The latest leather alternative is made from shrimp shells

In a 4,000-square-foot lab in the heart of the Brooklyn Navy Yard, a group of scientists demonstrate how to make portable shrimp dishes.

It all starts with mixing chitosan – a biochemical component extracted from the skins in the form of a white powder – with water and organic acid.

As the chitosan dissolves, the scientists add what they call the “secret sauce,” a combination of biomaterials and pigments that varies depending on the desired texture and color.

The liquid is then poured into a mold and placed in a heater to evaporate excess water, much like baking a cake in an oven.

A few hours later, all that remains is the final product: a laptop-sized piece of leather-like fabric.

“It’s amazing to see how the material captures all the details,” says Uyen Tran, pointing to a silver piece of fabric, this time with a snakeskin pattern.

At first glance, the shrimp leather doesn’t look much different than its traditional animal skin cousins; it also feels quite authentic.

And while the fabric doesn’t have the rich smell of cowhide, it doesn’t smell like seafood either.

Tran, 30, is the co-founder of TômTex, a 2-year-old startup that makes textiles from shrimp shells, mushroom waste and other biomaterials.

TômTex, which means “shrimp textile” in Vietnamese, plans to increase its biodegradable leather production capacity to 100,000 square feet this year.

That alone would be enough to make around 2,000 leather jackets, but at the moment TômTex mainly produces fabric samples and works on custom designs for fashion clients.

When British womenswear brand Di Petsa showed at London Fashion Week in February, TômTex’s shrimp shell biomaterial was featured in a long dress that mimics both traditional leather and fish scales.

Modern clothing has a significant ecological footprint. Polyester and nylon, two ubiquitous types of plastic derived from oil, form the backbone of today’s textiles. They are also the main sources of microplastic pollution.

Globally, clothing manufacturers emit more greenhouse gases than aviation and shipping combined, and the United Nations Environment Program estimates that the fashion industry could use a quarter of the world’s carbon budget by 2050.

In response to criticism from consumers and policymakers, a growing number of start-ups are developing materials that mimic the look, feel and durability of traditional textiles, without the ill effects of synthetics.

MycoWorks and Bolt Threads, two startups from Emeryville, California, make leather-like fabrics with mushroom roots.

Los Angeles-based Mi Terro turns spoiled milk into T-shirts, while London-based Vollebak sells T-shirts woven from hemp and dyed with seaweed.

Large retailers are also interested: The Swedish clothing manufacturer H&M finances start-ups that develop textiles from unconventional sources such as wood residues.

TômTex’s model aims to tackle two problems at the same time: the search for biodegradable materials for clothing manufacturers and the upcycling of mountains of marine litter.

In 2021, global shrimp production exceeded 4.5 million tons, an increase of about 50% from 2015.

About half the volume of each catch is shrimp shells, which are discarded as processing by-products.

While chitosan obtained from discarded shrimp shells has long been used in wastewater treatment and nutritional supplements, it is practically not used in textile production.

According to the company’s estimates, the production of one square meter of TômTex shrimp leather emits around 14 kilograms of carbon dioxide equivalent, which is slightly below the carbon footprint of synthetic leather and less than 15% of the emissions associated with cowhide.

Unlike synthetic materials, which take decades, if not centuries, to degrade in landfills, TômTex says its bio-material can be composted.

Raised in Vietnam, Tran says new clothes were generally reserved for special occasions — but she’s always been drawn to beautiful designs.

Tran moved to the US in 2012 to pursue her BA in Fashion Design at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco; She then worked for brands such as Ralph Lauren and Alexander Wang.

Tran says she was soon exposed to the darker side of high fashion: About 100 billion pieces of clothing are produced worldwide each year, biodegradable fabrics remain scarce and expensive, and few new pieces of clothing are or can be recycled.

When Tran began studying textile engineering at graduate school at Parsons School of Design in New York in 2019, she began experimenting with seaweed-based fabrics and then turned to leather made from mushroom roots and shrimp shells.

In 2020, Tran co-founded TômTex with Atom Nguyen, another Vietnamese who previously worked as a marketing specialist at Gap Inc.

They met Ross McBee, then a Ph.D. biology student at Columbia University in a startup incubator; After graduating in 2022, he joined as the third co-founder.

TômTex has raised nearly $2 million in a pre-seed funding round and counts venture capital firms SOSV and Portfolia among its backers.

The company is still in its infancy; it only produced several hundred square meters of leather last year.

And while TômTex’s fabric is priced similarly to luxury animal skins, the company admits it’s still 40% more expensive than synthetic products.

That kind of premium is a key hurdle for most alternative fabric manufacturers, says Hang Liu, an associate professor at Washington State University who specializes in materials engineering for textiles.

Liu says challengers like TômTex also need to prove themselves against traditional fabrics in another area: product performance.

On a sunny February afternoon, McBee sprays water on a piece of TômTex leather and stands back to wait. “It’s dry within a second,” he says.

According to McBee, this simple promise is the result of months of lab work.

After the company’s first textile prototype became soaked on contact with water, TômTex reworked the interaction between chitosan, water and its secret sauce.

To find the right formula, hundreds of different biodegradable ingredients were mixed with the shrimp shell derivative and tested.

“Water resistance has been a real challenge for a long time,” says McBee.

TômTex scientists optimize their leather for strength by testing it under a tenter.

They also leave the material in a grow tent—typically used for growing cannabis—overnight to study the effects of different temperatures and humidity levels. McBee says the product is “almost ready for sale.”

Another bottleneck lies ahead.

While chitosan from shrimp shells, which makes up about 80% of TômTex’s leather formula, is relatively easy to access, the company has yet to find consistent suppliers for its other ingredients.

Currently, alternative fabrics make up only a small part of the apparel industry.

But shifting consumer sentiment, increased regulatory pressure and rising fossil fuel prices are gradually leveling the playing field, says Marguerite Le Rolland, an analyst at consultancy Euromonitor International.

Biomaterials manufacturers are “reaching a tipping point” for scaling, she says.Meanwhile, constraints such as material shortages and price premiums make alternative textiles a perfect destination for high fashion.

Last year, TômTex teamed up with New York designer Peter Do to make pants and tank tops from TômTex’s shrimp leather.

Both designs hit the runway at New York Fashion Week in September.

To give their cloth an edge, Tran also seeks to offer properties that traditional cloths may find difficult to emulate. For the Di Petsa show in London, TômTex’s organic leather was engineered to look like it was dripping wet.

“This is a new class of material,” says Tran. “We don’t want to be an alternative.”