What do you get when you feed bacteria with industrial fruit waste? “A yellow leather jacket” might not be your first answer, but it’s exactly what came out of a collaboration between Danish fashion brand Ganni and Mexican biomaterials company Polybion.
The blazer — a one-of-a-kind prototype that is meant as a proof of concept for future collections — is made from bacterial cellulose, and rather than trying to replicate the characteristics of leather, it’s designed to feel like an entirely new material.
“We were impressed by the fact that a lot of people love the jacket because the material did not resemble leather,” said Alexis Gómez-Ortigoza, Polybion’s co-founder.
The fruit waste would otherwise end up in a landfill, where it would decompose and generate methane — a greenhouse gas 25 times more powerful than carbon dioxide at trapping heat. Some producers, according to Gómez-Ortigoza, also burn or dump the waste illegally. The production of Celium creates about one quarter of the emissions compared to the greenest methods of leather production, and after factoring in the emissions avoided by rescuing the fruit waste, the process becomes carbon negative, Gómez-Ortigoza said.
