Another ClimateTech Podcast
Another ClimateTech Podcast is a weekly interview series that explores the fight against climate change through the lens of entrepreneurship, investment, academia, activism, and art. Join Ryan Grant Little, a seasoned climatetech founder, advisor, and investor, as he interviews the climate warriors trying to save us from ourselves.
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Another ClimateTech Podcast
Making leather from beer with Brett Cotten of Arda Biomaterials
Who needs a cow to make leather when you've got beer? Brett Cotten is co-founder of London-based Arda Biomaterials and in this episode we talked about:
🐄 The problems of the traditional leather industry
👜 New Grain, Arda's sustainable leather alternative
🍺 Creating local supply chains by co-locating with breweries and distilleries around the world
🎡 The synthetic biology scene in London, and how the UK is investing heavily into biotech and material science
#leather #climatetech #beer #spentgrain #synbio #syntheticbiology
Welcome to another Climate Tech Podcast interviews with the people trying to save us from ourselves. Brett Cotten is the co-founder of Arda Biomaterials, creating leather alternatives from brewing byproducts. Personally, I love the idea of drinking beer being the path to creating new leather handbags and belts, much more so than killing cows being the path to creating new leather handbags and belts. Much more so than killing cows, we talk about how that's made, what's happening in London's synthetic biology ecosystem and the theory of nominative determinism. I reach Brett in London. I'm Ryan Grant Little. Thanks for being here, brett. Welcome to the podcast. Thank you very much for having me. You're co-founder of Arda Biomaterials, which turns the leftover grain from beer brewing into leather. How did you come up with this idea?
Brett Cotten:Yeah, it's a bit of a funny story. So I've worked across alternative proteins on the food side for years now. I've even written a book on it, and I really wanted to start a company of my own and I couldn't find a co-founder for the longest time. It's really difficult to find someone with the right skillset and the right timing. So I ended up joining this program called Entrepreneur First, which, for those who don't know, is kind of like Love Island or the Bachelor meets Shark Tank or the Apprentice. So the purpose is you go in as yourself looking to find a business partner and it really is speed dating and there's make-ups and break-ups throughout the program.
Brett Cotten:And I got really lucky to find a chemist who just finished up his PhD at Oxford before the program had even begun and we were the strong couple that stayed together throughout. And just by chance we happened to be neighbors in the craft brewing hub of London, which is just south of Tower Bridge, and another chemist told us hey, you guys have the brewers right on your doorstep. Why don't you go chat to them and see what you can do with their waste? And we went around to the brewers, we got some free beers, which was nice, and we discovered they have mountains of spent barley grains because they are just interested in the sugar content out of the malted barley, and so this spent grain is actually really rich in proteins.
Brett Cotten:So we looked at what we could do with it, and first we were looking at food applications as a competitor to soy protein or pea protein in uplifting plant-based meat and plant-based dairy. But we soon realized that there's a lot of food regulation. It's not super scalable unless you're one of the big guys, and the material has to be so standardized because it can really throw off the downstream processing. So we realized food is just a material that we eat. What other protein-based materials are there? Well, there's fur, wool, silk, feathers and leather, and the deeper we looked into the leather category, the more we saw issues with scalability and the rampant use of plastics. We went over to his kitchen, did some first experiments and off we went.
Ryan Grant Little:Okay, so it's a bit of like a process of elimination to find the best use for this stuff, and I mean, I'm familiar with some companies, especially in the US, that are taking this and using it as food product. But I follow the logic. I think that makes a lot of sense. And you know, leather is really a horrible industry in so many ways. You can, you know, go back to the tanneries of the times of Dickens and unfortunately not so much has changed, and especially in developing countries where a lot of this stuff comes from. And you know it's a bad industry in terms of treatment of cows through to the workers' conditions, to the toxicity of the tanning process and the stuff that you know, the effluent that comes from this.
Ryan Grant Little:I know this, you know just a little bit, from my time working in biogas and also, of course, just you know, being in the climate tech industry. But you probably know it pretty well. And I wonder, you know, I think probably most people don't really think too much about how their shoes are made or where their belt comes from. And I wonder if you can talk a little bit about the problems of the leather industry historically and today and why it needs to change.
Brett Cotten:Yeah, sure thing.
Brett Cotten:Well, I hadn't known much about the leather industry before going deeper into it and to the credit of my co-founder TJ, he was really passionate about the space and encouraged me to look deeper and deeper.
