S8. E8: Sydney Gladman And Ranjani Theregowda: Next-Gen Materials
“We need to move away from animal-derived materials, but we also need to move away from petroleum-based traditional materials. So what is out there, what can we do? That demand is strong and supply is where the issue is,” - Sydney Gladman
On June 12th the New York Times put out an article titled, How Fashion Giants Recast Plastic as Good for the Planet. The article, written by Hiroko Takeuchi, caused quite a stir within Species Unite and I'm sure many other vegan communities. It criticizes something called the Higg Index, a suite of tools that assesses the social and environmental impacts of products, including animal-based and synthetic materials. The article left many people confused and I received a lot of emails asking me, “should we even be wearing vegan leather?” (The answer is yes.)
In order to be better able to explain what the article was really about, I needed some help. So, I reached out to my friend Nicole Rawling, the executive director at the Material Innovation Initiative (MII), the non-profit that’s advancing next-gen materials. Next-gen materials are high-performance, animal-free, and more sustainable for fashion, automotive, and home goods. MII provides expertise while bringing all the key players together to get these materials from concept to commercialization.
Nicole introduced me to Sydney Gladman, the chief scientific officer at MII and Ranjani Theregowda, MII’s environmental data scientist, so that they could answer my many questions about the article, about the future of materials as well as our current situation. I have been excited about next-gen materials for a long time, but I’m even more so after speaking with them. It’s happening - we’re on the way to a future that no longer uses animals for fashion, autos, and home goods. And, MII is doing everything that they can to speed that future up.
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In gratitude,
Elizabeth Novogratz
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Transcript:
Sydney: [00:00:15] We need to move away from animal derived materials, but we also need to move away from petroleum based traditional materials. So what is out there? What can we do? That demand is strong and the supply is where the issue is.
Elizabeth: [00:00:35] Hi, I'm Elizabeth Novogratz. This is Species Unite. We have a favor to ask. If you like today's episode and you have a spare minute, could you please rate and review Species Unite on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts? It really helps people to find the show. On June 12th, The New York Times put out an article called How Fashion Giants Recast Plastic as Good for the Planet. The article is written by Hiroko Takeuchi and it caused quite a stir within the Species Unite and I'm sure many other vegan communities. It criticizes something called the HIGG Index. The HIGG Index is a suite of tools that assesses social and environmental impacts of products, including animal based and synthetic materials. I received a lot of emails asking me, should we even be wearing vegan leathers and vegan materials? So I called on a couple of friends at the Material Innovation Initiative, also known as MII. They're the nonprofit that's advancing Next-gen materials. Next-gen materials are high performance, animal free and more sustainable for fashion, automotive and home goods. What they do is provide expertise and bring all the key players together to get this stuff from concept to commercialization. This conversation is with Sydney Gladman, the chief scientific officer at MII and Ranjani Theregowda, MII’s Environmental Data Scientist.
Elizabeth: [00:02:23] I'm really excited to talk about Next-gen materials and this New York Times article. So thank you both very much.
Sydney: [00:02:31] Thank you. Absolutely.
Ranjani: [00:02:32] Thank you so much for having us. We really appreciate it.
Elizabeth: [00:02:34] The New York Times put out an article, I think it was last Sunday or Saturday when an article called How Fashion Giants Recast Plastic as Good for the Planet. Now, I know this is assuming they're primarily talking about existing Gen materials. Is that correct?
Sydney: [00:02:51] That is correct. There are very few next-gen materials that are even in the HIGG index at this point in time. So I'd just say, you know, when they're talking about the data that is available, it is either the incumbents or those current gen synthetics for the most part.
Elizabeth: [00:03:05] Just so we're clear, will you tell us what exactly qualifies as next-gen materials?
Sydney: [00:03:11] Absolutely. We have our own definition. I would say that sometimes it's more broadly adopted by other industries as well. But our definition is that this is high performance, animal free and more sustainable materials that are direct replacements for the incumbent. So they need to replace either leather, silk, wool, fur, down or exotic skins. Those are our six categories that we're looking for. So the three requirements are, animal free, high performance and sustainable. So that eliminates obviously the original incumbent materials, the cow based leather, for example, or silkworm based silk. It eliminates the current gen alternatives which typically are synthetics. Just like I mentioned, that would be polyurethane leather, pu leather, vinyl. Or it could be something like polyester for silk, it could be acrylic for wool. So those we do not include in next-gen materials. Those are something we want to move away from. We want to go to the next gen which are novel, sustainable, new, innovative materials.
