Polybion’s Celium Is Biomimicry at Its Best
Polybion’s Celium is making its world debut.
Following the operational success of its solar-powered bacterial cellulose manufacturing facility in Central Mexico, the material science company’s leather alternative is now globally available, marking a significant milestone for both the firm and the fashion industry as this brings biomaterials one step closer to mainstream commercialization.
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“One of the main ethos of the company is basically applying creativity and biology toward being able to find solutions for the planetary health issues, and we decided to start with materials,” Alexis Gómez-Ortigoza, Polybion’s co-founder and CFO, told Sourcing Journal. “We have been applying creativity and ingenuity toward being able to use bacteria as a platform. After 10 years of hard work, I would say one of our key objectives is to be able to make lab-grown materials—such as bacterial cellulose—a widespread option for brands across the globe.”
To create Celium, the 2023 Fashion for Good Innovation Program innovator feeds bacteria with agro-industrial fruit waste, such as mangos, converting the sugar contents into a cellulose structure as a metabolic by-product. Once that structure is formed, Celium’s cell-based membrane “undergoes a sustainable stabilization process,” the company said, to achieve high-performance attributes such as strength and breathability. Similar to tanning cowhide, the membrane is treated to mimic a leather-like texture.
“We’ve been pushing this concept of what we coined ‘uniqueness on a mass scale,’” Axel Gómez-Ortigoza, Polybion’s co-founder and CEO, said. And what this means, he explained, is that the aesthetics of Celium are unique in that the material shows inherently one-of-a-kind growth patterns. “It’s like your fingerprints or spots on a tiger; they are very similar, but they are unique.
“This is concept we’ve been pushing for 10 years that brands didn’t pick up in the beginning,” he continued. “But now they’re picking it up and we’re very happy because the material lets nature and biology speak for itself.”
As such, Polybion is moving away from the idea of labeling Celium as a leather alternative.
“This is not a leather alternative. It’s not plastic. It’s not leather. It’s bacterial cellulose, it’s a new thing,” Alexis Gómez-Ortigoza said. “It should be tagged as such.”
But what about Celium, exactly, has changed in the past, say, 12 months? In truth, the Ganni collaboration helped the brothers solve a few key issues regarding material performance.
“Because of the urgency of this collaboration, we stumbled upon very interesting breakthroughs that have allowed us to have a material with outstanding performance, at least in the lab-grown space,” Alexis Gómez-Ortigoza said.
And what Polybion has been able to tackle, regarding the performance of Celium, was threefold: performance, low carbon emissions and life cycle assessment (LCA) validation.
“We like to say impact requires scale. But impact also requires performance, right? Nobody’s going to, unfortunately, sacrifice their—let’s say quality of life or performance of materials that they’re using—for sustainability,” Axel Gómez-Ortigoza explained. “So, the only way for sustainability to actually become widespread and be used is for it to have several components.”
Polybion validated these components through the collaboration with Ganni, in which the material innovators produced a blazer made of bacteria, unveiled at the Global Fashion Summit in Copenhagen last summer. Ganni put Celium to the test, ushering it into “harsh manufacturing environments” where the material was dropped into existing supply chains. It didn’t behave any differently. Plus, Ganni didn’t try to push Polybion to create a leather alternative; instead, the Danish It-girl brand leaned into the new aesthetics Celium can offer.
“The Ganni collaboration pushed us to move faster, because the requirements that they were requesting—and we’ll always value a brand that operates fast because unfortunately, even though fashion is very fast, brands move slowly,” Axel Gómez-Ortigoza said. “It’s always good to have a brand that is faster because that’s how startups and this world of innovation works.”
But the B Corp didn’t open previously closed doors, Alexis Gómez-Ortigoza said. Rather, those doors are just starting to open.
“The great thing about biology is that we haven’t even started playing with the actual biology; if [Celium] was an iPhone, we’re at version 1.0,” Axel Gómez-Ortigoza said. “You can always keep improving [it] because of the biological aspects. With bacteria, you can start playing with the genes. We think that the future will be very interesting in terms of performance and aesthetics because we can genetically engineer everything.”
This article ran in SJ’s Material Innovation Report. To download the full report, click here.
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