In the future, leather shoes won’t come from cows. They’ll be manifested out of petri dishes, or in green chemist Richard Wool’s vision, divined from chicken feathers, flax, and soybean oil.

Over the past two decades, Wool has figured out how to turn chicken feathers into computer processors and soybean oil into John Deere tractor parts. His latest project aims to capture the attention of catwalk watchers: Wool hopes to commercialize a new kind of breathable leather that’s made without the environmentally destructive chemicals.





“It turned out to be one of those ‘oompah!’ moments in the lab,” the University of Delaware professor told me the day after he had returned from Washington, D.C., where the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency had honored him with the green chemistry academic award for 2013. “We made a beautiful sheet of material and it was also breathable. The technology that took us to the moon, we’re using that to make our Eco-leather material.”

Synthetic animal products backed by Silicon Valley investors have ignited the popular imagination in recent years. Early investors in Amazon, Twitter, and Google have thrown money behind plant-based meat and egg experiments, while PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel supports Modern Meadow, a startup growing leather from animal cell biopsies in petri dishes. But while Modern Meadow’s technology is promising, it has yet to prove it can be produced at a commercial scale. Wool’s Eco-leather could present an option more immediately applicable to the fashion and footwear industries.

Already, Wool’s company, Eco-leather Corp., has begun collaborating with Nike and Puma on developing an athletic shoe made out of non-toxic materials. In his own Affordable Composites from Renewable Sources lab, students have worked with the university’s fashion department to develop prototypes. Check out one below.

An Eco-leather athletic shoe. Photo courtesy of Richard Wool.

As for his process, Wool makes bio-composites using techniques developed by aerospace engineers to process the scraped, downy fibers from chicken feathers into the hardy soles of shoes. With heat and pressure, the feathers are combined with natural fibers and plant oil resins, which can be made soft or rigid. Wool’s lab has also developed a bio-based foam that can replace polyurethane, a widely used petroleum-based material that releases airborne pollutants.

The goal of his work, Wool explains, is to provide alternatives to the toxic leather production process. The Blacksmith Institute, a nonprofit environmental think tank, regards pollution from leather tanneries in Hazaribagh, Bangladesh, as one of the top toxic threats in the world. Various chemicals used in leather tanning can cause cancer in humans, as well as skin and respiratory diseases. They include toxic heavy metals like chromium as well as hormone-disrupting PFCs.