rethink sustainability
Why leather from fish-skin and fungi is becoming the height of fashion
Article published in Financial Times, 29 August 2024
As an avid scuba diver, Aarva Chavda was dismayed to witness the slow demise of the coral reef in his hometown of Florida. Over the years, the reef’s kaleidoscopic colours had vanished along with the ocean dwellers it sustained – buffeted by rising global temperatures, warmer oceans, heat stress and pollution – until one day the entire reef was desolate, resembling a ghostly underwater grave. But there was one creature that thrived: the lionfish.
First imported for aquariums, lionfish are an invasive species that decimate reef ecosystems in the Caribbean, Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico. With no natural predators, each fish can gobble up to 70,000 native reef fish over its lifetime, devouring 79% of young marine life within five weeks of entering a habitat. Since 1960, these innocuous-looking striped fish have cost USD 1.2 trillion of damage in US waters alone1, and eaten into the livelihoods of thousands of local fishermen.
In 2020, Chavda and some other scuba divers devised an ingenious solution: turning lionfish skin into the world’s first invasive-species based leather product that actively restores ecosystems. Inversa, the company he founded, has since become one of numerous ingenious start-ups creating innovative, all-natural materials for the fashion industry, offering brands a way to cut their environmental impact.
Restoring ecosystems
To date, Inversa has partnered with 40 fashion brands, who turn the lionfish skin into exotic leather handbags, shoes, belts and even footballs. In the process, Inversa employs local fishermen to catch the otherwise unprofitable fish, providing alternative livelihoods and dampening some of the demand for overfished species. The business now works across six countries and has expanded to incorporate two more invasive species – Burmese pythons from the Florida Everglades and carp from the Mississippi River – selling their leather into a global market worth USD 243 billion, 80% of which is swallowed up by fashion. Some 50,000 invasive animals have been removed so far. “The game is 500,000, 5 million, 50 million,” Chavda says.
“Invasives are responsible for about 60% of species extinctions around the planet today,” he continues. “The biggest challenge was that there wasn’t the scale needed to tackle this problem. And we see biodiversity bounce back in such a spectacular way: biomass regeneration is about 50% to 70% when there’s active management on a coral reef.”
“It’s exciting that fashion consumers can buy products that actively benefit the planet,” Chavda says. “It isn’t just a race to be less bad or net neutral: we’re firmly regenerative and beneficial for the ecosystem.”
Read also: How luxury brands make sustainable packaging
Nature-positive fashion – good for people and the planet
Inversa is a small part of a solution to a greater global challenge – shrinking the environmental footprint of the wider fashion industry.
The production and distribution of apparel contributes nearly 7% of global carbon emissions2, more than aviation and shipping combined. Fashion is also responsible for an average of 13% of water pollution in G20 countries3, and 4% of annual freshwater withdrawals4. All told, the industry adds significant pressure on our planetary boundaries, the limits – such as climate change, water pollution, biodiversity loss, and freshwater use – that we must stay within to ensure environmental sustainability.
The bulk of this impact comes from making synthetic materials like polyester, which accounts for more than half of all annual fibre production and consumes millions of barrels of crude oil each year; and the use of raw materials like cotton, which depends on high-emitting, water-intensive agriculture. Then there’s the waste – tens of millions of tonnes of discarded items dumped in landfills – the toxic chemicals and heavy metals, the microplastics that seep into the ocean, and the natural landscapes taken over by farming.
“Fashion is one of the top five polluting industries and the majority of the impact comes from the materials being used,” explains Nina Marenzi, founder of The Sustainable Angle, a non-profit behind the annual showcase Future Fabrics Expo. “And we also know that climate change is going to have a huge impact on the materials being grown and be a risk to a brand’s bottom line.”
Yet the size and inherent ingenuity of the fashion industry also make it a potent vehicle for change. Thousands of startups and scientists are vying for a slice of the alternative materials pie. There are fibres made from seaweed, pineapple skin, cacti, and fungi, cell-based leather grown in labs, and textiles formed from agricultural waste.
“We’ve really moved from our initial starting point, which was focussed on reduced environmental impact, to how materials can actually have a positive impact on people and the planet,” says Marenzi. “It’s a crucial transition phase from looking at removing toxicity in the supply chain to asking how can you do better? Reduce waste? Absorb CO2 emissions in the growing phase?”
The clothes you can eat
Uyen Tran grew up in Vietnam, surrounded by market stalls weighed down with second-hand waste from the West – clothing from Nike, Ralph Lauren, North Face. Later moving to America to pursue her designer dreams, she saw the other side of the coin: the high expense of repairing clothes and the limited wear of most items.
