COMPREHENSIVE GUIDE TO CELLULAR AGRICULTURE
The Future of Textiles Lies in the Hands of Mushrooms
Luxury clothing will be made of fungi and you won’t even notice the difference
I like to call myself a lazy fashion fanatic. Like most people, I enjoy looking nice and feeling put together, but I’m the kind of person that values comfort way more than looking all glammed up and perfect. As someone with very sensitive skin, I am picky about what fabrics I wear and never opt for scratchy glitter or wool. I have a personal place in my heart reserved for soft leather, silk, and stretchy leggings.
While I was wearing my classic comfy fabrics, I was curious: how are our fabrics made? Precisely, how is leather made?
Turns out, leather is made very inefficiently. 70% of all untreated hides get discarded before leather treatment. To match the consumer desires for “perfect” aesthetics, 20% of all leather hides are discarded because of scratches, blemishes or spots.
In 2050, 100,000,000 land animals will be needed to provide our meat, eggs, and leather goods. This will take a major toll on our planet and is not sustainable.
Yet, for the past 5000 years, little to no innovation has improved the efficiency of leather production. “Fake” leather alternatives pride themselves on being dupes, but they don’t provide the same texture or smell that conventional leather does.
The Problem with Traditional Leather
Leather has served humans for centuries. It is one of man’s earliest and most useful discoveries. Our ancestors used leather to protect themselves from the elements and survive to reproduce.
However, most of the leather produced today is a by-product of the agriculture and meat industry. When cows are slaughtered for meat, not hides of the cow cannot be eaten and are repurposed as leather used to make shoes and clothing.
Leather is typically produced through a lengthy process called tanning. The purpose of the tanning process is to alter the protein structure of the skin to increase its durability, texture, and appearance. Though mechanization has made it less labor-intensive, it still consists of a complex series of treatments that require considerable time and energy.
All types of leathers have to go through four fundamental stages: preparatory steps, tanning, re-tanning, and finishing.
1. Preparatory Steps
The cured skin or animal hide needs to be prepared for the tanning process. Although there are various preparatory processes, the purpose of each process is to remove unwanted raw skin components. The tannery may not perform all of them, depending on the quality and type of the desired product.
2. Tanning
Tanning converts the protein of the rawhide into a durable material and common tanning processes include mineral tanning, vegetable tanning, and glutaraldehyde tanning. All tanning processes require a plethora of chemicals or water.
3. Re-Tanning
Re-tanning converts the tanned leather into a marketable product. The choice of chemicals used in this process depends on the desired color and texture in the final product. You dry the tanned leather, shave it, split it into the grades of leather, and dye it using non-water soluble dyes.
4. Finishing
This is the final stage where finishing touches are added to the tanned leather as per the desired end product. Color, texture, thickness, and surface patterns are also altered depending on the use for the product.
After completing all these steps, you finally have an exquisite piece of leather. However, this leather was produced extremely inefficiently because raising animals requires huge amounts of feed, pastureland, water, and fossil fuels. The curing and tanning process to get commercial leather is often noxious, and there is a growing association in the minds of consumers between cattle rearing and the climate crisis.
Many brands currently face brand scrutiny and criticism for environmental pollution. We are long overdue for a renewable, sustainable alternative to leather.
Is there a way to get the non-synthetic leather without actually raising a cow?
We can through cellular agriculture. If you don’t already know, the emerging field of cellular agriculture involves the process of growing animal products like leather from cell cultures and eliminates the need to raise animals in order to make commercial products.
The Beauty of Mycelium
For billions of years, mycelium has grown beneath our feet and served as an ecological connective tissue. It is an infinitely renewable and interlaced web that threads through soil, plant bodies, and along river beds to break down organic matter and provide nutrients to plants and trees.
Mycelium grows as part of a fungus or fungus-like bacterial colony and is made up of a mass of thread-like hyphae. Fungal colonies composed of mycelium are found in and on soil, and the mycelium supports the fungi just under the Earth’s surface. When mushrooms appear above ground, they are connected by a web of mycelium below the ground.
Mycelium is very expansive and just keeps growing and growing. To better understand how it grows and its properties, I grew my own mushrooms at home and studied them. Let me introduce you to the “fun-guys” (I couldn’t help but name them).
Starting from just a couple of spores, my mushrooms started growing and sprouting. I watched over the “fun-guys” everyday, making sure to keep them in a cool and dark environment and spritzing drops of water every few hours so that they stayed moist. Within just a couple of weeks, they were fully grown and the mycelium just kept expanding.
Throughout this growth, the mycelium bound organic matter through a network of hyphal micro-filaments and formed a matrix similar to polymer composites used in producing clothing and plastic. Structural polymers like chitin and chitosan are produced naturally by fungi and are natural macromolecules that can be used to build the materials we use today.
Mycelium materials will biodegrade overtime after their intended product life cycle which is the perfect alternative to plastic-based materials that do not degrade for thousands of years.
