Innovative Fungal Leather from Food Waste: Sustainable Materials for Fashion and Automotive Applications

Our goal is to tackle two pressing societal issues, namely ´unsustainable leather´ and ´food waste,´ by transforming food waste into renewable fungal leather.

University of Borås, KTH, and Karlstad University, in collaboration with stakeholders from the fashion (Sandqvist bags) and car industry (Ecoist cars), will establish eco-friendly and resource-efficient processes for the conversion of fungal biomass grown on food waste to novel fully bio-based fungal leather.

Technical requirements, as well as consumer perspectives, will be at the center for the manufacture of fungal leather and design of prototypes.

In this project, environmentally benign treatments will be developed to enhance the performance of materials made of fungal biomass to meet the requirements of leather used in accessories and car interiors.

The project will adopt scalable and well-known processes in biotechnology (submerged cultivation) and the paper industry (wet-laying technique) to produce fungal leather, which guarantees the scalability of the process and facilitates its commercialization in the future. The project is expected to raise the SRL level from 4 to 6.

The project aims to produce 200–300-gram fungal leather from each kilogram of food waste.

This project is expected to yield significant insights into the production of innovative fungal leather through a close collaboration between academic partners and companies that require sustainable and durable alternative leather materials.