Elizabeth: [00:04:16] What are you seeing now on the innovation side? Are people getting close to like incredible mushroom leathers or amazing apple, like close in the sense that big brands could use it?
Sydney: [00:04:28] Yeah, absolutely. I mean, again, I think there's always this balance of patience that is required in these new emerging materials and that they're not going to be able to deliver millions of square feet of leather immediately. So there is some scale up that needs to be done, but a lot of people are really close. We are excited about a lot of different categories of innovation, like you mentioned Mushroom. We specifically call this mycelium, which is that component of the mushroom that is being grown for this purpose. But the plant based innovations that are coming from agricultural waste products, for example, we've also got people using fermentation approaches.
Elizabeth: [00:05:07] For people who don't understand that, will you explain?
Sydney: [00:05:10] Fermentation? Yeah. So this process is basically you're using microbes, whether that's bacteria or yeast as tiny little factories to produce precursors for your material. So it's very similar to how you make wine and beer, right? In that case, you've got microbes that are turning sugars into alcohol. We are here turning sugars, usually still into some sort of material precursor. An example would be bacterial cellulose. So cellulose is a really common material found in all the plants on our planet, and it's a really useful material for building things like next gen leather. So we've got a lot of innovators that are doing that approach. We also have people creating collagen. People probably heard of collagen from like in your skin. It's also the primary component of leather because that is a skin and therefore.
Elizabeth: [00:06:02] I never knew that. Or just never thought about it.
Sydney: [00:06:03] Yeah, you know, it's the same thing. It's very similar. So people are actually using that technique to create animal collagen without the animal, right. So you can genetically program these microbes to spit out those proteins without needing to go grow and then kill a cow to do so. So that's a really exciting approach as well. We have people that are doing the more protein based fermentation method. So that's actually, in terms of the scope of our players in this space, about half of them are doing a plant based innovation. Then the next biggest category is this what we call microbe derived category, which is that kind of fermentation approach. I think that's about 20% of all of our innovators. So it's a really hot kind of emerging area.
Elizabeth: [00:06:51] What's the rest?
Sydney: [00:06:53] The breakdown of that remaining 30 ish percent is split amongst the mycelium category. The recycled material category blends, which are kind of hard to capture, and the cultivated animal cell category. So this would be akin to the lab grown meat that we have heard about in the news. We have lab grown leather. So there are three companies that are all working towards lab grown leather or exotic skins, at this time.
Elizabeth: [00:07:22] I think one of the reasons that it's so important to talk to the two of you is because most people don't know the difference. They just think anything non-animal is now called vegan leather. Right. Vegan leather used to be a really bad term and now it's kind of hip. So for the everyday reader of the New York Times who doesn't know the difference, this really casts a bad light kind of on the whole movement of getting away from animal products to begin with. That's why I want to talk about it and have the two of you just explain, you know, like what was the article really saying?
Sydney: [00:08:01] Definitely. I mean, I think that the main points that were kind of come across through that article was that there are perceived issues with the underlying data or the way that the data is being used in the HIGG index and in that way that they're inappropriately relying on it to make decisions. Some of those decisions people feel are being made is that synthetics are being favored over, quote unquote, natural materials. Those natural materials could be either animal derived or plant derived, right? So cotton is also a natural material as well as leather and silk. So those were kind of the points that were being made. I wanted to quickly say those points are not new. This discussion has been going on for quite a long time. We do have a gap in the data that is available and the tools and methods by which we can make decisions in the industry. Sustainability is a relatively new conversation that is being had, and this tool was one of the first tools that was developed to be able to help brands in particular, be able to sort through the information in order to help them start making decisions on where to go with their materials. So that's one point I want to make. It's not new. We already knew about it. Most people already knew about it. But I think its platform in The New York Times now, everyday readers who may not have been aware of these issues are now aware.
Elizabeth: [00:09:29] Because I got comments like, Whoa, maybe I shouldn't buy vegan leather. I'm like, No, stop. Including comments of like, wait, we're just burying hides. It's a lot better to bury hides than to tan them for the planet and the people. So it threw me, like the amount of emails I received from it.
