Would you wear a shirt if the label said it was made of shit? Chances are you’re currently wearing something made of cotton. Ever since the fifth millennium BC, people have used the natural fiber derived from the cotton plant in textile production, and it’s now an enormous industry. Currently, the plant is growing on about 2.5 percent of the world’s arable land to supply the world with 25 million tons it uses every year. Cows are famous for having four stomachs (in fact, they have one, consisting of four compartments, but whatever right) to be able to digest tough grass. One way to look at this is that they’re eating grass, extracting the nutrients they need to survive, and dropping waste.Another way would be to see that they’re ingesting a rough source material that’s high in cellulose content, taking out all the material useless to textile production, and producing a base material that mostly consists of the cellulose needed.Jalilia Essaidi developed a method to turn cow manure into cellulose fiber. “Our solution turns an acute agricultural problem of waste into a sustainable source of raw material for the textile industry,” she told us.