Resources

• Mylo plant-based leather
• Bolt Threads
• Original TED Talk profiled on the TED Climate podcast: The future of fashion -- made from mushrooms

Host and Guest

Climate Rising Host: Professor Mike Toffel, Faculty Chair, Business & Environment Initiative (LinkedIn)

Guest: Dan Widmaier, CEO at Bolt Threads (LinkedIn)

Transcript

Editor’s Note: The following was prepared by a machine algorithm, and may not perfectly reflect the audio file of the interview.

Mike Toffel:

This is Climate Rising, a podcast from Harvard Business School. And I'm your host, Mike Toffel, a professor here at HBS. Today we're sharing an episode from the TED Climate Podcast that features Dan Widmaier, founder and CEO of Bolt Threads. During this TED Talk, he describes how he's using biotechnology to create substitutes for silk, leather and other fabrics. It's a perfect extension of our recent episodes where we focused on lab-grown cotton at Galy and lab generated palm oil at C16. Here's the episode of TED Climate with Dan Widmaier.

Dan Kwartler:

Hey, listeners, you're listening to TED Climate. I'm your host, Dan Kwartler, and today we are talking fashion. Now for me, one of the great failings of this audio only podcast is that you lovely folks at home never get to see my incredibly chic recording outfits. But lately, I'll admit, it has been tough finding new pieces for the wardrobe. Like many of us climate conscious fashionistas, I would always rather find something used at a thrift or vintage store. But the hunt is hard, you guys. You can't just roll into the thrift store and expect to luck into the perfect Looney Tunes themed denim jacket. You have to put in the time, just like a lot of fashion brands need to put in the time to actually address their enormous carbon footprint. And I mean, there's a ton of things they could do. They could use more sustainable fabrics and dyes. Textile factories could switch to green energy, old fabrics could be recycled, and some brands are moving in the right direction slowly.

Unfortunately, there are plenty of companies marketing themselves as sustainable without actually living up to their claims. So real progress has been slow. Of course, we consumers can also do our part by seeking out sustainably produced clothes or thrifting or simply buying less. We're probably never going to get to a place where our closets hold only the clothes we need, but who wants that world anyway? In this next talk, bioengineer Dan Widmaier shows us how we could trade in our unsustainable materials like cotton and leather for bioengineered ones like leather grown by mushrooms. Yes, that is a real thing, and I desperately want it. As far as he's concerned, this is just the start of a whole new path towards sustainable fashion, which is great because as we've already seen this season, fighting climate change doesn't mean we need to stop everything we're doing and quit living modern life. Who says activism can't be fashionable?

Dan Widmaier:

I'm a proud lifelong nerd, and I have a PhD in chemistry and chemical biology to prove it, which is why I never thought I'd be that guy who's standing up here talking about my love affair with fashion. And there's someone else in my life who's equally shocked by this turn of events, and that's my wonderful wife who literally has a degree in fashion. But here I am standing with these two wallets. One of these is made out of leather, one of these is made out of mushrooms, and I'm not going to tell you which one is which. The average consumer can't tell you the difference. And that's kind of the whole point because even if you hate fashion, you've got an entire room in your house devoted to it. It's called your closet, and your closet is full of all kinds of materials. Cotton, leather, nylon, polyester. That list goes on and on. And those materials matter because those materials are the reason fashion is in the midst of a sustainability crisis.

Now, when I started my journey, I thought this was going to be a really easy answer. We just consume less, we have fewer, better things. But in the last decade, I've come to believe that ignores fundamental realities of both fashion and human nature. You see, fashion is not purely functional. It's about confidence, creativity, self-expression. It's a pure reflection of our innate desire as humans to always want more. And it satisfies our insatiable appetites to discover, buy, collect, show off. In truth, fashion is intrinsic to who we are.

There is a piece of good news, though. We can make fashion sustainable, and we're going to do it with science, and we're going to do it not by changing the humans, but by changing those materials themselves. And lucky for us, the answers to all of fashion's materials, problems are available today out there in nature. And it's our job as scientists to go find the best inventions from nature's 4 billion year catalog of greatest hits and bring them to the world of design.

So I started a PhD and I actually fell in love with one of those materials from nature. And it's this, it's spider silk. It's this fine, elegant, tough fiber that spiders make. I mean, you've probably seen a Spider-Man movie. You may have wanted to make Peter Parker's web slinger. It's okay. I did too. It's badass. I wanted to recreate that material in a lab. So I started a company and we did just that. And the very first product we made was this: a tie. And I took the very first tie and I sent it to Stan Lee himself, co-creator of Spider-Man, idol to nerds around the planet, all around, amazing human and he loved it. He actually cold called my phone from a block number and we geeked out over the technology.

And back in those days, almost nobody was working on sustainable materials in fashion. So I excitedly ran off to go talk to designers and fashion executives, and they thought this was fine, cool. But they couldn't shut up about their problem with leather. And for a really good reason. Leather is one of the most pivotal materials in the fashion world. In 2020 alone, the 5 biggest European luxury houses sold over $50 billion of leather goods. And the challenge with leather is that today it's inextricably linked to raising cows. And not just a few. Like lots of cows, and cows at the global scale are terrible for our environmental future. And so I left this conversation thinking, okay, what makes leather leather? And the truth is nobody loves leather because it comes from a cow. We love it because it's strong, it's soft, it's beautiful. It plays from the runway in Paris to a rodeo in Texas. So if we can take cows out of the equation, what's the thing we have to replicate to make a great material like leather?

