Earlier this May, celebrities gathered in New York City for the Met Gala, one of the biggest and most extravagant fashion events of the year. This year, the dress code was nature-centric, instructing guests to dress for “The Garden of Time.”
As you can imagine, many attendees showed up in floral patterns or adorned with cloth roses. But outside the gala, engineers and designers are working on fabrics that allow people to wear a material that literally grows in gardens: fungus.
Currently, a small number of companies and startups are developing and selling materials made almost entirely of mycelium, living cells found in mushrooms that can yield fabrics strikingly similar to leather. Others are experimenting with orange peel fibers, algae and invasive lionfish skin to develop fabrics as a way to tackle the fashion industry’s gargantuan waste issue.
Recently, a variety of news reports have touted this trend as the next big thing in fashion. But these headlines looked eerily similar to some I saw four years ago, forecasting fungus fabrics as “fall’s hottest fashion trend.” It got me wondering: Are biodegradable, vegan clothes actually picking up steam or are they struggling to scale up to a level that will meaningfully reduce fashion waste?
For today’s newsletter, I am exploring the potential for biodegradable materials to mitigate waste—and why they may miss the “root cause” of fashion’s environmental issues.
Fashion’s Trashy Troubles: At this point, it’s no secret that the fashion industry has a waste problem. Each year, an estimated 92 million tons of textiles and clothes are discarded, many forming literal mountains of fabric in developing countries such as Chile and Ghana. Polyester and cotton make up nearly 80 percent of global fiber production, and clothes are often coated or weaved with plastic derivatives and nearly impossible to break down naturally.
Dramatic documentaries have investigated the devastating environmental and ethical impacts of “fast fashion,” from rampant water usage to slave labor. Animal activists have long voiced concerns about the ethical issues with producing leather, which mostly comes from the hides of cows or other animals. The clothing industry is also a top climate contributor, responsible for 10 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions from its supply chain and production, according to the United Nations.
Some environmentalists even felt that the Met Gala’s nature-centric theme fell short in addressing this deep environmental impact—and may have even highlighted some of fashion’s biggest problems.
“Inordinate water, chemicals, and raw materials are used to produce one gown, and significant emissions are produced at each stage of production from dyeing to processing to cutting and sewing,” Michelle Gabriel, graduate program director of sustainable fashion at Glasgow Caledonian New York College, told Fast Company.
As these issues have come to light, people have increasingly pushed for a deeper focus on sustainability in the clothes they wear and the fabric they are made of, providing the impetus for companies and startups to explore new types of materials like mushrooms that have a smaller environmental footprint.
Depending on the type of fabric, biodegradable materials have a variety of development processes. At the biotechnology company MycoWorks, workers lay out “deep-dish, lasagna-like trays” of fermenting mycelium in a large factory, the company’s founder Phil Ross told National Geographic. There, the cells dine on agricultural waste and incubate, until they are peeled off, molded, processed and tanned into a leather-like fabric.
Other processes can create similar looking materials using citrus peels or cactuses. However, these “vegan leathers” are not always entirely organic because many are sealed in a layer of plastic called polyurethane, reports the Guardian.
Is Fungus Fashion Really Trending? In 2021, fashion brands Stella McCartney, Hermès and Adidas each released products, from shoes to handbags, made using mushroom materials. Since then, a number of other companies have popped up, using things like invasive species skin, algae and other bio-based materials to make fabrics.
But at the moment, “there’s a lot of interest, I would say, rather than uptake,” Monica Buchan-Ng, the head of knowledge exchange at Centre for Sustainable Fashion, based at London College of Fashion, told me. “It can be kind of a bit of a game of chicken,” in which brands are willing to invest in a pilot project, but not yet prepared to spend millions on a single solution, she added.
Without that increased investment, several companies in the eco-friendly textile space have buckled, including Renewcell, a startup that aimed to turn old clothes into pulp for new materials. Similarly, materials company Bolt Threads announced last year that it was halting production of its mushroom leather, Mylo.
“We are not immune to the same macroeconomic pressures everyone else is facing, so we have paused Mylo to reassess what works and what will work in the future,” Bolt Threads CEO Dan Widmaier told Vogue Business. He added that fundraising for new material development is difficult because more funding has gone toward artificial intelligence in the fashion space, a trend that Buchan-Ng also mentioned.
Bolt Threads hopes to one day resume their mushroom production line. Meanwhile, MycoWorks announced in January their first 1,000 sheets of fine mycelium were headed to production, and a number of other companies have received millions of dollars in seed funding to continue development of their own bio-based fabrics.
However, it’s difficult to say whether they could scale up enough to have a meaningful impact on fashion waste. And Buchan-Ng said that they fail to get at the “root causes of fashion devastation”: overproduction.
“I genuinely think the biggest solution isn’t the easy one because it’s the one that requires these large fashion companies to make significantly less money. It’s just to make less stuff and to pay more for that stuff and to look after what we have,” she said. “We still need these amazing materials. But we just need fewer of them with less fashion overall, essentially—and I say that as a person that genuinely loves clothes.”
More Top Climate News
As climate change worsens, heat waves could increasingly affect those who are most vulnerable to them: seniors.
A new study found that more than 200 million older people worldwide will be regularly exposed to chronic and acute heat by 2050 under current climate trends. As bodies age, they become less effective at sweating, which is the key to cooling yourself during a heat wave. Under severe circumstances, heat stress can lead to exhaustion and potentially fatal blood clots, reports NPR.
Extreme heat fueled by climate change could also be worsening brain diseases, according to a different new study. The brain can struggle to function in high temperatures, which can exacerbate symptoms of Alzheimer’s, schizophrenia, Parkinson’s and multiple sclerosis, the researchers found.
Meanwhile, southern Brazil is still reeling from the flooding that inundated the region over the past few weeks, which killed at least 149 people, reports the Associated Press. The water also drowned many farm animals, though rescue teams are currently actively searching for animals that may have survived the floods.
About This Story
Perhaps you noticed: This story, like all the news we publish, is free to read. That’s because Inside Climate News is a 501c3 nonprofit organization. We do not charge a subscription fee, lock our news behind a paywall, or clutter our website with ads. We make our news on climate and the environment freely available to you and anyone who wants it.
That’s not all. We also share our news for free with scores of other media organizations around the country. Many of them can’t afford to do environmental journalism of their own. We’ve built bureaus from coast to coast to report local stories, collaborate with local newsrooms and co-publish articles so that this vital work is shared as widely as possible.
Two of us launched ICN in 2007. Six years later we earned a Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting, and now we run the oldest and largest dedicated climate newsroom in the nation. We tell the story in all its complexity. We hold polluters accountable. We expose environmental injustice. We debunk misinformation. We scrutinize solutions and inspire action.
Donations from readers like you fund every aspect of what we do. If you don’t already, will you support our ongoing work, our reporting on the biggest crisis facing our planet, and help us reach even more readers in more places?
Please take a moment to make a tax-deductible donation. Every one of them makes a difference.
Thank you,
Kiley Price
Reporter
Kiley Price is a reporter at Inside Climate News, with a particular interest in wildlife, ocean health, food systems and climate change. She writes ICN’s “Today’s Climate” newsletter, which covers the most pressing environmental news each week.
She earned her master’s degree in science journalism at New York University, and her bachelor’s degree in biology at Wake Forest University. Her work has appeared in National Geographic, Time, Scientific American and more. She is a former Pulitzer Reporting Fellow, during which she spent a month in Thailand covering the intersection between Buddhism and the country’s environmental movement.
