Project description
Setting the stage for a sustainable leather revolution
Turning animal skin into leather, a cornerstone of various industries, exacts a heavy toll on the environment. The traditional process demands copious energy and harmful chemicals, and it emits substantial greenhouse gases. Synthetic leather, often considered an alternative, is itself a highly polluting industry. With this in mind, the EU-funded BacLEATHER project aims to create eco-friendly materials from microorganisms via an efficient, cost-effective and proprietary bio-production process. This technology promises animal-free, high-performance materials that are cleaner to produce, safer to wear and ready for manufacturers. With funding from investors and support from the Horizon Europe EIC Accelerator and Women TechEU programme, BacLEATHER aims to pave the way for a more sustainable and responsible leather industry.
Objective
Turning animal skin into leather requires significant energy, and harmful chemicals, and releases substantial amounts of greenhouse gasses. Alternative synthetic leather is not an option since it is a highly polluting industry. We are using biotechnology to address the development of high-performance, animal-free, and more sustainable materials for the fashion, automotive, and home goods industries. We produce BacLEATHER, an eco-friendly material from microorganisms through an efficient and low-cost bio-production and proprietary process. Our technology provides solutions to the problems facing the leather industry, as our biomaterial has the same performances as the animal ones but are cleaner to produce (independent from animals, fossil-derived, and toxic chemicals), safer to wear, and ready to be used for manufacturers. BacLEATHER belongs to the nascent “next-gen materials industry” with a CAGR of 80% annually (2020-2026). Willingness to pay has already been confirmed with potential clients and we have established a collaboration with TEMPE, from GRUPO INDITEX (one of the most important brand footwear companies, owner of ZARA brand, among others) to prepare and validate the material for its market-fit within the footwear vertical.
In 2022, Next-Gen Leather was funded by seed capital investors BeAble to exploit the technology previously developed by Patent Shoes,SL. Next step to develop this innovation will be to set up a pilot manufacturing plant so we are applying for Horizon Europe EIC Accelerator calls. But also we need to deploy our market positioning strategy to achieve the maximum visibility of our product and technology among all relevant stakeholders, clients and the public. In this sense, the support offered by Women TechEU Program will allow us that to design and execute a comprehensive communication and marketing strategy in a time-sensitive manner to target both potential B2B customers as well as future investors.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- engineering and technologyindustrial biotechnologybiomaterials
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesmicrobiology
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Keywords
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.3.2 - European innovation ecosystems Main Programme
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-CSA - HORIZON Coordination and Support ActionsCoordinator
28010 Madrid
Spain
The organization defined itself as SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) at the time the Grant Agreement was signed.