In Spain, popular fast fashion brand Zara has unveiled a party dress partially made from Chinese steel factory emissions. The material is made by feeding waste gas to microbes developed by LanzaTech. The microbes produce ethanol, which is then processed into monothylene glycol, a precursor to polyester. About 20% of the carbon used to […]
In Germany, adidas and biobased sneaker pioneer Allbirds have announced they will scale up their low-carbon footwear collaboration to a larger 2022 launch. In May, the two companies unveiled Futurecraft.Footprint, a performance running shoe with a lower carbon footprint—2.94kg CO2e per pair—than either company had ever achieved on their own. The “design sprint” to engineer […]
In Montreal, vegan brand Matt + Natt will begin incorporating leather made from apple juice industry waste into its handbags. The first bags to use the material—dubbed AppleSkin—will be its forthcoming Studio 901 collection. “After an abundance of research, sweat, and tears, it’s finally here … The collection of all collections … One that is […]
In the UK, scientists at Cambridge University have developed biodegradable glitter made from fruit pulp that they hope will provide a sparkly alternative to conventional, microplastics-spreading glitter. “Conventional pigments, like your everyday glitter, are not produced sustainably,” says Professor Silvia Vignolini of Cambridge’s Department of Chemistry. “They get into the soil, the ocean and contribute […]
In London, biodegradable, seaweed-based plastics brand Notpla has raised £10 million ($13.2 million) to increase manufacturing and develop new applications. Notpla—which is short for not plastic—was founded in 2014 by Imperial College London and Royal College of Art alumni Rodrigo Garcia Gonzalez and Pierre-Yves Paslier. The Series A round was led by Bangkok-based Horizons Ventures. […]
In Rhode Island, a team comprised of Brown University and Rhode Island School of Design students has won the first Google Biodesign Sprint competition with their biodegradable printed circuit board vision. The group, comprised of RISD industrial design students Avantika Velho and Connie Cheng and Brown University computational biology student Alexander Le, call their two-part […]
In Israel, cultivated steak producer MeaTech 3D announced that it has successfully “printed” a 3.67-ounce cut of beef without adding any soy or pea protein. To produce the steak—which the company believes is the largest created to date—MeaTech 3D isolated and grew bovine stem cells from tissue samples. Once sufficient numbers were achieved, the cells […]
In China, a researcher team at Tianjin University has developed what it calls the world’s most sustainable bioplastic using “natural DNA,” which sounds reasonable before it nonchalantly reveals the source of the DNA to be salmon sperm. The retrieval procedure was not described, but once on hand, the DNA was extracted and mixed with a […]
In New England, university scientists have reported the first known robot reproduction, enabled in part by the tiny organisms’ Pac-Man-like shape. The research team, comprised of members from University of Vermont, Tufts University, and Harvard’s Wyss Institute, earlier this year created programmable organisms, which they dubbed xenobots, using African clawed frog stem cells and artificial […]
In New York, popular Bravo reality show Project Runway has featured a competition where contestants had to create designs out of Koba, a biobased faux fur made from DuPont’s Sorona fibers and developed in collaboration with Ecopel. Episode 1907, entitled Are You Fur Real, aired last week. Designers had access to Koba in varying […]
