Fibers & textiles
Performance lives in a structure, not in a material name; biology entered the industry through finishing and cost per kilogram decides its next step; recycling is blocked by identification, not chemistry.
Twenty-five subjects, from spider silk to diapers, that keep making the same point: performance lives in a structure, not in a material name. Leather works because of a three-dimensional collagen network, which milled plant biomass and fungal mats do not reproduce — so the coating and the backing carry the mechanics. Keratin must have its disulfide bridges destroyed to be extracted and then rebuilt from scratch. Dragline silk is a protein plus a spinning process, and the process is the hard half.
The second recurring idea: biology entered this industry through finishing, and cost per kilogram decides where it goes next. Enzymes clean hides but do not tan; the recycling enzyme cuts only amorphous polyester, so the problem becomes feeding it plastic in the right physical state; denim’s whole aesthetic rests on dye that never reaches the yarn core.
The third: fibre-to-fibre recycling is blocked by identification, not chemistry — by whether a machine can read a garment in a fraction of a second.
Start with biotechnology in textiles, which sets out that economics; the fibre, finishing and recycling pages then apply it.
Articles 25
| Recombinant spider silk Dragline silk is not a protein — it is a protein plus a spinning process, and the process is the part that is hard to copy. |
| Cork and mycelium in accessories Leather works because of a three-dimensional collagen network; cork and fungal mats have no such network, so the coating and the backing carry the mechanics. |
| Bio-based baby diapers The absorbent core is an osmotic engine, and every property a nappy needs — capacity, gel strength, dry skin contact — is traded against another one. |
| Bacterial cellulose sheet masks A bacterial cellulose pellicle is mostly water held in a nanofibril network, and almost everything a sheet mask does follows from that plus contact. |
| Bio-based elastane in swimwear Swimwear is the hardest environment elastane meets, and a bio-based soft segment is chemically identical to the fossil one — so it degrades identically. |
| Biotechnology in textiles Why biology entered textiles through finishing rather than through fibre, and why cost per kilogram — not capability — decides where it goes next. |
| Cotton fibre grown in cell culture A cotton fibre is one enormously elongated seed-coat cell, and the hard part of growing it in a vessel is not making cellulose but making shape. |
| Bio-based antimicrobial and odour finishes Chitosan works because it is a polycation, which means it stops working above its pKa — and odour control is a different problem from killing bacteria. |
| Algal pigments and living textile coatings Algal colour comes from proteins, and a protein-based colour is a conformation you have to keep intact; a living coating is an organism you have to keep alive. |
| Recombinant collagen in skincare Collagen is a triple helix that only holds together if proline is hydroxylated, and a molecule that large cannot get through skin — two facts that between them define the field. |
| Bio-based activewear Performance knitwear is a moisture-transport problem and an elastic-recovery problem, and bio-based fibres are weak in different places on each. |
| Bio-based camouflage and armour materials Camouflage is a reflectance-spectrum problem well beyond the visible, and ballistic protection is set by wave speed in the fibre — two constraints biology meets very unevenly. |
| Bio-based footwear: mycelium, algae foam and pineapple leaf A shoe fails at the flex crease, at the midsole after 300 kilometres, and at the bond line — and each of the three headline bio-materials fails at a different one of them. |
| Bio-based underwear Next-to-skin garments are governed by three things a fibre datasheet does not show: wet strength, the biochemistry of body odour, and what regulators allow you to put on a treated article. |
| Chitin and chitosan Chitin is the second most abundant biopolymer on Earth and dissolves in almost nothing; chitosan is what you get by breaking enough of that hydrogen bonding to make it soluble in acid. |
| Enzymatic leather processing Enzymes do not tan. They clean the hide before tanning, and the honest question is where the protease stops when the substrate it is meant to spare is also collagen. |
| Industrial natural dyes A natural dye has to bind to the fibre, survive light and washing, and be produced at a colour yield per hectare that a dyehouse can afford — and most fail on the third. |
| Natural fibres and bio-textiles Every mechanical property of a plant fibre traces back to two numbers: how much of it is crystalline cellulose, and at what angle the microfibrils spiral around the cell axis. |
| Recombinant collagen and gelatin Collagen is one of the few proteins a cell cannot make without a second enzyme first modifying it, and that post-translational step is why expressing it in microbes is hard. |
| Bio-denim Indigo dyes only the shell of the yarn, never the core — the whole aesthetic of denim rests on that defect, and it frames every greener version of the process. |
| Antifungal socks A fibre almost never kills fungus — it manages moisture; anything that does kill has been added, and has to survive the wash. |
| Textile collection and sorting Fibre-to-fibre recycling is not blocked by chemistry — it is blocked by whether a machine can tell what a garment is made of in a fraction of a second. |
| Enzymatic textile recycling The enzyme only cuts amorphous polyester, so the whole problem becomes feeding it plastic in the right physical state. |
| Keratin-based materials Extracting keratin means destroying the disulfide bridges that made it strong — and then rebuilding the network from scratch. |
| Plant-based leather alternatives Leather gets its strength from a collagen network woven in three dimensions, and milled plant biomass does not reproduce that network. |