And, if you didn’t already know, mycelium is actually an ideal ingredient that is used to provide structural support to both plant-based and cell-based cuts of meat. (Check out my article on cell-cultured meat for more information on this).
Using mycelium, we can bio-fabricate materials like packaging, furniture, and even leather. Your future clothing, chairs, and tables could be composed of mushroom roots and you would barely notice the difference.
Reinventing the status quo
There are several companies that are working on using the mycelium network to create leather. Specifically, the California-based company Bolt Threads with their product Mylo, which will be available to purchase this year in 2021.
How do they do it?
Step 1: They first start by growing the mycelium on a bed of sawdust or organic material in a way where it spreads out in all directions to form a cohesive web. The cells grow by extending fibers called hyphae and when fed a source cellulose-rich nutrients to eat (often corn stover). This is usually done with controlled temperature, humidity, and carbon dioxide levels so that the mycelium becomes a dense fibrous network.
This fibrous network looks like of like the fibrous network in a nonwoven mat (like leather).
Step 2: In less than two weeks, if the environment is right, billions of cells grow to form an interconnected 3D network. Thick sheets of the woven mycelium are then processed, tanned, dyed and embossed into the finished leather-like material, according to a brand’s specifications.
The process is fairly similar to traditional leather production, but is more environmentally friendly. Mycelium doesn’t rot like animal hide does, and does not need to be treated with the copious amounts of salt and chemicals to prevent it from disintegrating that goes into leather production.
Scaling Mushroom Leather Production
In order to scale production and deliver millions of square feet of Mylo, Bolt Threads have built a world-class supply chain which is able to maintain the high quality of the leather and minimize negative environmental impacts.
They work with a European tanning partner that meets top certifications in sustainability, including a gold rating from the Leather Working Group and a mycelium partner in the Netherlands that utilizes vertical farming to minimize their ecological footprint.
The Benefits of Using Mushrooms
- Eliminates the need to raise livestock
Unlike leather production, making Mylo doesn’t involve raising livestock or emitting any of the associated greenhouse gases or material wastes. The demand for leather goods is only increasing as disposable income increases. Using traditional leather, we simply do not have the necessary land or water to raise cattle and meet these demands.
- Timeliness
Raising livestock can takes a long time. It takes 2 years for a cow to reach maturity, meaning that traditional leather production will not be able to keep up with the increased demand for leather. The mycelia grown for Mylo is produced in days with far fewer resources consumed (which is 300–700 X more efficient). Mycelium production uses half the volume of water needed for cotton production and uses no animal products.
- Less Chemical Usage
Unlike synthetic leather, which is usually made from a synthetic fabric and a polyurethane or PVC coating, Mylo is made from mycelium and is not petroleum-derived.
- Abundancy
Mushrooms are an untapped resource for a number of industries. Researchers can easily extract cells of a specimen and grow them in bulk quickly, affordably, and in specific shapes. Because of these properties, many other companies are utilizing mycelium to create replacements for Styrofoam, building insulation, packaging, and even mushroom bacon.
New Layers of Opportunity
The success of vegan mushroom leather is picking up quickly. Companies like Bolt Threads have already secured contracts and collaborations with many famous designers in the fashion industry.
In April 2018, they collaborated with designer Stella McCartney to create a prototype of her iconic Falabella bag. They were able to replace the traditional leather material with Mylo and the bag premiered at the Fashioned from Nature exhibit at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London.
They have partnered with other brands like Adidas and lululemon to create a line and Kering in a consortium to produce high-quality and scalable products. Many brands are willing to invest in meaningful material innovation, and Bolt Threads is leading the change to more sustainable leather production.
Key Takeaways
- The way we make leather and other fabrics is incredibly inefficient. Mycelium production uses 50% less water than cotton production and uses no animal products.
- The mycelium is the root of the fungus. It is very expansive and grows incredibly quickly. We can grow enough mycelia in days to make a leather bag!
- Using mycelium, we can bio-fabricate materials like packaging, furniture, and leather. Researchers can easily extract mycelium cells and grow them in bulk quickly, affordably, and in specific shapes.
- Bolt Threads is making vegan leather from mushrooms by growing 3D mycelium networks and putting them through the tanning process to yield leather that is almost indistinguishable its traditional counterparts.
- Benefits of using mycelium include less harsh chemical and salt usage, better abundancy, faster production, and fewer GHG emissions
In a resource-constrained world, the time has come to develop smarter solutions through advanced science and a shared commitment to a better future. The mycelium in fungi has incredible properties that will allow us to produce high-quality products without the need for animals. Your future clothing, luxury goods items, and furniture might just be the outcome of the incredible properties of mushrooms.
Hey there! Thanks for making it to the end of the article. Before you click out…
My name is Kimberly Liang (just call me Kim ☺️) and I’m a 16-year-old innovator/business enthusiast/musician who’s super interested in the future of biotech. I spend my time reading up on emerging technologies and training 10X mindsets.
If you want to find me:
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Until next time 👋