Brett Cotten:So I think we've sort of been fooled to think that leather is this natural material, and in reality it once was, but not so much any longer. So once upon a time, before super industrialized chemicals and plastics, leather was treated with things like oak bark to impart the natural tannins into the material, to really go from a skin, stop its rotting and then go into this material like vegetable tan leather. And it takes about two months to do that process and that's just not quick enough for industrialized automotive and fashion and other sectors these days. So some clever chemists thought oh well, we have these chemicals, and they started using something called chromium. And so now most of the world's leather is tanned with a really polluting chemical called chromium, and often leather is coated with plastics anyway. So we've gone from something that was more natural to a chemical filled, plastic filled material, and a lot of people just don't realize that.
Ryan Grant Little:I didn't realize that there was also plastic on leather. So if you see something that says genuine leather or real leather, it still might have plastic and it's certainly been treated chemically.
Brett Cotten:Definitely yeah. And so you have this notion that we make a lot of meat in the world. Right, we raise a lot of cows, sheep, pigs and we're using this byproduct. It's better to not let it go to waste. But in reality it's really a co-product because the big meat industry factory farms. They sell these co-products and they make a lot of money off of them. So a good example alongside the hides is in pet food, so you can look at things like the organs, the connective tissue and all of that gets ground up and put into pet food. And of course, big meat makes a lot of money off of this. But we have innovators like Possible Foods in India, meatly here in the UK and Wild Earth in the US, which are sort of disrupting that part of the revenue stream for big factory farms, and we're trying to do the same with Hydes.
Ryan Grant Little:Yeah, and Biocraft Pet Nutrition here in Vienna, which has just reached price parity with their cultivated meat relative to premium pet food, and I know with them they've talked about this quite a bit that it's actually not a byproduct, it's a co-product, because without pet food, for example, the human animal meat industry basically it doesn't reach its margins right. It's a low margin business in general and they need that to keep it working. And so if you disrupt that, then you start to challenge the traditional meat industry as well. It sounds like what you're saying is that this is the same case with leather.
Brett Cotten:Exactly, and so the way I like to think of it is cows humanity use as a technology or factory for making many things, from muscle to fat, dairy keratin, collagen and hides, and cows make a lot of things all at once, but they don't make any one of those super efficiently. So if we work with different innovators and approaches from plant-based to fermentation to cultivated we're all sort of collectively dissecting the cow as this factory or technology stack for making stuff, and we can add in new sustainability, credentials, new qualities, things that cows just can't do, because we're not breaking something down but we're building from the ground up, which adds a lot more sort of options to the table.
Ryan Grant Little:That's a really interesting way of looking at it. It's definitely a different way of thinking of dissecting a cow for sure. Can you talk a bit about the manufacturing process itself? So you call the leather alternative new grain, which is a great name. You're, as you mentioned, I think, in London and the historic tannery district and present day craft beer brewing district, so nice parallels there. And yeah, your suppliers are your literal neighbors who pour you a pint when you pop in to pick the stuff up. Presumably what is, once you've got this spent grain in your facility, what does the process look like?
Brett Cotten:Yeah, well, it's funny because the brewers and whiskey distillers we can actually use the same equipment as they do not for fermentation. But the first step of brewing beer or distilling whiskey is to take malted barley, eat it up, mash it around and create a sugar solution. And we can use that same bit of equipment to take the spent grains, eat them up, mash them around and create a protein solution. And it's to this protein solution that we add in other ingredients naturally derived.
Brett Cotten:We don't play around with any petrochemical derived ingredients, and these will help to impart flexibility or even things like scent or how rigid the material is, the hand feel. And once we create this sort of master recipe, we can cast it in a similar way that you would cast plastic, leather, and at the moment we do it in batches and trays. We're just in the lab at the moment, but the next step for us is to go to a continuous roll to roll process, like you would get in plastic, leather or even paper, so to cast into a big continuous long sheet and then roll that up, and that is what we think is the most scalable approach. So in this way we can really use existing ingredients at a global scale, as well as equipment that brewers and the plastic leather industry already has around the world as well.
Ryan Grant Little:Yeah, it's already always a lot easier if you can kind of piggyback on existing technologies, on existing manufacturing processes, and not have to reinvent the wheel there because you've got enough innovation as it is. You have to kind of build the market a little bit on the end user or like the purchaser side, and I know as an investor.
Brett Cotten:For example, to limit the number of moving parts is really helpful side, and I know as an investor, for example, to limit the number of moving parts is really helpful.
Brett Cotten:Yeah, I think we also have the luxury of looking at the past two waves of leather-like materials that have come out. So we see mycelium, which is quite well known. You have bacterial cellulose, you have a whole suite of different fruit or vegetable or cactus leathers, which are essentially just plastic mixed with a bit of fruit, and there's some other approaches as well, but they're either not very scalable or they're just rampant in the use of plastics, and so what we see is brewers and distillers are everywhere in the world. They have a globally abundant waste stream. There's more than enough to make the world's entire leather supply multiple times over. It's rich in protein, and since animal leather is made of protein and our material is made of plant proteins, the chemistry actually works quite similarly, and then they end up sponsoring all of the people we want to work with, from F1 to rugby, cricket, fashion, music, and they can also help us scale and operate facilities as we grow. I think the brewers and distillers are sort of a secret muscle that we can use as Arda expands.
