Designing clothing from mushroom roots? The technology is already here, and it’s at the heart of one Emerson College student’s budding startup, Rooted Textiles.
Rooted Textiles is a one-woman business that aims to produce environmentally friendly, fake leather using mushrooms. It was founded by Emerson sophomore Eileen Polat.
“People have been really talking about how crucial it is to start making environmentally friendly and sustainable changes in your lifestyle,” Polat said. “We don’t know how much time we have left on the Earth right now because of everything that’s been happening. Personally, I try to make that change in the clothing I wear and make.”
Polat doesn’t shop from stores that mass-produce clothing, and she tries to buy secondhand when she can.
Clothing is an enormous burden on American landfills. In 2015 alone, the most recent year for which the Environmental Protection Agency displays data, landfills received 10.5 million tons of textiles—7.6% of all municipal solid waste. When it comes to leather specifically, most leather is made from the skin of cows, which are a major contributor to carbon and methane emissions.
Mushrooms—specifically, mycelium, or the network of threads within the mushrooms—could change all that.
“The filaments of the mushroom that are kind of threadlike, the mycelium, manipulate the same way skin does,” Polat said. “So once that’s done growing, once it’s the desired size you want, then you go through the same tanning and dying process that leather also has. So it's just like rinsing it and killing it so it doesn’t continue to grow.”
Polat is currently pursuing Emerson's minor in entrepreneurship, which includes a yearlong program called E3. Students in E3 create a venture from start to finish under the guidance of Lu Ann Reeb, assistant dean of Emerson’s School of Communication and director of the entrepreneurial and business studies program. Last month, at the annual E3 Expo, Polat tied for the E3 Cohort Entrepreneurial Spirit Award.
While Polat doesn’t yet have any business partners or a prototype, she does have long-term plans. While she’s finishing her degree at Emerson, she’ll continue to take advantage of the networking and growth opportunities within the school. She might even tap a classmate to be her co-founder. After that, she wants to go back to the West Coast, where she’s from originally: “Maybe Oregon, because it’s a cooler environment, or just somewhere in Northern California,” she said.
Once the business is grown out a little bit, she’s going to market it B2B, selling the mycelium “leather” wholesale to companies that could then transform it into clothing for their customers.
Polat takes inspiration from existing companies that are working with mycelium, like MycoWorks, but she sees a big opportunity in marketing specifically to people like her: young, worried about climate change, and interested in supporting small, sustainable businesses.
“The current demographic of people who are buying sustainable projects is ages 18 to 25, and small businesses make up most of the businesses in this country,” Polat said. “My mission is to educate people and show them that there are real alternatives so people can get easy opportunity and access to the product.”
This article has been updated to correctly reflect the spelling of Eileen Polat's name.
