Dr Jane Wood has created a fashionable recipe for success; a bit of left over tea and sugar, mixed with kombucha starter culture and she’s able to produce vegetable leather.
After one session a group were asking Jane if she had seen a video on the internet called ’ The Next Black ’. She hadn’t. But when she watched it, she was thrilled as it was a collection of all the things she was interested in - how innovations in fashion and textiles were driving the industry forward. One of the people featured in the film was a fashion researcher, Suzanne Lee, who was looking at new ways of creating fabrics. She talked about ’growing vegetable leather’ and this was it, the inspiration for Jane’s next work.
Getting started
Jane started to research everything she could about the ’vegetable leather’ and found it was actually a bacterial cellulose (BC) mat that is produced by microbes found in Kombucha (well known as a fermented drink). Leaving a Kombucha starter culture in black tea and sugar for a few weeks had been identified as an environmentally friendly and sustainable way to produce the BC mats and before she knew it (and much to her husband’s disgust), Jane was soon growing pots of vegetable leather all’over the house.Fast forward a couple of years and Jane was studying for a PhD degree entitled ’Bacterial Cellulose as a Technical Textile’. Before becoming an academic, she had already served many years in industry as an industrial textile technologist so felt she had the materials expertise, but what she really wanted to know was the ’how’ - how do microbes create this amazing material? She adopted a multidisciplinary approach to her PhD study and found some supportive supervisors in microbiology - at which point the journey really began.
Growing textiles
Jane discovered that while many researchers had studied BC mats created from Kombucha, no one had ever published data to explore how Kombuchamats compared to BC mats grown on other substrates.. Working with her microbiology colleagues, she collected a body of data to confirm that Kombucha in black tea and sugar grew the thickest mats. She also found that this method could be used over and over again, confirming it as a potentially sustainable way to make leather alternatives.. To further support her lab findings, Jane enlisted the help of the general public in a citizen scienceWhile this study proved promising, Jane knew - as an ex-textile industrialist - that if vegetable leather were to replace animal leather, it would need to perform just as well. Unfortunately, BC mats were less strong than animal leathers and without further processing they were unlikely to be a suitable direct replacement for the fashion industry. Coupled with the fact that many of the necessary treatments were likely to be synthetic and would negate any of the sustainability gains from their production, Jane started to investigate other uses for the BC mats.
Cleaning up fashion
Now, Jane is exploring how BC mats could be used to help clean up environmental pollution from the textile industry. Textile dyehouses produce lots of coloured liquid waste which often escapes into rivers and waterways causing devastating environmental impacts. In an experiment involving dyeing the BC mats, Jane discovered how easily the BC mats absorb the colour from liquid which could see BC mats used to treat dyehouse effluent. Jane is currently investigating how these BC mats can be used across the international textile industry to counter some of this pollution.Words and pictures - Dr Jane Wood
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