Ryan Grant Little:Okay, so it's sort of a commercial closed loop. I was surprised, so you've just. You said that some of these other kind of biomaterials are rampant with plastic. Is that sort of? Are they using plastic to buttress basically the product itself? I wasn't aware of that.
Brett Cotten:Yeah, so I had known it either before we'd gotten deeper into this. So I thought vegan leather, ah, it's all. Before we'd gotten deeper into this, so I thought vegan leather, ah, it's all. But if you look at the building blocks of pineapples or apples or mangoes or grapes, it's just fiber and that's not good enough to create a strong material. So what they do is they add in plastic. So on one part, it's great because it's not using animals. On another piece, it's displacing some of that plastic. But there's a lot of regulations coming into play now that are going to be making brands much more conscious of the materials they use. And then microplastic pollution is still a huge issue. And so it's. Yeah, you get these two clans, which one is we love animal leather, let's keep using it. The other is plastic leather is better on a multitude of different levels and there's not really a great third option yet that doesn't use either at scale. There's one leader in the category called natural fiber welding, which is a rubber based approach, but plastic is everywhere.
Ryan Grant Little:I try not to buy leather myself and when I do, I try to just stick to secondhand stuff. But I have found that you know the belts or the shoes that I get with the exception of my awesome Reebok vegan shoes, which I don't actually know what they're made out of, but are either uncomfortable or tend to fall apart and I wonder just you know, can you talk about how New Grain's not going to just melt the first time I step in a puddle?
Brett Cotten:Yeah, so I guess a bit of history. Before plastics were invented, we had to look to natural materials. History Before plastics were invented, we had to look to natural materials and, funny enough, henry Ford was looking at soy protein. Back in the day, like 1920s and 30s, he was so passionate about it. He had a lot of chemists working on a multitude of different products, everything from a soybean fiber he famously wore this soybean suit to things that could go into his cars, and petrochemicals wiped out that whole line of innovation.
Brett Cotten:But now, 100 years later, we're looking to turn the tables on plastic and bring back proteins from plants, and so we can basically create similar structures to animal-based materials. If you look at leather, it's these collagen fibers that form this network and we're able to recreate that process with these plant proteins. So it's very similar to a leather and, as I mentioned, the chemistry works quite similarly as well, which is great for the scientists upstairs. But we're working on things everything from tensile strength to water resistance to abrasion, and we've gotten really good results so far. So we think that we're set up well for the luxury goods industry, which doesn't have as stringent specs required as, say, automotive, but we think that we're set up well for the luxury goods industry, which I do that as a special order or through one of your customers. Hopefully someday. One of the dreams is to walk into a pitch meeting head to toe in our material from cowboy boots, pants, jacket, cowboy hat. But we're not quite there yet.
Ryan Grant Little:I think I've seen Elon Musk dressed like that once, but not in mock.
Brett Cotten:Yeah, give us another year or two and we'll be full-fledged across different products, beck, but we are currently looking more towards the luxury fashion segment.
Brett Cotten:As I mentioned, there's a lot of movements and regulation, such as the extended producer responsibility, which is essentially making brands and producers pay a fee based on the quality of materials they put out, because it's a pain to deal with the end of life of these things and governments need some money to start dealing with it.
Brett Cotten:There's also digital product passports that are making it very transparent about what things are made of and where they come from, and then some EU deforestation regulation, which is going to hit leather as well, because a lot of it comes from places like Brazil. So we're first looking into the fashion industry, but also into other areas. So automotive is a big one and companies like Jaguar, land Rover, general Motors and BMW have all sort of plucked innovators up to start working on car interiors, and then even things like airlines. So amenity kits or stationary I mean, leather is pretty much all around us. It's amazing. We were in a documentary premiere once about the use of animals in the fashion industry and the lights turned on in the theater, we realized all of the seats in the theater were leather, so it's ironic.
Ryan Grant Little:Yeah, and from a texture perspective you can replicate like cowhide through to other types as well, or what does that look like?
Brett Cotten:Definitely so. There's two ways we can do it. One is by casting onto a pattern, which is what the plastic leather industry does. We can also do embossing after the material is made, as a post-processing step. So you can do everything we have here Snake, crocodile, cow. You can do funky patterns. We've experimented with laser etching. There's so many different techniques to try and so it's really great for designers from that perspective.
