Materials & Packaging Supply Chain Circular Economy

Latin Innovators Unseating Conventional Leather with Circular, Biobased Alternatives

Polybion and Mabe Bio are future-proofing leather production with local and circular strategies that utilize waste, boost local economies and empower rural communities.

By Nina Purton | Published 4 weeks ago | About a 8 minute read

Image: Polybion

Leather, a century-old companion to humankind, is both iconic and practical. Found in myriad common goods including footwear, apparel, furniture, cars and more, it is a classic material that never seems to go out of fashion.

Despite its aesthetic appeal and durability, leather is associated with animal cruelty, deforestation, GHG emissions and toxic chemicals. Annually, we produce about 24 billion square feet of the material, with an impact of 110kg of CO2 per square.

While synthetic, “vegan” leathers cut out the cows and produce seven times less CO2 than bovine leather, many fall short of delivering climate benefits — considering they are non-biodegradable and derived from fossil fuels. The alternatives we need must offer the look, feel and durability of bovine leather without any of the environmental and health impacts.

Startup innovators have been busy on this front — producing a variety of viable leather alternatives from food-industry waste; circular, biobased polymers; mycelium and other more sustainable plant- and animal-based materials. And two Latin American biotech startups are further optimizing the supply chain by making leather from locally sourced, plant-based feedstocks.

Polybion

Image credit: Polybion

Initially inspired by the potential of mycelium as an alternative material, Mexican brothers Alexis Gómez-Ortigoza and Axel Gómez-Ortigoza Aguirre decided to start a business. While Alexis took care of the commercial and financial side of things, Axel worked away at their mother’s lab until they could afford to rent their own space.

On the brink of giving up due to resource scarcity and months of struggling to achieve results, the mycelium experiments finally worked at a pilot scale and the brothers founded Polybion (from Greek and Latin, meaning an entity capable of developing multiple technologies) in 2015. A year later, they launched Fungi Lab — the first vertically integrated pilot plant for mycelium materials in Latin America.

Starting with scarce resources helped define the company’s ethos: “We believe in doing more with less, because of the origin of the company,” Axel told Sustainable Brands® (SB). “We innovate not because we want, but because we need to.”

After several awards and grants, the Ortigoza brothers pivoted — while working in the lab, they derived a material from a bacterial fermentation process and realized they could turn it into a high-performance leather alternative. So, they hired a team of world-class biologists who helped develop their now-patented, bacterial cellulose-based leather alternative, Celium™. Suitable for fashion, footwear, sportswear and automotive applications, the customizable bio-textile became their full-time focus in 2018.

With locality and circularity central to their strategy, Polybion’s production activities occur within a 50-mile radius of the company’s base — a great example of a hyperlocal value network in action. The team takes over-ripened and damaged fruit from local fruit processing and packaging companies, which would otherwise end up in a landfill, and converts it into liquid in a 3,000-liter tank. The liquid is then poured onto vertically stacked trays and stored in an incubator. Bacteria, inoculated into each tray, eat and transform the fruit waste solution — producing 100 percent pure cellulose as a byproduct, which is then processed into Celium.

As Axel explained to What Design Can Do, the resulting material is a hydrogel — made from 90 percent water — which can then be “tanned” to transform into a leather-like textile. The entire process emits 12,27kg of CO2 per square meter (mostly due to electricity and chemicals), not accounting for the emissions saved by diverting food from landfills or composts. The company estimates the process will save 50 percent more CO2 once scaled up.

In 2022, Polybion completed a US$4.4M Series A funding round — which has been used to scale Celium production. Although they have already built FOAK (their first-of-a-kind biomanufacturing facility to industrialize bacterial cellulose production), Polybion’s team is mapping out what they call 10x — an even larger facility that will be a blueprint the company can license to other companies and brands that want to transform organic waste or other cellulosic products into leather.

This year, Polybion collaborated with fashion giant Ganni to feature Celium-based jackets and bags at Paris Fashion Week in January; in October, the partners launched Celium-based Bou Bags at a Ganni Lab pop-up at Selfridges in London.

Axel says the Polybion team is excited to see Celium performing well enough for commercial launch, but they continue to fine-tune the material as they scale. As he told Dezeen: "There is still a road to walk when it comes to performance in order to outperform animal leathers. This will be achieved by a steady learning and improvement cycle of both the stabilization process, the growth process and via gene-tuning of the strains."

He also told SB that, depending on the application, Celium requires a Polyutherane (PU) coating for water resistance and durability — which accounts for about 1 percent of the material’s total composition. The team is investigating plastic-free coating options.

Cellulose is one of the world’s most abundant substances, and Axel said Polybion is already experimenting with other feedstocks with which it can continue “converting waste to high-purity cellulose that can be used for many different products and other uses” — adding that more proofs of concept will be released to the public soon.

Mabe Bio

Image credit: Mabe Bio

Also fascinated by nature’s abundance and utility, Brazilian textile expert Marina Belintani developed a methodology investigating the potential of plants to create bio-based products. In 2022, she returned to her home country with a mission to continue her investigation with native plant species.

During this process, she discovered the regenerative environmental, social and economic benefits of using pods from the Angico tree as a circular raw material for plant-based leather production.

“As a native species, Angico is found in almost all Brazilian biomes and is widely used in reforestation projects,” Belintani told SB. “By valuing a forest waste product, we are helping to generate value from native forests and increase the income of local communities.”

So, research became business: In 2022, Belintani met Rachel Maranhão during the Business Acceleration Program for founders of Antler — a venture capital firm that invests in early-stage startups — and the two co-founded MABE Bio, with a goal to provide not only sustainable materials but also a regenerative production model good for both people and planet. Later that year, the company won first place and €10.000 in ClimateLaunchpad’s Global Grand Final.

Brazilian venture capitalists are risk-averse, so launching a deep-tech business — not to mention a woman-founded deep-tech startup — in Brazil is “extremely challenging,” Belintani shared. According to UN research, women-founded startups receive less than 12 percent of the total investment volume from the country’s major venture capital firms.

The company now enjoys the support of major national institutions including Embrapii, Sebrae, FAPESP and Finep; and is collaborating with supply-chain expert Farfarm for responsible sourcing of Angico tree pods from Indigenous communities and MST (Landless Workers’ Movement) settlements. In 2023, Belintani was named one of Bloomberg’s New Economy Catalysts and Maranhão made MIT’s list of Innovators Under 35.

While the material’s LCA is still in development, MABE Bio estimates its plant-based leather has the potential to increase the income of 600 families by 15 percent and preserve over 100 hectares of forest during its initial years of production. According to the company’s current calculations, Angico bio-leather could sequester more than 4,250 tons of CO2 and use 90 percent less water than conventional leather production.

And unlike many plant-based leathers, Angico leather does not require a PU coating — it is durable and water resistant in its natural state.

“We are committed to continuously investing in the evolution of our product to ensure it meets the performance standards required by the industry,” Belintani stated.

Earlier this year, the company received an additional R$1 million in funding: “This investment is a critical step towards establishing ourselves as pioneers in the construction and development of this new industry in Brazil,” Belintani said.

Meanwhile, Mabe Bio continues to fine-tune Angico leather and prepare for launch: Last month, the company participated in the Academy-Industry Training (AIT) program — which helps researcher-entrepreneurs transition their projects from the lab to the market.

Future-proofing fashion

Fashion remains one of the world’s top polluters; but more brands and innovators are turning away from the industry’s destructive, conventional practices toward next-generation materials, processes and production models — a welcome and necessary trend creating new value and a more resilient industry.