Alliance of European Flax-Linen & Hemp announces positive outlook for 2024 flax fiber harvest

Source | Alliance of European Flax-Linen & Hemp

The Alliance for European Flax-Linen & Hemp (Paris, France) has announced a positive outlook for the 2024 flax harvest. As the flax pulling period commences, the industry is optimistic due to favorable weather conditions that provide an ideal context for the upcoming harvest.

Alliance of European Flax-Linen & Hemp’s latest estimates predict average straw yields of 6-7 tons per hectare for spring flax, a significant milestone that has not been seen since 2019. While winter flax, cultivated on 30,000 hectares for this harvest, shows slightly lower performance with the overall prospects remaining strong. Flax straw, the raw material for fiber extraction during scutching, is expected to be abundant.

In the last few years, flax has become a popular natural fiber used in composite applications, expanding beyond niche applications and R&D labs into increasingly larger-scale commercial projects.

Read “Natural fiber composites: Growing to fit sustainability needs” for a deeper dive into this topic.

In 2023, Alliance for European Flax-Linen and Hemp partnered with ecoinvent to enable a more comprehensive and transparent inventory database for this fiber type.

The area under cultivation for European Flax is projected to reach at least180,000 hectares for both spring and winter flax combined, the highest since 2020. This expansion suggests that the European sector is poised to achieve record level yields of flax straw, the building block for premium flax fibers for composite applications, in a single harvest.

While the exact amount of flax fiber to be extracted from this volume remains undetermined at this stage, the retting process, set to occur in the summer, will provide more detailed production output data. Scutching of the current harvest is scheduled to begin in autumn 2024 in French, Belgian and Dutch factories.