Semeru Gita Lestari and Arka Irfani are adventurers at heart. As biologists, they spent a lot of time observing and appreciating the nature of their native Indonesia on expeditions where it quickly became apparent that, even in the depths of the nation’s jungle, plastic had integrated itself into the natural environment.
The leather industry is a significant contributor to the worldwide plastic problem. Indonesia is a major manufacturer of leather products.
With worldwide demands for leather growing every year, lots of big brand names have made the switch from natural cattle leather to synthetic plastic-based substitutes for a more efficient yield and to reduce the production of the material’s contribution to greenhouse gas emissions. This has opened up a whole new slew of sustainability-related issues, in Indonesia and beyond.
Many synthetic leathers are made of fossil fuel-derived plastics. And they’re not biodegradable, turning up in the eco-systems Gita Lestari and Irfani have spent time studying.
“In the production [of plastic] itself, we produce toxic chemicals,” said Irfani. “So we want to create an alternative material that is non-toxic and uses less plastic.”
The answer to this alternative lies no further than the local coffee farm.
To get to the core of Gita Lestari and Irfani’s mission, you have to start with coffee cherries and their anatomy. The cherry consists of the seed — commonly known as the bean — which is roasted into coffee grounds and the pericarp, or outermost layer.
Wet processing is the most common method of coffee processing. The pericarp is removed using water and the cherry is pulped to remove the outer skin and fruit, leaving behind the seed to be further processed. But what about that outer layer?
“When we produce … one kilogram of beans, we also produce one kilogram of the coffee waste,” said Gita Lestari. “So we have a lot of coffee waste that the farmer usually just throws away. We want to absorb that waste and enter it into something more valuable.”
Indonesia is the third largest producer of coffee in the world, outputting 774,600 tons annually.
So Gita Lestari and Irfani linked the production of coffee and the manufacturing of leather together and developed M-Tex, a leather-like material made by converting organic waste into sustainable materials using bacteria.
The team uses the biodegradability of their materials to their advantage in a process called bio-weaving. It involves feeding harvested coffee skin waste to bacteria, which form the skin into sheets of cellulose — a type of fibre — that are later used to produce the lab’s products.
Bell Living Lab stems from there.
The website’s catalogue looks like a collection of products traditionally made with leather using M-Tex such as wallets and chairs, but it’s so much more than that. From seed to store, behind every piece is a team of agriculturists, researchers and product designers.
The initiative has become a source of income for a group of around 100 farmers in Indonesia. They harvest the beans and are taught how to prepare the coffee skin for the lab’s processes and receive helpful agricultural resources such as solar domes. Gita Lestari and Irfani purchase the farmers’ leftovers that would have been thrown away. It’s the team’s way of contributing to a circular economy.
Bell Living Lab has gained traction in Indonesia, and has already worked with big brands such as Kia and Nestle. Now, collaborations with students from UBC’s Sauder School and business ventures into local fashion have solidified Bell Living Lab as an up-and-coming grassroots business to look out for in Vancouver.
The demand for a solution to reinventing leather as a fashion staple is international. Through clothing, Gita Lestari and Irfani are experimenting with the possibility of M-Tex becoming a more mainstream vegan leather alternative, a proposal that has been welcomed by designers at Blanche Macdonald. M-Tex durability is comparable to traditional leather — and cheaper.
“We are a research-based company so our goal is to purchase more bio-materials that can be used by everybody, not just some people or some market,” said Gita Lestari. “We want to make it inclusive.”
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