Uses for Milkweed Floss

There are numerous uses for Milkweed Floss, many of which are just being discovered now due to the fiber’s unique properties.

Milkweed Floss is a natural fiber material with vast untapped potential as a natural sustainable material and component for sustainable textiles and fabrics of the future. As a hypoallergenic and cruelty-free substitute for goose down, it is finding widespread use as sustainable insulator in jackets, pillows, and comforters.

To help promote uses for Milkweed Floss we offer a selection of Milkweed Floss for sale here.

Numerous uses for Milkweed Floss have been explored throughout history due to its unique properties. Milkweed Floss is a sustainable fiber that is:

• Six times warmer than wool.
• Hypoallergenic.
• More buoyant than cork.
• A cruelty-free alternative to goose down.

In the 1800s, uses for milkweed floss included mattress filling while other parts of the plant went into making netting and socks. Newspaper accounts from the 1940s excitedly described milkweed as a future commercial success, useful for clothing, insulation, paints, plastics, and wax.

As endangered.org writes:

During the Pacific battles of WWII, military occupation of Java eliminated the Allies’ source of kapok, the material that filled life jackets used by soldiers in the war.1 Kapok is a cotton-like, fibrous substance surrounding the seeds of the kapok tree (Ceiba pentandra). Without this critical material to fill life jackets, the United States turned to an abundant native plant with seed carried on the wind by fuzzy, lightweight floss: milkweed (Asclepias spp.). Citizens were asked to collect milkweed pods to fill life jackets with milkweed floss as an effective and life-saving replacement for kapok.

endangered.org

Modern industry has looked at milkweed as a pest control product, skin moisturizer, oil absorbent, and is experimenting with numerous other uses for the plant and its floss.

We are working to promote and facilitate additional uses for Milkweed Floss because more Milkweed Floss use means more Milkweed plants – and, following on from that, more Monarch butterflies. The Milkweed plant is an essential part of the lifecycle of the Monarch butterfly. Milkweed is the only plant on which Monarchs will lay their eggs, and Milkweed leaves are the only food which can be eaten by Monarch caterpillars.

As Spinoff magazine writes, “Many factors have contributed to the shrinking monarch population, including deforestation of their winter grounds, severe weather patterns, and a diminishing availability of milkweed plants. “Habitat loss and modern agricultural practices have resulted in a dramatic decline in milkweed, and therefore a decline in monarch numbers,” points out Mark Garland, director of the Monarch Monitoring Project, who has been studying monarch migration for nearly 30 years.”

Our mission is to help people discover the many uses for Milkweed Floss by making the finest Grade A Milkweed Floss available for sale, for a simple reason: the more Milkweed Floss uses, the more Milkweed Plants will be planted, which means more habitat for Monarch butterflies.