Taking less, returning more.
Across rural India, communities have raw materials, knowledge and skills shaped by their land, history and ways of making.
But when those raw materials enter wider production systems, value is often extracted from the people and places they come from.
That can mean intensive labour, degraded environments and very little of the value created finding its way back to the communities themselves.
We think there’s another way to make things.
We have a small team of scientists and researchers in New Zealand and Sweden.
We have partnered with a nursery in Waihi, New Zealand who have kindly allowed us to take their waste clippings of Vetiver grass to use for our research.
We are also working with a small rural community of farmers in Bundelkhand, central India.
This is a big undertaking.
Which is why, quite honestly, and often accompanied by a deep breath, we've labelled this our 10-year project.
Long enough to learn properly. To test things. To get things wrong. To understand what works. And to build something that lasts.
We've already begun with two connected pathways: our hands-on experiments in NZ and beginning work in India with our local, rural community. We have also begun our LUCA storytelling project to better understand the knowledge and skills for existing materials and crafts.
Each pathway informs the other, connecting what we learn with what we make.
The opportunity here is significant. Global brands are now enforcing strict environmental norms, requiring higher renewable energy use, waste recycling, and traceability of raw materials. And while demand for clothing, furnishings and everyday goods continues to grow, the materials we make to meet that demand, desperately need a rethink. Something genuinely different needs to happen.
A raw material grown from the ground up, literally. A community recognised for what they know and what they tend. Byproducts that go back into the soil, not into waste.
LUCAtech is building towards this.
