A bioreactor-created substance is being touted as an animal-friendly leather substitute that will also help save the earth.
The biotechnology business is growing into the fashion
industry, with investors supporting leather alternatives derived from
mushrooms, animal cells, or yeast-produced recombinant collagen. On January 13,
MycoWorks announced
a $125 million round of investment to build a full-scale manufacturing factory
in South Carolina to produce a leather substitute from Ganoderma lucidum
mycelium. This follows a $7 million investment in VitroLabs, which produces
hide from animal cell cultures, last year.
"We have certainly seen an inflow of biotech firms
formed in the fashion and materials arena in the past couple of years," says
Fiona Mischel, head of international outreach at Built with Biology (formerly
SynBioBeta) in London.
Made with reishi. Credit: MycoWorks"Their vision is to reimagine the fashion business with
sustainable materials," she explains. According to these firms, cowhide
and contemporary false, fossil fuel-based equivalents are poisonous and
wasteful. Leather manufacturing necessitates the growing and butchering of
animals, which has a significant environmental impact, and the tanning process
often employs harmful chemicals like chromium. Because biotech leather does
not need to be polished in the same manner as traditional leather, fewer
chemicals are utilized. And today's imitation leather, or "pleather,"
is not only created with synthetic polymers derived from nonrenewable fossil
fuels, but it is also not easily biodegradable.
As a result, biotech entrepreneurs are stepping into the
leather replacement market, using a variety of innovative biotech technologies
(See table). To simulate leather, one approach grows mushrooms on a substrate
(such as agricultural waste, maize cobs, hemp hurds, paper pulp waste, rice
hulls, or sawdust) under precisely regulated environmental conditions. Another
method involves growing mammalian cells into leather-like sheets. Another
method involves genetically engineering bacteria to make collagen, which is
subsequently converted into textile fibers. Many bio-based materials have
similar qualities and look to leather, enabling designers to use them in place
of animal leather.
VitroLabs, for example, creates its product from cells. Scientists
encourage unknown immortalized cell lines to thrive in a nutrient-rich
environment in their technique. Cells generate tissue with the intricacy of
actual animal skin using scaffolds, eliminating the need to kill animals. The
method is similar to that employed in the cultured meat business, in which cell
lines derived from animal muscle are cultivated in bioreactors and coupled with
biocompatible scaffolds for cell development and maturation to create an edible
meat replacement. VitroLabs will benefit from advances and investment in the food
side of this business, which is decreasing the cost of the growing medium and
pushing scaffold innovation.
Other businesses are identifying proteins that can be
connected to make biomaterials with characteristics comparable to leather
rather than utilizing complicated cell culture techniques. Hide Biotech in
London creates a leather substitute for isolated collagen proteins. Scales,
skin, and other fish debris provide the proteins. The company's proprietary
enzymatic and chemical technique aids in the formation and strengthening of a
protein network into a transparent substance. According to Yudi Ding,
co-founder of the firm, dyes and fat liquors may be added to the material as it
is created, eliminating the need for a separate dying or tanning procedure.
Several businesses are using biological techniques to
manufacture leather alternatives. MycoWorks, for example, cultivates the fungus
G. lucidum in trays of sawdust the size of half a cowhide. Researchers use
patented methods to persuade the fungus to grow and branch into thread-like
filamentous structures called hyphae (together referred to as mycelium) by
regulating temperature, humidity, carbon dioxide levels, and other
characteristics of the fungus's environment. According to the business, the
fungus colonizes the trays, resulting in a material that looks and feels like
leather thanks to an unknown unique method. MycoWorks said last year that it
has teamed with Hermès, a high-end leather goods maker, to provide the material
for the Victoria luxury handbag, which is set to hit stores this year.
In Arequipa, Peru, Le Qara ferments a consortium of natural,
unknown microorganisms to make a biopolymer, which it then formulates into a
textile with qualities akin to leather using an undisclosed technique.
According to Jacqueline Cruz, co-founder of Le Qara, the
biomaterial can withstand the high heat and pressures used by machines to
polish animal leather. All of these technologies are innovative, but they all
confront the same core challenge: replicating the quality and feel of genuine
animal leather. The fashion sector has very stringent standards. "Nobody
is prepared to forgo quality and performance for sustainability," says
MycoWorks CEO Matt Scullin. "The original performance material is animal
leather." It boasts a very unusual mix of hand feel, warmth,
breathability, beauty, and durability. When all of these qualities are
combined, we get the emotional reaction that leather provides. It is very
strong and precious. "As a result, the bar is set exceedingly high,"
he explains.
