Plant-based nylon garments
An investment in equity in Genomatica in 2021 was Lululemon’s first in a sustainable materials company. The gymwear brand has now followed up by launching T-shirts made from nylon, developed from Genomatica’s plant-based building blocks.
What began as an interest, then an investment in plant-based nylon at yogawear brand Lululemon has now resulted in garments. The Canadian company announced in April that its first plant-based nylon garments are now on the market. The garments, plant-based versions of its shortsleeved T-shirt styles called Metal Vent and Swiftly Tech, were almost two years in development, Lululemon states, but the plant-based nylon they are made from has a much longer development history. It is the work of Genomatica, or Geno, which chief executive and cofounder, Dr Christophe Schilling, launched in the 1990s while carrying out research into sustainable materials for his PhD at the University of California, San Diego. His cofounder was the university’s professor of bioengineering, Bernhard Palsson.
Their work produced a proprietary technology that converts renewable carbon in the form of sugar from plants into butanediol (BDO), the key chemical intermediate for making caprolactam and hexamethylene diamine (HMDA), precursors for nylon 6 and nylon 6,6 respectively. The aim from the beginning was to use these building blocks to produce 100% renewable carbonbased nylon 6. Geno took a look at the traditional, fossil fuelbased nylon industry, which has a value of more than $20 billion per year, and decided to disrupt it.
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In 2013, Genomatica won a prestigious chemical engineering prize, the Kirkpatrick Award, for its process to produce biobased butanediol. In 2017, Geno developed another new process, this time to make butylene glycol for the beauty industry (giving its new brand of 1,3butylene glycol the name Brontide) and, in 2020, Brontide won an award, too, the Green Chemistry Challenge, organised by the US Environmental Protection Agency. Partnerships followed for scaling up both these processes, with major groups, including Novamont in 2016, Aquafil in 2018, Covestro in 2019 and Asahi Kasei in 2022, signing up to work with Geno.
At the time of Covestro’s announcement about partnering with Geno, its chief technology officer, Dr Klaus Schäfer, said: “Being able to derive key materials from biomass is essential for making our industry less dependent on fossil raw materials and market fluctuations. We are pursuing our vision of making the world a brighter place.” When, in 2022, Geno and Aquafil began what they call precommercial production of plantbased caprolactam at a new demonstration plant located at a site in Slovenia, Aquafil chief executive, Giulio Bonazzi, said: “The world needs to put into action every possible approach to make supply chains sustainable. Making biobased nylon is an essential piece of that.”
The project with Asahi Kasei involves Geno’s plantbased butanediol to make HMDA for its nylon 6.6 offering. The Japanese group said it viewed Geno as “an essential partner” in its drive towards carbon neutrality. Its nylon 6.6 yarns will still be 50% derived from fossil fuels because its construction is from HMDA and adipic acid, which is still made from fossilderived feedstocks. But the HMDA half of the recipe can now be plantbased, utilising Genomatica’s breakthrough.
Qore, established in 2021 as a joint venture between chemicals firm Helm and food corporation Cargill’s bioindustrial business, has launched its own brand of biobased butanediol, calling it Qira. It has licensed Genomatica’s BDO process technology to make the product and has said it will open a dedicated Qira production facility at Cargill’s biotechnology campus in Eddyville, Iowa, in 2024. Qore’s immediate ambition is to bring to market a minimum of 65,000 tonnes of biobased BDO per year.
Luring Lulu
Lululemon kept a close eye on all of this and very much liked what it saw, so much so that it decided in 2021 to open its chequebook and its order book to Geno.
The Vancouverbased brand has said nylon makes up the biggest portion of the materials it uses. “Nylon provides outstanding product performance and quality that cannot currently be replicated with other materials,” Lululemon claims. “Our goal is to transition from virgin nylon fibre to renewable or recycled fibres to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels and lessen carbon emissions, while simultaneously ensuring uncompromising feel and performance.” It has committed to using nylon made 100% from renewable or recycled content by 2030 and says: “This is by far our most challenging materials goal.” It was to help it meet this challenge that Lululemon took part in a C Series funding round for Genomatica in 2021, which brought in total investment, from all participants, of $118 million. C Series is about scaling up innovations that have already been proven to work and that is what Geno pledged to do with the 2021 cash injection. This was the first time Lululemon had invested in the equity of a sustainable materials company. Its vicepresident for raw materials, Patty Stapp, said: “By transitioning our nylon to renewable content, we will impact over half of the synthetic materials we use in our supply chain. We have seen Genomatica repeatedly and successfully deliver industrychanging biobased materials on a commercial scale and are confident this partnership can truly change the way we source products.”
Advances in biomanufacturing
On the path towards its 2030 target, the gymwear brand had committed to launch “alternative nylon solutions” by 2025. By introducing the plantbased versions of its Metal Vent and Swiftly Tech Tshirts, it has achieved this target early. At the time of the launch, Geno chief executive, Dr Christophe Schilling, said it marked a major achievement. He said the partners were opening a new chapter for plantbased nylon and “accelerating the sustainable materials transition”. He believes that an array of openings awaits plantbased nylon. Dr Schilling appeared before a US Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry to contribute to a discussion about advancing biomanufacturing in the US. To give them a sense of Geno’s potential impact, he said that replacing current petroleumderived ingredients with plantbased alternatives could reduce carbon equivalent to taking more than 18 million cars off the road each year because “bionylon has notably lower greenhouse gas emissions than conventional alternatives”. He said procurement professionals should engage much more deeply with the manufacturers of upstream ingredients, including Geno, rather than only with the manufacturers of finished products. This would help them make informed decisions about stipulations for biobased content in the products they source. “We are ready to get to work,” he told the politicians and policymakers. “The US has the raw materials, the technology and the talent to be the world leader in biomanufacturing. The time to invest in building this important industry is now.”
Lululemon has reached its target of launching alternative nylon solutions ahead of schedule.
CREDIT: LULULEMON
