Is Artificial Spider Silk the Future of Material Engineering?

Could this be the sustainable alternative to single-use plastics?

Maria Fujisawa

Published in

Insights of Nature

4 min readMay 6, 2024

By Maria Fujisawa

Plastic bags have become an important part of our throwaway culture. Every time we shop, whether it’s at the convenience store or retail shop, we’re passed a plastic bag, and as the world continually seeks sustainable alternatives to single-use plastics, the spotlight is increasingly turning to artificial spider silk. Every year, up to one trillion plastic bags are used worldwide, which can be converted to 160,000 plastic bags a second.

But What Exactly is Spider Silk?

Spider silk is known as one of the strongest materials in nature and is considered tougher than kevlar and stronger than steel. It can be stretched several times its length before it breaks and has a lot of elasticity. By using this natural material, researchers are looking into the potential use of spider silk in replacing single-use plastics.

Spider silk is made up of protein fibers produced by the glands in the abdominal of spiders. The raw material of silk is a liquid protein that passes through the spinnerets and it becomes dry as it comes out from the abdomen and forms a thread. Spidroins are the proteins that make up the protein fibers. The major Ampullate Silk consists of poly-alanine blocks and glycine-rich regions that are repeated and this repetitive region makes the spider silk strong and elastic.

Can’t We Mass-Produce Silk from Spiders?

Mass-producing silk from spiders may seem like an obvious solution to using spider silk for plastics, but it is nearly impossible because :

They’re cannibals and are very territorial, meaning they could eat each other
Spiders can’t be put to work to produce spider silk and fibers the way silkworms can
Spiders usually only produce enough silk for their webs

Consequently, researchers have turned to other approaches such as creating artificial/vegan spider silk, which replicates the strength and stretchiness of natural spider silk using plant proteins.

Vegan Spider Silk

Spider silk is one of the strongest materials in nature even though it has a weak molecular structure and this is because of the hydrogen bonds placed regularly in a space and at a very high density. In a study conducted by researchers at the University of Cambridge, researchers created a new material mimicking the spider silk’s strength and stretchiness. The material was replicated by assembling plant proteins (soy protein isolate), and they found that they could get the plant proteins to self-assemble into the structure of spider silk because all proteins are made of polypeptide chains. They came up with vegan spider silk, and used soy protein isolate and a mixture of acetic acid and water combined with ultrasonication and high temperatures to control the solubility and get the plant proteins to self assemble. A company related to Cambridge University, Xampla, focuses on replacing microplastics and using vegan spider silk in the process.

Another laboratory research created artificial spider silk producing silk fibers at room temperature using water as the solvent. In this research, the artificial spider silk is composed of 98% water and created from hydrogel. Synthetic fibers such as nylon usually require high temperatures for spinning while the spider silk produced through the research only requires room temperature and no chemicals.

Other researchers are conducting experiments with using modified E-coli to produce spider silk and, at the University of Utah, they conducted research using genetically modified “spider goats” to produce spider silk.

Why aren’t single-use plastics replaced yet?

Artificial spider silk has proven to be a biodegradable/sustainable option some companies are researching, but one reason artificial spider silks aren’t replacing all plastics is because of the scale of the fiber production process. Additionally, one of the main challenges with synthetic spider silk is that we still lack an understanding of the natural material and the process it is created.

Spider-like silk is completely biodegradable and can absorb so much energy because spiders need their web to be able to keep its structure when a bird hits its web. Artificial spider silk has the potential to replace not only single-use plastics, but also be used in bulletproof clothing, wear-resistant lightweight clothing, ropes, nets, seatbelts, parachutes, and even biodegradable bottles. Even though there still are challenges with the fiber production process and mass production, they have the potential to revolutionize material engineering and in a few more years, with more research, artificial spider silk could be used daily as an alternative to single-use plastics.