The Brooklyn-based start-up, Modern Meadow, has just raised $40 million in funding to mass produce leather sans livestock.
Instead of slaughtering animals and then using physically and chemically intensive processes to clean their hides, the company “biofabricates” leather by engineering cells to produce and assemble collagen and other proteins. The final result is, according to the company, “biologically identical” to the real stuff.
Environmental benefits not only include the elimination of the aforementioned toxic processes that are used to remove flesh, hair, and fat, but also a potentially huge reduction of cattle-caused greenhouse gases. What’s more, the company claims to have the ability to tailor the leather’s characteristics to meet designers’ specifications, which would help to decrease production waste.
So, the material’s clearly an appealing alternative to natural and synthetic options, but the challenge still remains to make it affordable – and not mildly terrifying.
You can read more about Modern Meadow’s “leather” over at Tech Crunch. What do you guys think? Would you be willing to pay for / wear leather that came from a petri-dish?
