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Your Next Designer Bag Will Be Made Out of Mushrooms
From fungi to spider silk, the hunt for sources of climate-friendly clothes and leather alternatives is getting creative
Around the turn of this millennium, when everyone else was busy worrying about the Y2K bug, researchers at Nexia, a secretive biotechnology firm based in Montreal, had other, bigger critters on their minds. Goats, to be precise. Although they looked just like regular goats and were given cute names like Sugar and Spice, they were, in fact, extraordinary. They had been genetically modified with spider DNA, so that their milk contained silk proteins that could potentially be spun into thread softer than the finest Egyptian cotton, and stronger than Kevlar.
In the end, spider-goat silk never took off. Nexia went bust, the silk-making herd were sold off and, although research is ongoing, the odds on a comeback have never looked good. Dreams of groundbreaking new textiles, however, are still very much alive, and very necessary.
Textile manufacturing, particularly for the fashion industry, has a deservedly dirty reputation. It is a major polluter and consumes vast quantities of water. Around 60% of the materials we wear are made from plastics — principally polyester, acrylic, and nylon. Each time they’re washed, these garments release microplastics into the environment — adding up to around half a million tons annually — endangering wildlife and our own well-being. “We urgently need to know more about the health impact of microplastics because they are everywhere — including in our drinking-water,” Dr. Maria Neira, the World Health Organization’s Director of Public Health, has said.
Given these environmental costs, and the fact that depletion of fossil fuels will eventually make synthetic textiles more expensive, the industry is coming under mounting pressure to invest more of its $3 trillion value into cleaning up its act. This means looking for environmentally friendlier textiles that could take the…
