Researchers are using biofabrication to develop sustainable textiles by growing them with fungi and bacteria, displacing animal and plastic-based materials. Efforts focus on working with microbes like mycelium, algae, and bacteria to produce naturally occurring polymers like cellulose. London-based biomaterial company Modern Synthesis is co-creating a micro-cellulose textile with bacteria isolated from kombucha tea.
Researchers are developing novel, more sustainable textiles using organisms, such as this shoe 'woven' from bacteria. Power, politics, fungi, bacteria: the surprising history and creative future of textiles
During her postgraduate studies, Keane grew the upper of a shoe using this technology. A thread of yarn was fashioned into a pattern to act like scaffolding, which the bacteria grew around to form the end material. "But the difference really with this is actually working with biology and working with natural systems and living systems and so that they start to become living factories, factories that are producing materials for us," said Hannah Hansell, an artist and researcher, focusing on the future of the fashion and textile industry.
"But then also the piece was trying to elicit how we would feel about that. Would that be a step too far, that we wouldn't want to have that kind of interaction with microbes?"Textiles are the fourth highest pressure category for raw materials and water use. Clothing production alone has doubled over the last two decades. Much of the clothes we don't wear either end up in landfills or are burned — only one per cent is actually recycled.
Through this process, garment makers wouldn't have to make a bolt of cloth and then cut it, rather the cloth would grow into its intended shape. "And in that sense, very much using principles within nature, because nature often will only make what it needs within natural biological systems. It doesn't create waste most of the time. Or byproducts are used in different ways. It's very, very efficient and economical," she said.
In the early history of computing, data was stored on a woven structure of copper wires, called magnetic core memory and had a little magnetic doughnut at the intersection. "And that wasn't modelled on weaving, It just fell out of the essentially binary nature of weaving," she said.
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