I recently spoke with Eldy Lazaro Vasquez, a Ph.D. candidate at the ATLAS Institute at the University of Colorado Boulder, an interdisciplinary institute for radical creativity and invention that works to transform ingenious ideas into reality through research, experimentation and critical thinking.

Representing the next generation of talent entering the textiles and apparel industry, Eldy works across three different research labs (Unstable Design, Living Matter, and Utility Research) and has also spent the summer of 2022 in Germany, studying how lab-scale spinning machines, typically located in high-end labs used by chemists and materials science researchers, create fibers. These machines are out of reach for the average entrepreneur or designer who is interested in creating bio-based fibers that can make the textiles industry more sustainable. And these machines have been designed to work mostly with more stable petroleum-based materials for spinning fibers.

Eldy explains, “Working with bio-based materials, you need to have more control over temperature during extrusion, which is not typically a requirement in working with more stable petroleum-based materials. So not only are these machines expensive, but they are not structured to work well with most bio-based materials that are often heat sensitive.”