A startup producing lab-grown cotton could make clothing greener and more ethical

Ginning, blowing, carding, drawing, spinning, spinning, weaving, dyeing, cutting, sewing, ironing, shipping and transporting: all the steps required to turn something into a fabric. cotton Cotton balls are deposited on your shirt. These processes are also the ones that contribute the most to global warming due to the fibers in clothing.

Growing cotton bolls consumes huge amounts of water, pesticides and fertilisers. Of all the water used to wash a cotton T-shirt over its lifetime, it will have taken 50 times more water to grow the cotton than was used to make it. Cotton uses around 2.3% of the world’s arable land and accounts for 16% of all insecticide sales. And the fashion industry has been forced to confront allegations of forced labour and poor working conditions in certain cotton-growing regions.

Boston-based startup Galy claims to have found an alternative that avoids all of these problems by growing cotton in a lab. The company shared an assessment by environmental consultancy Quantis showing that, on an industrial scale, its process reduces water use by 99%, land use by 97%, and the negative impact of fertilizers by 91% compared to conventional cotton.

Brazilian-born Luciano Bueno, Galy’s chief executive, founded the company in 2019. But cotton has been a part of his entrepreneurial life for much longer. “I started selling T-shirts door-to-door just to pay my bills in high school,” he said. His first job at Deloitte involved working for textile companies. His first company, Horvath Co., which he founded in 2015, attempted to develop sweat-resistant T-shirts.

But after Horvath got locked into an exclusivity deal, he took a break and studied entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley. It was during the heyday of fundraising for lab-grown meat startups that Bueno thought he should apply the same idea to cotton. It took Galy a few years, but now the startup has shown enough progress to secure investments from big cotton consumers: Hennes & Mauritz AB and Inditex SA, which owns Zara.

Galy takes cells from a cotton plant, places them in a large container, and feeds them sugar. Once they have multiplied sufficiently, Galy’s technicians use their genetic knowledge of the plant (which has been developed over decades of research) to turn on certain genes and turn off others. The result is that the cell transforms and elongates into a cotton fiberSo far, Galy has only been able to produce a few kilograms of vat-grown cotton. If it can produce more on a larger scale, the company has big dreams of making lab-grown cocoa and coffee powder, too. At its booth at the Breakthrough Energy Summit in London in June, Galy showed off all three products. Cotton buyers care about strand length, strength and purity. Galy already has purity since the process happens inside a vat and not out in the open. That has helped it secure a $50 million deal with Suzuran Medical Inc. for medical-grade cotton, which Galy plans to supply for 10 years once it starts producing on an industrial scale.

As for clothing, Bueno says Galy still needs to improve the length of the threads. That development will require investments in further research. In an announcement today, Galy said it had raised $33 million from Breakthrough Energy Ventures, led by Bill Gates, H&M and Inditex, bringing the total raised by the company so far to $65 million.

Martin Ekenbark, head of H&M’s circular innovation lab, said the fast-fashion retailer is seeing an increase in demand for cotton. “Customers prefer the feel of fabrics made from cotton,” he said.

In early 2021, H&M stopped using cotton from China’s Xinjiang region, following accusations of forced labour, which led to Chinese boycotts. H&M and other cotton consumers are keen to find solutions that would allow cotton to be produced without these risks.

Inditex has invested in more than 300 startups with the aim of finding new materials that have a lower impact on the environment, a company spokesperson said, and is now working with Galy to “improve the quality of the fiber through various proofs of concept.”

Cotton, on a weight-for-weight basis, is much cheaper than meat and has a smaller market. The global cotton market is worth about $60 billion and cotton sells for just over a dollar a kilogram, while the meat market is worth more than a trillion dollars. So Bueno’s goal is not just to scale up production, but to do so at a tiny fraction of the cost of the process used for lab-grown meat.

There are a few things that help Galy. Plant cells only need sugar to multiply, rather than the complex growth material used for meat. And since people won’t eat the cotton, Galy can use reactors that don’t have to meet such high hygiene standards.

The hurdles that remain to be overcome are not small. Despite abundant funding and investor enthusiasm, lab-growing companies have struggled to grow because of the delicate nature of the biology and the difficulty of selling the products at a much higher cost than traditional alternatives. Galy will face the same problem and is raising money at a time when investments in climate technology have slowed. That is one reason why Galy does not currently face any major commercial competitors for developing lab-growing technologies. lab grown cotton.

Peter Turner, a partner at Breakthrough Energy Ventures, notes that Galy’s cotton today is at the same point as lab-grown meat was in 2013, when Dutch researcher Mark Post made a 5-ounce burger that reportedly cost €250,000. That led to rapid growth in the number of startups chasing the prize, with funding for the sector peaking in 2021. Galy wouldn’t say how much his cotton costs today.

“We expect there to be competition,” Turner said.