Tackling fashion’s waste problem led her to experiment with chitin, a natural polymer extracted from shrimp shells, and a version of cellulose found in mushrooms. Tran partners with a supplier in Vietnam who gathers waste shrimp, crab and lobster shells and extracts chitin from them.
TômTex, her company, partners with luxury brands including Dauphinette and Peter Do to create fully biodegradable clothing collections. “The principle is no plastic, no petrochemicals, no toxic chemicals,” she says. Tran and her scientists have taken to eating their material in the lab to illustrate its natural essence.
“This beautiful material can mimic a lot of different things – leather, silicon, vinyl – but we wanted to go beyond that. Sustainable material can be seen as not sexy: we want to do things no one has seen before.” Tran and her team are currently working on producing sheer, translucent materials that react with body temperature to change colour. TômTex is scaling fast – a few years ago, the lab had 10,000 foot per year capacity, which has since soared to 100,000 square feet. Pilots are moving to production. Four of the latest brand partners will launch their designs at New York Fashion week in September.
Read also: How can the textile industry reduce its environmental impact?
Naturally plastic
Another alternative materials start-up, Natural Fiber Welding (NFW), is seeing similar success. Luke Haverhals, founder and CEO, believes he’s cracked the code for replacing the conventional plastics used in fashion and the broader textiles industry with all-natural materials, and the company’s collaborations to date seem to indicate he might be right.
A former chemistry professor, he had an “epiphany” one day in the lab. “Why do people use toxic synthetics when natural materials are more abundant, higher performing and nature produces them by sequestering carbon? It’s because plastics can be moulded into any shape. What if I could do what plastics do, but naturally?”
He realised that natural inputs cost less than petro-chemicals and, if you could harness existing moulding and shaping industries, you wouldn’t need to reinvent the wheel. “In other words, I can work with a footwear manufacturing company and not have to change how you make a shoe,” Haverhals says. “I can give them the right material at the right price point, making all-natural materials using existing infrastructure.”
So far NFW has made car seats for BMW, trainers for VivoBarefoot (which can be shredded and returned to the dirt), handbags for Stella McCartney, recycled-cotton polo shirts for Ralph Lauren (including those sported by the US Olympics team in Paris), and rhinestone high heels for H&M. The company has raised about USD 185 million and is currently pursuing Series C funding to secure profitability.
“We can do things across trillions of dollars-worth of industry,” Haverhals says. “We want to help brands ditch oil. Brands want to build a better world but didn’t know how before. They didn’t have time to reinvent their supply chain. So we mix up these doughs and get it to the people that are already moulding things out of plastic, but now they’re moulding natural recipes. And consumers don’t have to pay ten times more for BMW to do the right thing.
“Even if 10% of what you could buy from Zara was NFW, that’s billions of dollars of business. We’re a seed that has sprouted, and you can tell we’re going to be an oak tree, but we’re not a forest of oak trees yet.”
The materials revolution – a sleeping giant
At Lombard Odier, we are convinced that the global economy is transitioning to a sustainable model marked by new investment opportunities in Circular materials, Lean consumer, Inclusive health, and Clean energy – we call this the CLIC® economy.
The switch to a more circular materials system will include growing use of nature-based alternatives to many of today’s plastics and other synthetics, where we gain our materials not from artificial processes but from well-managed natural landscapes – such as renewable timber replacing steel and concrete in buildings, and wood-based cellulose being transformed into everything from clothing fibres to car bodywork.
According to Nina Marenzi, the switch to sustainable materials in the fashion industry is a sleeping giant, and it will be the job of investors to wake it. “The finance industry and impact investors absolutely do not realise the potential size of the market,” she says. “They were quite focussed on green energy but nobody was really looking at materials and supply chains. The future is here now waiting to take off. And I think it needs a mindset change, and more understanding by the finance industry that there’s a complete materials revolution underway, and it could really accelerate if there was more money flowing in.”
1 Invasive Lionfish Management, Quintana Roo, Mexico - INVERSA Leathers - ORRAA (oceanriskalliance.org)
2 measuringfashion_globalimpactstudy_quantis_2018.pdf
3 The Textile Industry and Sustainable Development: A Holt–Winters Forecasting Investigation for the Eastern European Area (repec.org)
4 World Water Day 2022: Fashion’s Water Consumption and Pollution - Global Fashion Agenda
Important information
This document is issued by Bank Lombard Odier & Co Ltd or an entity of the Group (hereinafter “Lombard Odier”). It is not intended for distribution, publication, or use in any jurisdiction where such distribution, publication, or use would be unlawful, nor is it aimed at any person or entity to whom it would be unlawful to address such a document. This document was not prepared by the Financial Research Department of Lombard Odier.
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