Sydney: [00:09:50] Yeah, yeah. I mean, to be fair, same on our end. We also got a lot of people reaching out, asking questions about the article. But I think the big thing is we wanted to highlight as well, you know, on our end, we've been really aware of these issues and we're actually trying to do something about it. So MII is launching this Environmental Data Coalition, we'll call it the EDC for short. The things that the article brought up, many of them are actually real and true problems. Right? We don't have enough data. I will say that right now. So we need to tap into those white spaces, what we call them, kind of untapped opportunities and challenges and really summarize them is one step. We could do that as a nonprofit. We can bring together all that information and then have everybody start working together on, how do we solve this, how do we communicate better, and how do we work together to get the data, the methods and the analysis to be more robust?
Elizabeth: [00:10:49] Why is it that there's such a lack of data? Do you know?
Sydney: [00:10:53] One of the things that Ranjani and I were just talking about today is that this tool that we're talking about is called Lifecycle Assessment LCA. That is the most common tool adopted for doing sustainability evaluations. It is a good tool. It helps you get a very holistic perspective on the footprint of your material. So it's not just carbon footprint, which would be like greenhouse gas emissions, but everything that goes into making a new material with a certain process, things like water, how much land use, what happens with effluents or eutrophication, which is the runoff of fertilizer which can result in downstream effects. There's all these different things that go into it and that LCA tool is really new. Ranjani was saying, when were you doing your PhD and how soon was LCD invented? Basically.
Ranjani: [00:11:45] I think LCA’s first was initiated by the International Organization for Standardization back in 1996 and it was fully refined only in 2006 to include every step of the process of production. I was doing my PhD back in 2009 on life cycle assessment of tertiary wastewater treatment, and it was not really accepted at that point. It was a very new principle, especially industries who are just trying to attempt to bring in some new innovation. They basically didn't like LCA because it included so much data and it is an extremely data intensive process. So we can see that LCA uses sort of a quantitative assessment to measure environmental impacts and it's pretty new, especially for the fashion industry.
Sydney: [00:12:38] So that's why we don't have enough data. It takes a long time to do these assessments. It's also money intensiv. So getting all of these assessments done on all the materials that exist in the fashion industry, especially the emerging materials like next-gen materials, is a huge challenge. That's something, again, that I think we can help with, is how do we accelerate this, how do we make it more available and more standardized, so that we can all do it the same way.
Elizabeth: [00:13:03] And that people understand it. Because most brands don't want to use plastic either. Right. They're looking for solutions right now. That's why they're coming to you. Can we talk about that, like what the demand is on the brand side.
Sydney: [00:13:19] Yeah, it's actually surprising. I would say the just consensus amongst all brands is that we need to move away from animal derived materials, but we also need to move away from petroleum based traditional materials. So what is out there? What can we do? That demand is strong and the supply is where the issue is, right? Even though I just bragged about how there's awesome new stuff going on and there are new products, it's still very limited, right? It's not something that every consumer can get their hands on. It is not at a scale and availability and price point either that it is really pervasive in the industry yet. So that's what we're trying to do is get that caught up, right. Is to help the innovators be able to meet that demand with the supply. One of the big critical things that we try to ensure is that the subpar products do not make it to market, that is detrimental for the entire movement. So if the first products that come out that people are testing and experiencing for the first time are low performance or don't have the aesthetic quality that they expect for these materials. People are going to be turned off of the whole category, right? We liken it to vegan cheese.
Elizabeth: [00:14:33] That is such a good example.
Sydney: [00:14:35] The vegan cheese was really bad in the beginning. You know, still sometimes when I go to the store there, most of what is being offered is poor quality and it turns people off from even trying any new ones in the future.
Elizabeth: [00:14:46] It turned me off a long time ago before I was vegan and I tried vegan cheese. This is like over a decade ago and I tried vegan cheese. I was like, I am never going vegan. I was vegetarian. I was just like, No way. It was horrible. But that's such a good way to compare it.
Sydney: [00:15:04] So that's why we're really trying to avoid that and a lot of my team members came from the food industry. So they really see they've seen these learnings and the food industry is about 5 to 10 years ahead of the materials industry. So they really were able to kind of follow that growth path of the alternative protein movement and how successful that has been and see how we can apply some of those learnings and principles to materials because there is some overlap.
Elizabeth: [00:15:28] So there's this huge demand, not just from the fashion industry but from the car industry, from home goods, all across the board. Wherever you use a material, pretty much.
Sydney: [00:15:37] Automotive already knows that they have to phase leather out. That's been decided. I think most people have probably seen if you purchase a new car these days, it's usually a synthetic leather that is being offered as the standard something like a polyester urethane or a vinyl. But they're now realizing too, hey, we're getting hit on sustainability as well. People don't want plastic and everything. So the same concern has been we have talked to some of those brands as well, and they're really looking for that truly sustainable interior that still has the quality of leather but isn't made from animals or primarily from petroleum.
