Bruce Bugbee began studying cannabis for its medical properties. But now the Utah State University plant physiology professor is looking into how it can be used in reinforced concrete.
His research is part of Utah State University’s new Natural Fiber Hub, a collaboration among researchers across colleges who are working to make natural fibers useful and practical in things like concrete, clothing and medicine.
One goal is to reduce reliance on plastic, which is found across all ecosystems, in food and even in human tissue.
Bugbee is working to answer a lot of questions before hemp can become better and cheaper than plastic.
“How much do we need to mix in? What are the optimal lengths of the fibers? How strong is the concrete when we mix it this way? Trying to quantify all those things,” he said.
Cannabis bred for its fibers is much taller than cannabis bred for its flowers, Bugbee said, so he’s also looking at optimal growing conditions.
Elsewhere on campus, biology professor Justin Jones will be the first to tell you that hagfish are not cute. But the eel-like deep-sea dwellers have something else going for them.
“They have one of the coolest adaptations to predation that exists out there in nature,” Jones said. “When they are attacked and they are bit, they can very quickly exude a voluminous slime into the water that clogs the gills of predators.”
The slime is clear, and it contains durable fibers.
“When you take those fibers out of the slime, and you stretch them and you allow them to dry, they're as strong as spider silk is,” Jones said.
Jones’s lab spent more than 20 years working with spider silk but couldn’t figure out how to produce it on a large scale. Now, their knowledge is coming in handy. They recently figured out how to spin hagfish slime fibers into very fine threads, just two or three microns in diameter.
Merino wool, for comparison, measures about 18 microns and feels quite soft, Jones said.
“Two to three microns must feel really, really nice against our skin, and probably have some other properties as well,” he said.
The lab takes hagfish genes and uses E. coli bacteria to produce the proteins that make slime fibers. They don’t need hagfish on hand.
“The E. coli is just making the proteins that we then have to assemble into a fiber,” Jones said. “The hagfish does that all in a natural system. We have to do it completely synthetically in the laboratory.”
The fibers could be good for more than just textiles. Jones’s research partner, biological engineering professor Elizabeth Vargis, found a way to make a very thin film that’s similar to a membrane in the human eye. That way, scientists can model how the disease progresses and learn from it.
“We're also trying to build that line of research and commercialize that, because that's going to make a difference also to people's lives,” Jones said.
Since plastics come from petroleum, using more sustainable alternatives would reduce reliance on oil, particularly foreign imports, said Kyle Moor, who teaches at the Utah Water Research Lab.
Moor studies how plastic contributes to pollution after it’s made. Synthetic textiles like polyester take decades or centuries to break down. In the meantime, little bits come off in washing machines and make their way into water, all the while releasing chemicals as they’re exposed to light, Moor said.
“Those dissolved chemicals can interact with, like, fish that are out there, insects that are out in surface waters. And so those would be negative impacts on an aquatic system.”
Moor knows plastics are harmful, but he’s also questioning the conventional wisdom that natural fibers are inherently better. His lab is studying how those fabrics wear down under light and how the chemicals they release affect water organisms.
“What we're trying to do is compare them — cotton materials to something that's like a polyester — to see if cotton really is, you know, a safer textile,” he said.
Macy Lipkin is a Report for America corps member who reports for KUER in northern Utah.