And the answer is microstructure and it looks like a mess. It's just this jumble of fibers mixed together. At its essence, that structure is why leather is both pliable and strong. Now, contrast that to your closet, all those materials, they're what we call knits or wovens. Essentially, you take a single thread and you loop it around itself, or you crisscross it over itself and you make a fabric. So if we want to make a new material with the same amazing properties as leather, we need to go out in nature and find a natural material with the same microstructure as the collagen in cow hide.

Now my brain gets going with this, and I think, okay, we can grow skin, we can grow pure collagen, we can use plant fibers. Those all fail. Quality, cost, or scalability reasons tank those ideas. And that's what brought me to the world of fungi. I'm going to show you some mushrooms on the side of a dead tree, and I'm much more interested in what's happening just beneath the surface. Inside that tree are millions of stringy little strands that are called mycelium. They're these long branched networks, and what they're doing is eating dead stuff in the soil and releasing nutrients to the mushroom and to the ecosystem around it. We're onto something here, but to pull this off, we need to do this at the scale of fashion. So we don't need a little mycelium. We need a lot. Not a lab, but a factory. So that's exactly what we did.

And this is where science has to meet design. You see, we need to take that material and turn it into something leather-like. It has to be beautiful, it has to be functional, and designers need to be able to easily incorporate it into the world of fashion products. The first prototypes were none of those things. But after many, many, many, many thousands of iterations, we have a material and we call it Mylo, and Mylo does everything we set out for it. It's beautiful, it's functional, but most importantly, it's sustainable. So when you grow mushrooms, it takes about a little under one square meter of land to grow one kilogram of mushrooms. Contrast that to cows. Takes about 97 square meters of land to grow 1 kilogram of cow. And when we're growing Mylo, we're doing this in high density vertical agriculture, and we power it with 100% renewable energy. And this is technology. We're constantly getting better. Contrast that to the cow, it's about as good as it's going to get and the cows really don't like it when you stack them up in high density, vertical agriculture.

And so the question remains, how are we going to distribute this material at global scale to meet the moment? And I have bad news for you here. Historically, it takes decades for a new material to reach global scale adoption. Take spandex, it's that stretchy fiber. It's in your blue jeans, your yoga pants, makes your butt look amazing. That material was invented in the 1950s, and it wasn't until the athleisure megatrend 50 years later that it was truly everywhere on this planet. And thank you climate change. We humans don't have 50 years to wait. We need to solve this problem. We need new materials, and we need them now. And this is where fashion can be transformational. So I went out and constructed what we call the Mylo Consortium. These are fashion brands you know, this is Stella McCartney, Lululemon, Kering and Adidas. And now normally fashion brands are like renowned for their competitive nature and their desire for exclusivity.

But I was able to convince these brands that no one group can solve this problem alone. And to meet this moment, it was time to act in collaboration instead of competition. And we did just that, with the idea that we're going to solve this really big problem really fast. And here's a taste of how they're supporting Mylo. Lululemon wove Mylo into yoga and wellness accessories. Celebrity environmentalist, Paris Jackson modeled Mylo in this fashion editorial. Adidas redesigned the Stan Smith. It's their most iconic style with Mylo. And Stella McCartney designed the Frayme Mylo handbag and debuted it on the Paris runway and that little black handbag that's now part of Stella's commercial collection. What that means is that this is not some far off idea that's a dream that may one day be real. Mylo's commercially viable today. We sell it for $30 a square foot. It's about the price of premium calf leather.

This is the tipping point. This is the first tangible proof that the future of fashion can and will be made with sustainable materials. And this is our roadmap. We went looking to nature for a better alternative to leather, and we found that mycelium, it was hiding in plain sight. And this story, Mylo's story, is just one small example in a much broader movement. It's the one I know. But in the last few years, countless scientists have joined us in this journey of a sustainable materials revolution. And in the coming years, I think we're going to see amazing advances that replace all the harmful materials in your closet, in your home and your car.

And my hope is that by sharing this journey with Mylo, it can act as a blueprint that these others can follow to more quickly improve this world for all of us. Because in my heart, I'm still that nerd from the beginning. And I want to know what else is hiding out there in nature. I want to know what's the number one spot on the best of playlist from 4 billion years of evolution. And the incredible part of all this is that fashion undoubtedly compounded our sustainability crisis, but fashion has a golden opportunity to lead the charge to live with nature instead of against it. And now and in the future, fashion's not just about making yourself beautiful, it's also about making this planet beautiful and livable for generations. Thank you.

Dan Kwartler:

That's it for today. TED Climate is part of the Ted Audio Collective. This episode was produced and mixed by [inaudible 00:12:26], Jimmy Gutierrez is our story editor, fact checking by Paul Durbin. Faraday Grunge is our project manager. Wilson [inaudible 00:12:32] is our managing producer, and Dan O'Donnell is our executive producer. Special thanks to Anna Felan and [inaudible 00:12:37]. I'm your host, Dan Kwartler. Next week, how we can fight for environmental justice as we fight against climate change.

Speaker 4:

Every community has the right to a clean environment, and you do not need to be an environmental champion or a climate justice leader to embrace that value.

Dan Kwartler:

That's in the next episode of TED Climate.

Mike Toffel:

This was a bonus episode of Climate Rising, bringing you an episode of TED Climate with Dan Widmaier, founder and CEO of Bolt Threads. You've been listening to Climate Rising. I'm your host, Mike Toffel. Sophie Wong produced today's episode, Craig McDonald is our audio engineer. We'll be back in two weeks with another episode of Climate Rising. See you then.