Many in the biotech industry claim that their fabrics reach
or come close to meeting the high standard for leather. They also want biotech
leather to outperform plant-based leather alternatives such as cactus, pineapple,
seaweed, and apple peels. Vartest, an independent testing company, has received
MycoWorks' material.
This material, according to MycoWorks, meets the performance
standards of cowhide in terms of durability, color fastness, and tensile
strength. Aside from the realistic feel and quality of the material, biotech
leather producers must also overcome the difficulty of mass-producing their
fabrics at a price competitive with animal leather. That is not a simple task
for businesses experimenting with the delicate biology of live objects or
cultured cells. Historically, competing with fossil fuels has proven too
difficult for life. Many firms attempted to create biofuels from algae in the
mid-2000s but came into roadblocks when attempting to scale up at a price
point competitive with crude oil. Amyris, a pioneer in that industry,
eventually shifted to genetically altered yeast, which produces high-value
specialty compounds for perfumes, cosmetics, food and drinks, and medicines. These
items have pricing values that correspond to the amount of manufacturing that
biology enables.
Alternative leather businesses have already changed direction. According to Anna Bakst, the company's CEO, who first joined the board of directors in 2017 after it changed directions, Modern Meadow was founded in 2012 with the intention of growing animal hide in the lab by culturing mammalian cells. However, the company changed its focus when it realized that producing a high-quality material at scale would require too much time and money.
Now, the business purchases proteins from plants. Because we
are using existing infrastructures and know-how, she claims that this method of
doing business is more sustainable. According to Bakst, the platform also helps
the business to develop more swiftly in order to satisfy the needs of apparel
manufacturers. Fashion develops more swiftly than [biotech] R&D, according
to the expert.
Modern Meadow intends to use their combination of
plant-based polymers in a variety of fabrics, including ones that resemble
leather. Following a $130 million round of venture funding, the business
declared a joint venture with Italian textile manufacturer Limonta in October
of last year.
Beyond scalability and performance issues, leather
replacement businesses also face opposition from the animal leather industry,
which has campaigned vehemently to prevent the use of the word
"leather" for anything that does not originate from an animal. At
Hide Biotech, Ding explains, "We may say it is 'influenced by leather,'
but we avoid calling the substance 'leather,' since I fear it will spark the
leather industry." In fact, in response to the demands of the animal
sector, a number of European nations have prohibited the use of the phrases
"hide" or "leather" for non-animal textiles.
So the obstacles confronting biotech leather are enormous,
but the sustainability argument is on their side. Raising cows and other
animals for their meat and skins contributes
to deforestation when forest area is converted to pasture. The procedure
for cleaning and tanning hides creates waste and effluent containing
harmful chemicals. Plus, a hide is typically obtained, tanned, and polished
at numerous sites throughout the globe, sending it traveling tens of thousands
of kilometers before it reaches the buyer.
International climate change treaties and new legislation may force fashion businesses toward more sustainable materials. For example, the New York state in January presented legislation that would compel businesses to trace their supply chains and publish an environmental sustainability impact report. Beyond the ecological argument, fashion designers may come to realize that they just need alternatives. “The leather supply chain was nearing its limits—and this precedes the pandemic,” adds Scullin of MycoWorks. The availability of the substance fluctuates from season to season, especially since it’s a co-product of the cattle sector. Purchasers of leather don’t have control over what they’re going to receive, he argues. “So the industry,” he says, “is looking at its supply chains and trying to figure out where they’re going to acquire high-quality materials over the next 20 or 30 years.”
Biotech provides not simply an alternative that resembles
leather, but a potential to accomplish more with a textile. “It’s one thing to
have a material, but it’s another thing to take that and continue to enhance
that material and develop that material so that you can fulfill the diverse
demands of the brands,” says Bakst of Modern Meadow. Adds Scullin: “We’re
particularly enthusiastic about the possibility to further modify the biology to
open up new functions that leather does not have.”