Ponda has won a £2.35 million grant to scale BioPuff, a plant-based down alternative grown from wetland bulrush on restored peatland, with Stella McCartney an early backer.
Bulrush, the tall, dark-headed reed that stands in shallow water at the edges of marshes and slow-moving rivers, has spent most of its history as a plant people drained away to get at the ground beneath it. That ground is peat, the half-decomposed remains of wetland plants pressed down over thousands of years, and it holds a quantity of carbon out of all proportion to the land it occupies.
Peat soils contain more than 600 gigatonnes of carbon, up to 44 percent of all the carbon held in the world’s soils, and they store more carbon than every other kind of vegetation on Earth combined, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Drain a peatland to farm it, as Europe has done to millions of acres over centuries, and the stored carbon meets the air and begins to burn off as carbon dioxide, which is why damaged peatlands, covering barely 0.3 percent of the planet’s surface, now release an estimated 1.9 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent every year, roughly 5 percent of all human-caused greenhouse gas emissions.
A British materials company called Ponda is trying to make the reed that grows on that ground valuable enough that farmers flood their fields again instead of draining them. Its product, BioPuff, is an insulation spun from bulrush fiber and sold as an alternative to both goose down and the petroleum-based synthetic fill that most outdoor brands use. It is light and warm and naturally water-repellent, with a supply chain that runs back to a restored wetland rather than a bird or a barrel of oil.
Ponda recently secured a £2.35 million grant from the United Kingdom’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs to carry the material out of the lab and onto a working farm, FashionUnited reported, underwriting a 30-hectare site and a 30-month project to grow bulrush on rewetted peatland alongside J&K Barnard Farms, Liverpool John Moores University, the Lancashire Wildlife Trust, and the outdoor label Berghaus.
“We’re not simply developing a new material—we’re building the agricultural, processing and supply chain needed to produce it at scale,” Julian Ellis-Brown, Ponda’s co-founder and chief executive, told FashionUnited. “BioPuff is our first proof point, but the bigger opportunity is demonstrating that restored wetlands can support commercially significant material production.”
The idea has already reached the runway: Stella McCartney, who has run an animal-free house for three decades, pads her Falabella bag with BioPuff and lists Ponda among the material partners she works with, and last October she extended her old argument from leather and fur to feathers, presenting a plant-based feather technique at her spring-summer 2026 show in Paris. “I’ve been having the conversation about not killing cows and goats and snakes or any living animal to be made into a shoe or handbag in my industry for over 30 years,” McCartney said at the time. “But I realised not that long ago that feathers were a whole other barbaric part of the industry.”
The down that fills a winter puffer sits at the center of the same argument, since the softest of it is often taken from live birds. Live plucking “results in bleeding and tearing of skin, causing pain, discomfort and stress to the birds,” the RSPCA has said, calling for the practice to be banned worldwide, and the certification schemes meant to police it have repeatedly been shown to miss it. The synthetic fills that many brands adopted to sidestep the welfare problem answer one objection and raise another, because they are made from fossil fuels and shed plastic for the length of a garment’s life. BioPuff is Ponda’s wager that a coat can be warm without asking a shopper to choose between an animal and a barrel of oil.
Rewetting peatlands turns a reed into a crop
Growing food and fiber on wet peat instead of draining it has a name: paludiculture, and a small but growing body of science behind it. The central appeal is that it keeps land in production while stopping the carbon leak that drained farming causes. The obstacle has always been economic rather than technical, because a field of reeds is worth far less than a field of potatoes unless someone finds a product the reeds can become.
“Peatlands cover just 3 percent of Earth’s land surface,” peatland scientist Franziska Tanneberger, head of the Greifswald Mire Centre, told Yale Environment 360 last year, “yet they store more than 500 gigatons of carbon, which is twice as much carbon as all the world’s forest biomass combined.” Much of that ground has already been drained and handed to agriculture, and Tanneberger is blunt that simply reclaiming it is neither realistic nor just. “It’s neither feasible nor fair to simply take that land away from farmers in the name of climate protection,” she said. “Instead, we need to find ways for farmers to earn a living from rewetted peatlands and the sphagnum mosses, sedges, grasses, and rushes that thrive there.” A reed that fills a jacket and pays the landowner who grows it is precisely the kind of crop she is describing.
The investors and fashion brands backing wetland materials
The Defra grant is the second pot of money behind BioPuff in under a year. In November, Ponda raised a $2.4 million seed round co-led by Faber VC and Counteract, with PDS Ventures, Evenlode Impact, and the Royal College of Art also backing the company and bringing its total funding to $6.5 million. Its early brand partners already run beyond McCartney to Berghaus, Parley for the Oceans, and Sheep Inc, the kind of list that suggests the material is being taken seriously by the outdoor and luxury markets at once.
“By coupling regenerative coastal wetland farming with an advanced material with strong potential in textiles and beyond, Ponda is well positioned to unlock significant business opportunities across multiple industries while delivering meaningful biodiversity impact at scale,” Rita Sousa, a partner at Faber VC, said in a statement. Ellis-Brown puts the same case in the plainer terms of what a buyer is actually funding when the material goes into a coat. “Every jacket filled with BioPuff does not just avoid emissions. It directly funds peatland restoration, one of the planet’s most powerful carbon sinks,” he said.
Whether a wetland reed can be grown, harvested, cleaned, and stuffed into garments at the volume a global brand orders in a single season is the question the 30-hectare trial exists to answer, and it will be years before the fields around J&K Barnard Farms give a verdict. What draws the money and the designers back to the same soggy ground, though, is the promise that the wetland can pay for itself while it works. “Through rewetting, you save emissions from the land; you can substitute materials that might otherwise have a fossil origin,” Tanneberger told Yale Environment 360. “[Y]ou can sequester carbon in durable products like furniture; and you can encourage peat formation, creating new carbon sink capacities.”
Related on Ethos:
