Today, meat is murder, plastic is poison, and making a cheap cotton T-shirt requires a two-year supply of clean water and enough synthetic fertilizer to kill a blue whale. Corporations are destroying the environment, and every time someone buys almost anything, it gets worse. Still, corporations are people, and people can change. Adidas now has mushroom leather Stan Smiths, for example. The other day, a group of major brands including Nike, BMW, Ralph Lauren and the Kering Group, which owns Gucci and Balenciaga, gathered at a renovated shipbuilding warehouse in Brooklyn’s Navy Yard to hear about the latest ecological news. junk.
On display: algae inks, crustacean superglue, thread derived from squid DNA. “Instead of making things from animals or petrochemicals, like fossil fuels, can we do it with biology? Can we design life itself to do the things around us? asked a fashion designer named Suzanne Lee, who had called the summit, called Biofabricate. “Most people still don’t know that all of this is possible, because many of these products are not yet in stores. You know, your house isn’t actually cultivated. . . even! ”
Lee held up a brown brick-sized building block, which had been produced from fungal waste from Namibia. “Smell it! It’s amazing,” she said. (It didn’t smell amazing.) Nearby, her colleague Amy Congdon pointed to a gray cube. “It’s a bacteria-grown brick,” she said. “They’re using bacteria to essentially make concrete! ”
Twenty years ago, after working as a fashion designer for John Galliano in London, Lee began using a modified kombucha recipe—“green tea, sugar, some microbes, and a little time!”—to grow her own clothing. “I asked the question ‘What will fashion look like fifty years from now instead of next season?’ “she said. Investors didn’t love the idea. “There was zero traction,” she recalled, shaking her head. “I basically gave up.”
In 2014, he hosted a summit for “bioinnovators” at Microsoft’s headquarters in Times Square. Only a few big brands and a handful of startups appeared. This year, more than sixty new companies confirmed their attendance; so did most of the major European luxury brands. “We’ll do it in Paris next year!” Lee said.
In the showroom, a few people were setting up their booths before representatives from Louis Vuitton and Tesla arrived. Amanda Parkes, a scientist for the Pangaia brand, pulled a pink hoodie out of a bag. “It’s entirely plant waste, no cotton, no plastic,” she said. The cloth was printed with a small block of text:
THIS HOODIE IS MADE WITH RESPONSIBLY SOURCED BAMBOO AND EUCALYPTUS, ORGANIC SEAWEED AND WILD HIMALAYAN NETTLE. THE FABRIC IS TREATED WITH NATURAL MINT OIL TO KEEP IT FRESH, SAVING WATER, ENERGY AND TIME.
Wearing green high-waisted cotton pants and a purple Pangaia sports bra (“made from castor oil, a non-food crop that doesn’t disrupt the food chain”), Parkes continued, “Justin Bieber wore our tracksuit.” lotus pink, accented with chunky Balenciaga sneakers. (Other Pangaia fans include Kourtney Kardashian, Natalie Portman, Harry Styles, Jaden Smith, and Pharrell Williams.) “And we don’t pay anyone to use anything!”
“Repeating your order, you wanted ‘all fries.’ ”
Caricature of Pia Guerra and Ian Boothby
Nearby, two brothers, Axel and Alexis Gómez-Ortigoza Aguirre, who attended the Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey (“It’s like Mexico’s MIT”) before founding Polybion, a synthetic biology startup, showed a great sample of bioassembled leather. “It’s like half a cow,” Alexis said.
Axel said: “Food processing companies in Mexico throw away about sixty percent of all the fruit they use. We have a secret formula to take ‘food’ out of the waste and give it to the bacteria”.
Alexis added: “The bacteria eat and as they eat they assemble this material. Segregate this!” She pointed to the sample. You can smell it.
Axel said: “It’s a bit strong!” (It was a bit strong.)
The raw material, which resembled a huge raw chicken fillet (the brothers call it “chicken breast”), can be tanned, dyed and cut to customer specifications.
“You could make shoes, a wallet…”
“—car interiors, anything you would use leather for—”
“You could make a SpaceX seat to go to the moon!” Axel said.
“We are already working with major global brands,” said Alexis. “We just can’t reveal their names.” (Polybion has signed NDAs with the world’s largest shoemaker and the three largest German automakers.) “In the future, we can grow tissue with this, like meat. We can grow organs,” Axel said. An assistant frowned. “It’s not science fiction,” Axel said. “This is like the Internet in 1990. The best is yet to come.” ♦
Source: www.newyorker.com