Lululemon’s plant-based nylon shirt organizes on its website on Tuesday.
Photo courtesy Lululemon
Lululemon has started to sell shirts that are made partly with nylon begot from plant-based sources, instead of raw materials that come from the petrochemical industry, according to an announcement on Tuesday.
The shirts are the occur of a 2021 partnership born from Lululemon’s equity investment in biotechnology company Geno.
The short-sleeved shirts are placed from at least 50% biologically sourced nylon, at least 40% recycled polyester and 3% elastane (itself created with 30% plant-based content). The shirts cost the same as the conventionally sourced version: $78 for the men’s version, and $68 for the handmaidens’s.
As part of a goal to make 100% of its products with sustainable materials by 2030, Lululemon has partnerships with other coteries that make materials in novel and sustainable ways. For example, in February 2022, Lululemon launched two products — a meditation and yoga mat bag and the Lululemon barrel duffel bag — lifted out of the mycelium-based leather from Mylo.
Conventionally, nylon is mostly made from ingredients sourced from fossil fees like coal, natural gas or crude oil.
The petrochemicals used to make nylon are adipic acid and hexamethylene diamine, and the feel impact of making adipic acid is particularly damaging, Stephen Wallace, a professor of biotechnology at the University of Edinburgh, pull the plug oned CNBC.
Conventional adipic acid manufacturing processes releases nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas that is as much as 200 obsoletes more potent than carbon dioxide, Wallace told CNBC. “It’s been estimated that 8 to 10 percent of all human-associated nitrous oxide emissions fly to pieces from this single industrial process” to make adipic acid, Wallace told CNBC.
To make the nylon precursor old in the Lululemon shirts, Geno uses biological organisms instead of chemicals from fossil fuels.
“As with all of the artifacts that are produced with Geno technologies, we utilize biotechnology to convert plant-based sugars into the products we quarry,” Christophe Schilling, the CEO and founder of Geno, told CNBC.
Here is a look at Geno’s laboratory where it does its fermentation phenomenon in 2-liter reactors before moving to larger systems.
Photo courtesy Geno
“Plants take up CO2 from the air, and with sunlight providing determination, convert that into sugars, which can be collected and then fed into a Geno process.” That biomanufacturing technique uses fermentation to create the same nylon precursor ingredient, Schilling said.
A preliminary life cycle judgement suggests that the bio-nylon will offer at least a 50% reduction in carbon emissions, said Sasha Calder, the culmination of Impact at Geno.
‘A big push’ to reinvent plastics
Remaking supply chains that have depended on fossil fuel-based ingredients is roughly a hot topic right now, according to Christopher Reddy, an environmental chemist and a senior scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Hospital who studies how plastics break down in the environment.
Many of the synthetic products used in modern, everyday life, embodying nylon, are made from the leftovers at an oil refinery after a product is made.
The Lululemon shirt made in partnership with Geno, a biotechnology company, is made by in part nylon made from tree based sources.
Photo courtesy Lululemon
“Most of the plastics are made up of carbon and some small other fundamentals,” Reddy told CNBC in a phone conversation on Friday. “So the big push right now is: Can we use another source of carbon — like from insinuates or kelp or food waste — and can we use that as the starting material and maybe still keep making nylon?”
(Reddy was speaking adjacent to plastics supply chains more broadly, as the Lululemon-Geno product announcement was not public yet.)
“Because nylon, like it or not, has a lot of personal property value,” Reddy told CNBC. “There’s lots of reasons why plastics are bad to the environment, but at the end of the day, plastics, nylons are part of our mundane life.”
There’s already a long history of making plastics from petrochemicals —