Slowing down fast fashion: Alum uses mushrooms to change clothing industry

Alejandra Ruiz, M.F.A. ’23, is using mushrooms to turn fast-fashion waste into reusable, eco-friendly materials.

By 2015, Ruiz said fast fashion, the mass production of low-cost garments, led to the annual production of 120 billion pieces of clothing, 15-20% of which went to waste. Most discarded items from the United States and other consumer-driven economies are sent to regions of Latin America, Asia, and Africa for disposal. 

"Imagine how many of those 120 billion items are going to be discarded in these developing countries just within one year," said Ruiz.

During her undergraduate studies in fashion design, Ruiz saw the impact of discarded clothes from fast fashion on local communities in Chile and in her home country of Colombia.

"When I ventured into materials design, I found new questions and multidisciplinary challenges,” Ruiz said. “I wasn’t feeling comfortable with the fashion system, and started looking into what happened to clothes after people buy them.” 

Ruiz began wondering how to repurpose textile waste to create new materials without negatively impacting the environment and people globally. In 2021, Ruiz began pursuing a graduate degree in design at UC Davis. She conducted research in biodesign, which included identifying new ways of upcycling, reducing and breaking down textile waste using mycelium, the root-like structure of fungi. 

Her extensive research work in this field earned her the prestigious Savageau Award upon her graduation, philanthropically funded by UC Davis Design Professor Emeriti Ann Savageau. 

The path to innovation

To experiment with the potential applications of mycelium in the industry, Ruiz collaborated with UC Davis Design Professor Christina Cogdell and Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Professor Valeria La Saponara to create MycoTextile Futures, an award-winning, interdisciplinary project. 

MycoTextile Futures uses living mycelium to turn discarded clothing and agricultural waste into versatile architectural materials like the mycelium brick. These materials can be reused several times while breaking down the synthetic textile fibers and eventually returning them to the soil.

MycoTextile Futures was created from Ruiz’s mission of transforming waste into resource, which has been recognized with a research award from the international Future is Fungi competition. The project has been approved for UC Davis’ Green Initiative Fund, a program that offers grants to students, staff, and faculty to promote sustainable development and projects on campus. 

"One of the things I enjoyed about working on this project was the design program’s interdisciplinary nature,” Ruiz said. “It is so cool to be the designer and to be able to connect with all these different approaches to knowledge."

How do we design materials from this textile waste without creating more burden on the environment and its people?” - Alejandra Ruiz, M.F.A. ’23

Award-winning work

Ruiz’s graduating installation, “Sustainable Pathways for Repurposing Textile Waste,” was granted the 2023 Savageau Award, which supported Ruiz’s transition from graduate school.

This prestigious accolade honors the career of a graduating M.F.A. design student and celebrates creativity in the program. In addition to the recognition, Ruiz’s work was displayed at the opening celebration of the annual Arts and Humanities Graduate Exhibition at the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art. 

Ruiz’s dedication to sustainable material design resonated with Savageau, who said she and Ruiz share a similar creativity, passion and commitment to positively impacting the realm of design. 

"Alejandra’s work with mycelium is truly very impressive and original,” Savageau said. “It is incredibly detailed, and it has a tremendous economic and social impact on the work she is doing. She is definitely a rising star in sustainable design and mycelium research.”

Weaving a sustainable future

Today, Ruiz is focused on addressing critical issues in fashion and textile culture, envisioning a sustainable and responsible future for the clothing production industry. In her role as a teaching assistant at UC Davis, Ruiz advocates for sustainability through education. When she is not teaching, the designer collaborates with industry professionals on the national and international level on the topics of conscious consumption, sustainable design education and waste revalorization.

"In the future, I would like to continue research on fiber biodegradation and its potential for using textile waste to create biodegradable new materials for sustainable infrastructure," said Ruiz. "I really feel there is a need to try to collaborate with nature to create new products that can be used to improve the lives of people."

To learn more about Ruiz’s work, visit https://www.hello-alegria.com/