Living Materials, Unstable Evidence: Why Environmental Impact Assessment Frameworks Fail Bacterial Cellulose, and What Practice-Led Experimentation Offers Instead

Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) and Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) have become the dominant tools through which fashion judges whether a material is sustainable. These tools were built for materials that behave predictably: stable, standardised, manufactured to specification. But a growing class of biofabricated materials is not manufactured—it is grown. This paper argues, from the perspective of a designer–researcher who spent a year cultivating and designing with bacterial cellulose (BC), that applying these frameworks to living materials does not produce neutral measurements. It flattens a material whose environmental story is written through process, not fixed at origin. Drawing on a year of practice-led experimentation at Northumbria University, I present three moments where the material refused to behave as a single, assessable object: a glycerol conditioning concentration arrived at through iterative testing that diverged from standard protocol; cultivation variability that produced materially distinct outcomes from nominally identical processes; and a laser-cut sample that distorted in sunlight at a public exhibition, revealing how post-processing and use conditions—not composition alone—govern whether BC’s much-cited biodegradability actually holds. Read through a maker’s lens, these are not technical failures to be smoothed over—they are evidence. I argue that EIA for living materials must become contextual, process-aware, and willing to recognise the designer–practitioner, working at the material frontier, as a legitimate producer of environmental knowledge.