Shining a light on sustainable fabrics

Dr. Taylor Wright (BSc'17, PhD'22) was working on his PhD at UBC Chemistry, experimenting with liquid silicone and clothing, along with plastics and other hard materials. The connecting thread? All the materials interacted with light to become functional in some way.

One day he shone light on a treated fabric — in this case expecting the light to have no effect. But the material stiffened and hardened. Puzzled, Wright sent the fabric to another UBC lab to run it against E. coli bacteria to prove the material was inert. It wasn’t. The material killed all the bacteria.

“It was a complete accident that spawned three years of research on polymers,” Dr. Wright recalls. “It was during COVID. We had a naturally antimicrobial material, so we tried putting it on fabric samples and see if we can make antimicrobial fabrics, as well as coatings for hard plastics and surfaces.”

Soon after he graduated, Dr. Wright’s supervisor, Dr. Michael Wolf was at a barbecue chatting with an employee of Vancouver-based sport apparel maker Lululemon. The guest mentioned a new position at the company for someone who worked with textiles and polymers. Dr. Wolf brought up Dr. Wright’s research with antimicrobial material, and passed along word of the job opening.

Taylor interviewed with Lululemon five times in a week and a half, taking care to demonstrate how his research related to textiles. He started two weeks later with a new team at Lululemon called raw materials innovation.

“My job is to go out and find interesting companies that make sustainable raw materials,” Dr. Wright says. “One of the first things I did when I joined the company was scout companies that can recycle clothing. We said, here are all the polymers and natural materials that Lululemon uses. Who can develop a sustainable solution for them? Then we hit the road and visited everyone — whether they had an existing chemical factory, or, in some cases, two people in a shed in the middle of nowhere.”

Recycling the mountains of clothing discarded worldwide is a huge task. In California alone there are hundreds of thousands of tonnes of clothing thrown away every year.

“The world needs hundreds of millions of dollars in investment to set up large, sustainable, impactful facilities to recycle textiles. We're working on getting the first few set up. Lululemon has sustainability goals for 2030 and all the work I do is driving towards those goals.”

The chemist Lululemon didn’t know they needed

Although Lululemon was looking for someone with a strong chemistry background, the job title Dr. Wright responded to was research analyst.

“They didn't know how to write the job description because it was the first chemist the company was hiring in a research capacity, so the HR people had no one to bounce ideas off of to figure out the posting,” he says.

Dr. Wright advises new graduates who are looking for work in sustainability that there are a lot of brands now staffing related roles — but the job postings might not reflect what the companies actually need.

“Sustainability touches across everything. It's analytics, chemistry, science, and engineering. It's water science, pollution. It's aerosols. The field is growing rapidly because we need it. Companies are casting a really wide net for sustainability, for materials innovation, because they don't know the exact specifics they need.”

Communicating science to people who sell pants

“One of the most translatable soft skills scientists can have is being able to take a really complex topic and explain to someone why they should care. That's 95 per cent of my job. How do we take four different types of chemistry and explain it to someone who spent the last 20 years developing brand campaigns for pants?”

While he was at UBC, Dr. Wright taught the First-Year Seminar in Science, a science communications course that’s now mandatory for all first-year Bachelor of Science students.

“You can be an amazing scientist publishing in Nature, but if you can't articulate your research to investor, business or industrial partners, it can limit your impact. Being able to articulate science accurately, quickly and in a way that's considerate of different backgrounds, really makes things move along. No one wants to be in a meeting and feel like the scientists are talking down to them.”