By Jasmin Malik Chua / Source: Ecouterre

Clothing made from cow manure? Don’t pooh-pooh the idea just yet. After all, dung is serious business, particularly in the Netherlands, where a booming dairy industry has already outstripped the so-called “phosphate ceiling” of 172.9 million kilograms per year. Too much phosphate in waterways can lead to algae blooms, which rob aquatic life of oxygen and are potentially toxic to people. But less manure typically calls for fewer cows, which, for the land of milk, butter, and cheese, is a compromise farmers are hard-pressed to make. Eindhoven-based designer Jalila Essaïdi has an alternative solution: create a circular economy that turns excess excrement—and the surplus phosphate it embodies—into useful products. By “deconstructing” manure, Essaïdi is able to tease out the cellulose within and transform it into bioplastics, biopaper, and even biotextiles.

POO POWER

She dubs the material Mestic, from mest, the Dutch word for manure. While people have sought to manage No. 2 before, Essaïdi says this is the first time “manure is being considered as a valuable resource.”

“In Germany, for instance, great advances have been made in the fermentation of manure into fertilizer; others have succeeded in turning manure into energy. Those are great initiatives, but they’re not very efficient,” she said in a statement. “And even at their peak performance, they are still only partial solutions. A true result would be to completely strip the manure and use the resultant cellulose to manufacture new, biomaterial products. And once you’ve made that step, you’ll notice: manure is worth its weight in gold.”

Using manure in this manner also allows us to ease up on other, less-abundant natural resources, such as trees, cotton, or oil: an environmental win-win.

In June, Essaïdi partnered with the municipality of Eindhoven, Suna Producties, Inspidere, and Eindhoven365 to produce a fashion show featuring Mestic-derived fabrics.

All this served to herald an upcoming expansion of Essaïdi’s operations in the Moerdijk municipality, where Mestic’s first commercial products will roll off.

Eventually, Essaïdi says she wants to make Mestic suitable for three-dimensional printers, but “we have to tweak the melting temperatures first.”

As for Mestic’s immediate future, Essaïdi says it’s not just up to her. “We naturally want the Moerdijk scale-up to really start manufacturing a lot of stuff, but we will also license Mestic, allowing other parties to have a go at it,” she said. “After cows, we’ll tackle pigs. And after that? Who knows.”

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