It has been one of the main challenges in manufacturing for years: how to create spider silk on a cost-effective, mass scale. Heralded as one of the most durable and strongest materials in the world, spider silk is said to be multiple times stronger than steel (numbers range from 5 to 340, strangely), and can be used in various ways to make products everything from waterproof to bulletproof. Japanese advanced biomaterials company Spiber, however, seems to have cracked the code, and has teamed up with The North Face to bring a very durable coat to the world, which incorporates their QMONOS ('kumonosu' being 'spider web' in Japanese) spider silk technology. Their Moon Parka is set to go on sale in 2016.
The original issue with making spider silk was that it had to actually be made rather than harvested: real spiders are apparently not too keen on people stealing their strings and using them for mass production. They’re also cannibalistic, making a natural spider-group project quite difficult to envision. Spiber went into a full 11 years of research, including specialised research on fermentation from 2008, and managed to circumvent the problem by locating which exact proteins were involved in the process, as well as in later fermentation. They then went on to physically create new protein molecules, and altered their gene pools in different ways to implement the most elasticity, durability, and/or heat tolerance.
Next, these new protein strands were injected into microorganisms that would sit and ferment until they created their own silk. Still with us? The finishing touches were then made with a completely new spinning process, as spider silk is so fine that spinning it into a proper thread was almost impossible so far. Yes, we’re blown away too by the amount of innovation this interdisciplinary team has going on. They now have a good bank of different prototypes to work with, and set out to create the first spider silk products for consumers.
The challenges didn’t end there however, as getting things to a mass-production level rather than a mere few, very costly, strings wasn’t straightforward either. Making spider silk was never really cost-effective, with prices of at least $100 per kilogram; your synthetic spider silk coat would be rather expensive if it stayed like that. There has been no full disclosure as to how exactly they did it (got to keep some secrets safe), but their interdisciplinary approach means that they have now allegedly gotten to 1/53,000th of the original manufacturing costs, with production having been increased 4,500-fold. Now that’s a lot of string.
Their latest step is their collaboration with The North Face, known for its outdoor apparel. With the creation of commercially viable spider silk being likened to the initial impossibility of the Apollo Space Project, they created the Moon Parka: modelled on The North Face’s Antarctica Parka, but with Spiber’s synthetic spider silk technology doing part of the legwork. Even the colour has some arachnid references – the golden yellow is a nod to the colour of the Golden Orb spider’s web. The fiercest arachnophobes might still not be keen to wear a jacket with these associations, but we would definitely reconsider after all this innovation.
The Moon Parka will be on tour in selected The North Face shops across Japan before its official commercial release in 2016. The Tokyo dates have sadly passed, but now you have a great reason to head to Sendai (until Jan 10). For more information on the process and Spiber, check out their website (English & Japanese).
– By Kirsty Bouwers