Leather-like materials by cellular agriculture

Abstract

Leather, a popular material in a wide array of industries, is traditionally sourced from animal hides. The scale of production has increased over time, leading to ever-greater concerns about the environmental, ethical and health impacts of leather manufacture. The substantial resources required, plus the pollution and waste generated, pose serious doubts over the sustainability of existing production systems and their ability to meet the increasing demand for leather-like materials. To address these issues, alternatives to leather have been developed. Up to now though, these materials have been unable to perform as well as genuine leather, either mechanically, aesthetically or texturally. Some of the polymer-based alternatives may even be more harmful to the environment than leather itself. The need for a more-suitable leather substitute has coincided with the emergence of cellular agriculture technologies. In the future, it is hoped that leather-like materials may be engineered from collagen created by cellular agriculture, instead of relying upon animal slaughter. Such a material could offer great design, sustainability, environmental and ethical benefits over real leather. Whilst there is significant potential, more investment in research and development is needed before the technology can be considered sufficiently well developed. So far, tissue-engineering techniques applied from clinical fields have proven too costly and inefficient for scaling up, but work has already commenced to identify sources of collagen and cell growth media that are less animal-dependent and not so expensive. Even so, more-efficient methods of controlling the collagen network structure still need to be created. The new round of research is therefore expected to focus upon increasing cell-culture efficiency using, for example, specialised bioreactors.