Modern Meadow believes leather is a “co-product of the meat industry.” You can’t get cattle hide without stripping it from meat. Rather than configuring new ways to utilize polymers, the Brooklyn-based company genetically creates proteins similar to bovine collagen. As Inventionr reports :
Modern Meadow has formulated a method of activating the building blocks of proteins to form fibres without using natural fibroblasts. Once the fibres form, they can as well be assembled, according to its intended purposes, into fine sheets of leather. Once the process reaches this point, other processes like tanning and dyeing can proceed in the normal way.
Environmental impact is only aspect of this story. Natural leather is notoriously finicky. Now it can be produced in straight sheets, making production easier for whoever is going to work the leather. Engineers can even alter the composition within each sheet, making one part coarse and another soft, for example.
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