Cashmere sweaters are everywhere these days, and often at incredibly low prices. The appeal is clear: If you’ve ever worn cashmere, you know that it’s soft, light, and warm—an impressive fiber that’s hard to give up. Unfortunately, these bargain prices usually come with a catch.

Cashmere comes from the soft undercoat of a handful of goat breeds. Typically, one goat is sheared twice a year, producing only 4 to 6 ounces (113 to 170 grams) of cashmere annually. That’s not a lot of supply for a growing market.

“Raw material producers are actually under a lot of pressure,” Sim Gulati, co-founder and CEO of Everbloom, told TechCrunch. “What you’re seeing now, especially with the advent of $50 cashmere sweaters, is that it’s being sheared too much. The quality of the fiber is not good, and it leads to unsustainable grazing practices.”

Instead of trying to change grazing practices or convince consumers to buy only high-quality cashmere, Gulati and his team at Everbloom had a different idea. The startup, which has raised more than $8 million from investors including Hoxton Ventures and SOSV, creates a recycled material that is virtually indistinguishable from the real thing.

وللقيام بذلك، أنشأت Everbloom ذكاءً اصطناعيًا لعلوم المواد يسمى Braid.AI. The model can adjust different parameters to create fibers with different qualities. Cashmere is one of the targets, as are other materials widely used in the textile industry.

At its core, the Everbloom process is the same regardless of the final product. To manufacture its materials, the company currently collects waste from across the fiber supply chain, including cashmere and wool farms and mills, as well as bedding suppliers. In the future, it plans to expand into other waste sources, including feathers from the poultry industry. These waste streams have one thing in common: They are all made of keratin, the main protein that supports the everbloom process.

The company then cuts the waste according to size and combines it with special vehicles. The mixture is pressed through a plastic extrusion machine (which shapes the material by pushing it through a die), and the pellets that come out the other end are fed through spinning machines typically used to produce polyester fibres. “This equipment is used in 80% of the textile market,” Gulati said. “You have to be a drop in replacement.”

To turn waste into new fibres, all the necessary chemical reactions take place inside these two machines. Everbloom can create fibers that mimic everything from polyester to cashmere, using its AI to adjust the composition and how it is processed by the two machines.

The startup said every fiber it produces must be biodegradable, even the polyester alternative.

“All the ingredients we use are biodegradable,” Gulati said, adding that his company is currently running its products through rapid tests to prove the hypothesis. And because Everbloom uses waste products, the environmental impact will be significantly lower.

In addition, it should also be cheaper. “We want it to be more economically viable for brands and consumers,” Gulati said. “I don’t believe in the ‘sustainability premium’” – the idea that environmentally friendly products should be more expensive. “For the material to be successful – both in the supply chain [and for] Consumer – You must have a benefit for the product and an economic benefit for everyone who touches the product. This is what we aim for.”