Elizabeth: [00:16:16] Where is the lab grown leather compared to even the meat world?
Sydney: [00:16:20] Yeah, it's interesting, I really think we're close. Vitro Labs is an example of one of the companies, they just got a nice round of funding to help them scale up their production. They've kind of tackled a lot of the R&D challenges of getting that material to be spit out from the bioreactor. Now it's all about getting it to a scale at which they can deliver products. So that's really exciting. We're excited to see them move forward.
Elizabeth: [00:16:47] Is it made similarly to how you make the meat?
Sydney: [00:16:50] Is pretty similar. I'll actually say that lab grown leather is a little bit easier, you know, on the scale of things because one, you don't have to eat it. So the challenge is with, you know, making sure the taste and the texture and all of these things are instead replaced by making sure you have the mechanical properties and the aesthetics. The origins of this technique come from medicine. People have been using tissue engineering for the purposes of medical improvements for a long time. I actually worked on this back in the day during my PhD and lab and the skin was one of the first applications. It's a relatively easy thing to grow, let's say, because it's thin. You don't have to worry about supplying blood into like a big, thick piece of tissue, because it's so thin it can just kind of sit in the bioreactor fluid and grow that way. So it's actually easier. So I think we're going to see it very soon.
Elizabeth: [00:17:48] I still can't picture it, though, when you're growing leather. I mean, can you grow enormous pieces of leather?
Sydney: [00:17:54] Yeah, I mean, there's different approaches to do it. But one of the common ones is that you have something called a scaffold, which is basically a template for which you can place the cells on top of and let them spread out and kind of grow the skin. However big that scaffold is and however many cells you can add over that area is how big the product can be. So if you make a scaffold the size of an airplane wing, you could have a piece of leather the size of an airplane wing. I'm not sure if people are at that scale yet, but hypothetically, you could do that.
Elizabeth: [00:18:25] There's only three companies doing this. I mean, three is great, but I would think there would be more for some reason.
Sydney: [00:18:30] Well, I do think one thing I'd like to note is that a lot of people in the lab grown meat industry are, I think, exploring other verticals. You know, a lot of them are in stealth mode and we probably can't mention who they are. But I do think that because there's that overlap in the technology and people see this opportunity space that if you crack the code with meat, it does make a lot of sense to see if you can attempt some other applications.
Elizabeth: [00:18:57] Sure, and you don't need regulations for leather. I mean, if you can scale it, you got it.
Sydney: [00:19:01] Are far fewer exactly. You don't go through the FDA if you're in the U.S., for example, which is very complex. Again, that's why I think it's a little bit more straightforward. It's really just making sure you can meet the target of your customer, in this case, the brands in terms of aesthetics and performance.
Elizabeth: [00:19:17] And do any of these companies have anything on the market yet?
Sydney: [00:19:19] I believe, as far as I'm aware, nothing that a consumer could buy at the moment. There have certainly been prototypes that have been made. But yeah, I do not believe that it's commercially available yet, but I think it's soon.
Elizabeth: [00:19:30] Like any ideas on timing? Like that's so exciting.
Sydney: [00:19:33] I honestly think like next, next year we could expect it. From what I have heard talking to some of these folks.
Elizabeth: [00:19:40] Wow. That's incredible.
Sydney: [00:19:41] Yeah.
Elizabeth: [00:19:42] I mean, all of this is, so game changing.
Sydney: [00:19:47] Mmhmm. We're very excited about it.
Elizabeth: [00:19:48] Especially in an industry that is evolving weekly. It's got to be so exciting. Like, is anybody kind of, not any company, but any plant material or anything, is there anybody kind of winning right now in the sense of getting this stuff out there and scaling?
Sydney: [00:20:04] Plant derived as a general category is the most popular. One of the reasons for that is the availability of raw material is already here, right? If you're using agricultural waste streams, for example, you don't have to grow that material from scratch. It's already a big pile that is sitting somewhere ready for you to use. So those people have had a little bit of an easier time for the most part, scaling and getting things going. When you're using a biotech based innovation, whether that's the mycelium because it is growing from scratch in a lab or the cultivated cells or the fermentation, there's a lot that goes into that from infrastructure, R&D optimization. It's a little bit more complex to get going, but the return could be even greater. You know, we do think that technologies like cultivated technology have the best chance of directly mimicking the properties of the cow. Whether you're growing cow cells in a laboratory, you know, it's going to get pretty close. So, that's where people are kind of buying out. It's, you know, they're waiting for, okay, we might get something that's exactly like real leather, like indistinguishable. Right now we have stuff that is able to meet performance. It's great, but it might not be exactly like real leather. It might be somewhat closer to the current gen, the synthetic leather, which is so great. That's a great point to hit.