Ryan Grant Little:Okay. Well then, the rattlesnake leather cowboy boots sound entirely possible. You closed an investment round of 1.3 million euros almost exactly a year ago from the time of this recording, and I wonder are you now ramping up for the next round? If so, can you say anything about that?
Brett Cotten:Yeah, we were really lucky to bring on a great group of VCs and angels last year in a pre-seed round, the lead of which was Clean Growth Fund, which is a UK-based fund, and some other great ones like SatGana, who I think you know, plug and Play, serpentine, cpt Capital, and so this round we're looking to close about 5 million pounds to get up to this roll-to-roll manufacturing process. That really is the way we believe to scale, as opposed to growing in trays, and we think we can do that because it's a very well-known process and our material is akin to making plastic leather without the plastic.
Ryan Grant Little:Okay, so that's the sort of continuous process that you're talking about. So, pre-seed, as you're working at this kind of in a pilot phase, in a batch process, and with kind of the next round, you're hoping to move to this continuous process.
Brett Cotten:Yep, and then the series A. Beyond that we'll be co-locating with the brewery because our big vision is that we can co-locate to create these local supply chains. So you can imagine working with the German brewery in the automotive sector or an Italian for the luxury fashion industry and sort of copying and pasting this around the globe. Then also we have other things in the pipeline I can't share too much but to make brewers and distillers into industry powerhouses from fashion goods, automotive, home goods and more.
Ryan Grant Little:OK, so even faster access to that pint. And, as mentioned, you're based in London and I'm a bit curious. So the sector that you work in is called synthetic biology, or SinBio for short, and I wonder what's happening in the London ecosystem. Are there lots of companies like you? Is there kind of a district where people are working on this? Is there buzz? Is there funding around? Could just maybe paint a picture.
Brett Cotten:Yeah, so I'm originally from New Jersey, but I moved over here to do a master's and then found a company in materials and I think it's a great place to build in this space. So you have big universities Cambridge, Oxford, Imperial, Queen Mary's, King's. You also have a great grant ecosystem. We've been lucky to get almost well about £900,000 in grant funding so far, because the UK is really investing into biotech, material science. And then you have a great community. There's lots of meetups, there's loads of VCs.
Ryan Grant Little:It's a great community. There's lots of meetups, there's loads of VCs, it program, but basically in a pub in the area that you're now working and you mentioned that TJ's got a strong kind of background in this and a passion for materials what kind of team does it take to build a company like this? Are you mostly engineers and scientists?
Brett Cotten:Yeah, so we're mainly scientists. At the moment, we're a team of seven, of which five are scientists, mainly chemists, and we also have one designer, and I think it's really important to mix design and science, because you can create materials, sure, but then you need to make them look really nice and ready for market and consumer. So Jess, who's our design and innovation lead? She worked in the fashion industry for 10 years, to the point where she can look around London and pinpoint products that she had designed, and so she's been incredible on leveling up our materials so that they can make their way into commercialized products.
Ryan Grant Little:Very cool, very cool. The most important question that I have in this whole interview is if you know the theory of nominative determinism. Yeah, go ahead.
Brett Cotten:Yeah, it's not lost on me that my last name is Cotton, and here we are trying to work in the material sector, potentially even creating alternatives to Cotton someday. But yeah, it's like having a dentist called Dr Smiles or something like that.
Ryan Grant Little:Yeah, so I just looked it up and it's the hypothesis that people are attracted to fields of work that fit their names. And some of the more fun examples that I found are, like the writer of a book on polar exploration by Daniel Snowman, a race car driver called Scott Speed, and then definitely my favorite, which is a fireman called Les McBurney, and then definitely my favorite, which is a fireman called Les McBurney, so hopefully it means success ahead for us at Arda.
Ryan Grant Little:For sure, I have no doubt about that. And for those people who are listening, who are fascinated by your mission and want to help somehow or another, what are you looking for right now and how can they get in touch? Yeah, thanks.
Brett Cotten:So we're currently doing a fundraising round. That's one component. We're working on some really cool projects, but always open to hearing from designers and brands. The best way to reach me is either through our website or you can reach me more directly at brett, at ardabio.
Ryan Grant Little:Brett, thanks a lot. It's been great talking to you. Thank you, ryan. Thanks for listening to another Climate Tech Podcast. It would mean a lot. It's been great talking to you. Thank you, ryan. Thanks for listening to another Climate Tech Podcast. It would mean a lot if you would subscribe, rate and share this podcast. Get in touch anytime with tips and guest recommendations at hello at climatetechpodcom. Find me, ryan Grant Little, on LinkedIn. I'll be back with another episode next week. Bye for now.
