"The range of materials used in manufacturing looks very different now than it did a decade or two ago. It's a lot easier to find bamboo used to make a host of items, from furniture to paper products; in 2019, luxury automaker Bentley noted that it was looking into a leather alternative made from grapes and other wine byproducts. Not every initiative pans out as planned - but when it does work, it makes for a fascinating case study in innovation and sustainability."
"In an article for Knowable Magazine, Sandy Ong explored some efforts to use pollen as a raw material to make things like paper and sponges. These efforts, Ong reports, don't entail using every part of pollen; instead, they would make use of its outer shell, which is very durable. A breakthrough came in 2020, when scientist Nam-Joon Cho and his colleagues came up with a way to heat pollen in a way that can make it much easier to manipulate."
Manufacturing raw materials have diversified over recent decades, with sustainable substitutes like bamboo and grape-based leather emerging. Pollen's outer shell, composed of sporopollenin, is extremely durable and is being investigated as a biomaterial for items such as paper and sponges. Researchers developed a heating technique in 2020 that renders pollen easier to manipulate. Additional work includes a DARPA-funded project at Colorado State University to produce sporopollenin in the lab and academic evaluations that praise pollen's potential as building blocks. Significant challenges include removing allergenic components and scaling production for large-volume use.
Read at InsideHook
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