Elizabeth: [00:21:24] It's awesome. So because I've been vegan for a long time and the one issue I've had since day one, it's not really an issue, but the one thing that annoys me is sweaters. I don't wear wool and the options are pretty mediocre. I don't feel like they've gotten much better. That's one area where it's like, okay, like they don't seem a whole lot better than they did ten years ago.
Sydney: [00:21:50] Definitely, wool, for example, in particular is really hard to mimic. It actually has some really unique properties. I'm writing a report right now on what makes wool wool. We do this because we want the innovators who are working towards these goals to understand what is the incumbent and what are your targets you need to hit, right? So you need to understand how it works, how it's made, so that when you're trying to make your replica, it's actually going to be nice and mimic those qualities in performance. So wool is actually really unique. It has a very unique structure, very unique composition, and that's hard to replicate. The other reason is I think there's some misinformation out there that a lot of people feel that wool is a relatively sustainable fiber. A lot of people are like, well, the sheep are not killed, right, to get wool. So I think there's less impetus to, you know, we need to eliminate this one. Even some vegans, or depending on how they may define it, may not take wool out of the equation. So we're trying to clarify that there is still a sustainability issue with wool. You know, it still requires a lot of resources to farm sheep for their hair and to encourage people to look into more alternatives. We have very few people in wool and we're really trying to push people towards those under served categories, but we don't need to convince people to go into leather, it’s happening. So we really spend a lot of our time on that wool and fur and silk and some of these categories where there aren't as many players and help them understand what the opportunity is.
Elizabeth: [00:23:24] But so there are people working on wool?
Sydney: [00:23:27] There are. There's actually you know, some people are doing the crazy lab grown approach to see if we can grow the follicles that make the hairs. You know, that's a long term vision, I'll say. I think there are intermediate steps we can make before we get to that, but people are trying it. So I think there's plenty of room in the plant based innovations that haven't quite been tapped into yet, to get something close to wool. We do have people using soy protein, for example. It's called vegetable cashmere, which some people have been working on. The brand is called KD New York, and they've been one of the earliest people that even attempted to make something, you know, from a vegetable protein into a fiber. There hasn't been a lot of exploration there. I think that there will be a big push in that direction soon as people are identifying that as a good opportunity.
Elizabeth: [00:24:26] That's awesome.
Sydney: [00:24:27] It's tofu waste like I mean, literally like rice. So again, the food and the materials, there's a lot of overlap. So I think it could be really cool.
Elizabeth: [00:24:39] Unlike the meat industry, there's just no resistance in the same way, right? Like you're not you're not getting resistance from people or from industry, I would assume.
Sydney: [00:24:48] I think people are a little less attached to where their clothes come from, than the taste of their food. I think that's a big thing. So it is a lower barrier to entry for people to realize that we should be able to innovate in this space, that there are plenty of opportunities and from the movements in food as well, I think people are like, oh well of course if we know we're supposed to eat less meat, then we should also probably use less animals in our materials as well.
Elizabeth: [00:25:16] Thank you both so much for this. It's so helpful, it's so informative and it's so hopeful.
Sydney: [00:25:22] We appreciate the ability to talk about it because we're really excited about it. One just plugged from our end is that we are a full, philanthropically funded organization and to be able to continue to do what we're doing, we rely on donations. So if anybody who is listening to our interview wants to learn more, you can go to our website, materialinnovation.org/. We would appreciate any support that you can provide us because that enables us to continue to do what we're doing.
Elizabeth: [00:25:59] To learn more about the Material Innovation Initiative, and Sydney and Ranjani go to our website SpeciesUnite.com. We will have links to everything. We are on Facebook and Instagram, @SpeciesUnite. If you have a spare moment and could do us a favor, please subscribe, rate, review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. It really helps people find the show. If you'd like to support Species Unite, we would greatly appreciate it. Go to our website Species Unite.com and click Donate. I'd like to thank everyone at Species Unite, including Gary Knudsen, Caitlin Pierce, Amy Jones, Paul Healey, Santina Polky, Bethany Jones and Anna O'Connor, who wrote and performed today's music. Thank you for listening. Have a great day.
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