensive across mills’ existing platforms.

On the market side, early adopters are already bringing bio-derived elastane into commercial collections. Premium denim label AGOLDE (from Citizens of Humanity) has introduced styles featuring the new fiber, arena has launched its first swimwear collection (Vitalife) made with renewable LYCRA® EcoMade fibre, and European legwear brand Oroblù have launched a pair of tights with bio-derived LYCRA® at the core.

Despite a challenging retail environment and shifting priorities in some regions, Ruffin sees strong momentum: “Most brands started with their majority fibers, cotton, polyester, polyamide. Now they are seriously looking at spandex as the next lever in their decarbonisation roadmap.”

Beyond bio-based: recyclability and circular design

LYCRA® EcoMade is one pillar of The LYCRA Company’s broader Planet Agenda, which also focuses on durability and circularity. Extending the lifetime of garments remains one of the most powerful levers for reducing environmental impact, and the company continues refining its fibre portfolio with that in mind.

A major recent breakthrough addresses another industry challenge, namely recycling mixed-fibre textiles. In partnership with Radici InNova (RadiciGroup) and Triumph, The LYCRA Company helped validate a patented process that can separate and recover both nylon and LYCRA® fibre from blended textile waste. The recycled fibres were re-spun and transformed into a new lingerie prototype, demonstrating the technical feasibility of circular elastane. “The long-term strategy is to combine solutions,” Ruffin explains. “Step by step, we will integrate higher levels of post-consumer content into our bio-derived LYCRA®, creating fibres that are both low-impact and recycled.”

The broader portfolio is moving in the same direction. COOLMAX® and THERMOLITE® technologies are shifting from bottle-based recycled PET towards feedstock derived from textile cutting-room waste, keeping materials within the textile loop. Meanwhile, LYCRA® T400 technology enables mono-material polyester stretch fabrics, supporting recyclability scenarios where a single fiber type is a prerequisite.

Incremental change at industrial scale

Ruffin is realistic about the challenges of reaching a fully circular industry. He likens the journey to the automotive industry’s transition: “Everyone talks about the hydrogen car that emits only water vapour, but it isn’t ready at scale. If we all wait for the perfect solution, nothing happens. That’s why we see bio-derived LYCRA® as the ‘hybrid car’ of elastane: not the final destination, but a major step that delivers real CO₂ reductions now.”

For fashion businesses under pressure from regulation, investors and consumers, that pragmatism, combined with industrial scale and technical compatibility, may be exactly what’s needed. Sustainable stretch, it seems, will not arrive in a single revolutionary leap, but through a series of measurable, science-backed upgrades to the fibers the industry already relies on.