Sustainability in Fashion Is a Necessity Not a Trend, Says One Earthshot Prize Finalist

Victoria Murphy
·2 min read
individual seated in front of a shelf cluttered with various items
Earthshot Prize Finalist on Fashion SustainabilityCourtesy Earthshot

There was an unlikely inspiration for the innovation behind Earthshot Prize finalist MYCL’s sustainable leather alternative. It came in the form of traditional Indonesian food tempeh.

“We really wanted to go into agricultural business as Indonesia is an agricultural country,” co-founder Ronaldiaz Hartantyo, a former architect, told T&C over Zoom about starting out 10 years ago as one of five founders. However, he admitted, “I’m not really good at growing things. My first concern was that I needed to be able to grow it. That’s why we came across mushrooms, because mushroom is a really adaptive organism.”

earthshot
Courtesy Earthshot

The business’s first product was an educational mushroom-growing kit. Then, inspiration struck from an unlikely source.“We came across tempeh,” Hartantyo said. “It’s an Indonesian traditional food. We got inspiration from tempeh. Tempeh is soya beans bonded with mushroom mycelium. We used a similar concept but instead of soybeans we used agricultural waste that’s abundant here in Indonesia.”

The first iteration of the material was actually a building material. In 2017, the founders discovered a leather alternative could be produced. Now they partner with brands who use their product in different ways, including for art, clothing and jewelry. As Hartantyo puts it, “The market is exploring the material’s potential by itself.”

MYCL grows mycelium in small labs near to crop waste sources. They use waste from palm oil plantations, which has the added benefit of preventing this from being burned and producing pollution. “We saw that rather than burning it up in open air, which creates lots of air pollution, we can actually convert the carbon and then turn it into usable materials,” Hartantyo said.

a unique jacket featuring a mushroom design hanging on a wall next to a wooden stool
Courtesy Earthshot

On November 6, MYCL will be one of 15 finalists celebrated at Prince William’s Earthshot Prize awards in Cape Town. Nominated in the Clean Our Air category, they have a chance to win £1 million to scale up their innovation. They already have a factory in Japan and hope to eventually expand more widely across Asia and Europe.

For MYCL, sustainability was always a "main core value since the beginning.” “We saw sustainability not as an additional value but as part of the foundation of the company itself,” Hartantyo said. “Sustainability in fashion, for us, it’s not a trend, it’s a necessity. There is no other way other than sustainability to be moving forward. The Earth doesn’t need us, we need the earth. Sustainable technology is the future technology. That will make sure that we have the future for the next generations.”

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