Luisa Kahlfeldt | Sumo Diaper

Since 2014, GreenWave has connected farmers with national processing companies, entrepreneurs making value-added products, corporate cafeterias, and retail outlets to realize our vision for a new blue green economy. The growth over the last six years in creative seaweed- and shellfish-based innovations emerging in multiple industries including food, animal feed, fertilizers, plastic alternatives, and and textiles has been exciting to witness. One new application recently caught our attention – a reusable diaper that uses a seaweed-based fabric designed by Luisa Kahlfeldt, a Berlin-based product designer. 

Using her experience in traditional furniture, lighting, consumer product design, Luisa Kahlfeldt developed the reusable Sumo diaper as her Masters project while attending Ecole cantonale d’art de Lausanne (ECAL) in Renens, Switzerland in 2019 using SeaCell fabric.

ECAL’s graduate program partners students with up and coming material manufacturers to experiment with new product properties. ECAL connected Luisa with smartfiber AG, the manufacturer of SeaCell, and she quickly got to work, transforming the biodegradable, absorbent, and antibacterial  fiber into fabric. According to Luisa, “it was obvious [I] needed to design something for the body because the material is ultra hygienic and gentle on the skin.”

Luisa approaches her work with functionality at the forefront. “I like to look for contemporary problems and design solutions,” she says. At the time, many of her friends were new parents struggling to find sustainable and fashion-forward disposable diaper alternatives. “In the EU alone, 17 million diapers are disposed of each day and take about 500 years to decompose,” she says. Luisa set out to make a reusable, mono-material diaper that could easily be recycled. Luisa’s simple design emphasizes the essence of the SeaCell material. “I wanted to let the pureness of the product come through,” says Luisa. 

The Sumo won the 2019 Swiss James Dyson Award, which celebrates simple designs that solve a problem. This year, Luisa hopes to produce diapers at scale and design new concepts that use SeaCell fabric to benefit a wider audience.

Luisa hopes the success of the Sumo will inspire more product designers to develop more sustainably sourced products. “I suspect the growth of the regenerative ocean farming industry will encourage collaboration between ocean farmers, material scientists, and product designers,” says Luisa. “I’m excited about the material innovation that will result from readily available renewable raw materials like seaweed and shellfish and the chance to use them in future designs,” says Luisa  

At GreenWave, we’re eager to see more creative seaweed-based solutions emerge as the blue-green economy grows.