One end product creates another.
It’s a soft, flowy fabric. Opaque or translucent. Woven strips or coverall. Perfect for gowns. Loungewear. Daywear. Anywear.
It could be the finest silk. The sheerest organza. The softest cotton. The gauziest chiffon.
But it’s not.
It’s Mestic®, the ultimate in sustainable textiles made from — wait for it — cow manure. That’s right, bovine excrement. Indeed, the name Mestic® includes the Dutch word mest, which means “manure.”
Mestic® is the brainchild of Jalila Essaidi, an artist and designer from the Netherlands who also knows a thing or two about biotechnology. Her creation, and its many forms, just may save a life or two.
Think of it this way. Cows graze on grass, which contains cellulose— a main component of vegetable fiber, itself a key element of cotton, hemp, jute, and sisal. The average milk cow produces 82 pounds of manure a day. The average dairy farm in the U.S. has about 234 cows. That’s over 19,000 pounds of manure—more than 8 tons—per day, equivalent to the weight of two female elephants. The question is, what to do with all that dung.
The typical answer is use it for fertilizer and compost. This is all well and good. But an overly generous layer of dung on the soil or near waterways can be extremely harmful. Raw manure contains E. Coli and other dangerous bacteria, which can contaminate well water, streams, and crops, causing people to become ill.
Enter Jalila Essaidi. Essaidi and her team have developed a way to process cow manure so it yields a variety of useful products. To do so, they extract cellulose and acids from the manure, convert it to cardboard and paper, transform it to a liquid plastic, and use the liquid to create textiles and hard bioplastics. This is the (non)magic of Mestic®. During the process, all bacteria and fungi in the manure are killed, so the cellulose is completely clean.
There is no yuck factor. No compromises. No excuses. Mestic® just may be the quintessential expression of a circular economy – turning waste into wearables.
How cool! Also, cows emit a surprising amount of climate-warming methane. There are 1.5 billion domesticated bovines around the globe, and their belches and farts add as much greenhouse gas to the atmosphere as all the world’s vehicles.
Thank you for adding this information!
And here I doubted the tale of spinning straw into gold..
This is truly an amazing discovery of the use of cow manure, cows are known to excrete a lot of waste which could cause a lot of unwanted situations if left unattended to. what an incredible way to make cow manure very useful aside it being used for fertilization.