Despite international bans, thousands of African elephants are illegally killed every year for their tusks. Could a man-made alternative be the answer?
My parents often talk about their honeymoon safari in the Serengeti National Park in 1972. Mum reminds me that they didn’t have “fancy cameras with zoom lenses back then” and that the photos that adorn their album were taken with a simple camera. Among them are herds of elephants close enough to make any wildlife photographer jealous.
At the end of the 1970s, more than 1.3 million elephants roamed Africa. Today there are around 450,000. And as Mama said on our return to the Serengeti 20 years ago: “It’s not like it used to be.” At least 20,000 African elephants are still illegally killed every year for their ivory tusks. International trade in ivory was banned in 1989 by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (Cites), but elephant populations have continued to suffer. A resurgence in demand from unregulated markets in Asia and Africa has been a key driver.
And it’s not just elephants that are in danger. Earlier this year, the UK government announced plans to extend the Ivory Act 2018 to other animals and marine life. Pending a vote in the UK Parliament, this will mean that the sale of ivory from the tusks and teeth of killer whales, hippos, walruses, narwhals and sperm whales will also be banned.
But the good news is that a new market will open up for man-made ivory, as well as ivory-like materials made from plants.
Ivory, or “white gold” as it is sometimes called, has been one of the most valuable and sought-after global commodities throughout history. A material of luxury, ivory has been made into jewellery and weapons, musical instruments and figurines. It has a catalogue of properties that few other materials can match: beautiful, durable, homogeneous in appearance and easy to carve while retaining a high degree of lustre.
For this reason, evolutionary biologist Fritz Vollrath believes we should stigmatise the trade in poached ivory, but acknowledge that the material is coveted for a reason. “While we need to be wary of it becoming a common commodity that ends up on mantelpieces, there is something about the material’s properties,” says Vollrath. “It has a certain touch that is different from plastic. There’s something special about ivory.
To meet this demand without harming animals, Thaddäa Rath is among those trying to create a synthetic alternative. Together with her team at the University of Vienna in Austria, she has developed a high-tech ivory alternative called “Digory”. The material can be 3D printed and polished to create deceptively authentic carvings.
Rath and her team wanted to mirror the optical and aesthetic properties of ivory, while achieving similar strength and density. They also wanted to mimic a visual structure within ivory called Schreger lines, which are similar to those found in wood.
Digory is made from synthetic resin and calcium phosphate particles that are 3D printed layer by layer into a desired shape.
The material is then colour-matched (remembering that ivory is translucent), stained and polished to create a believable imitation of natural ivory.
Rath acknowledges that there are many challenges to commercialising Digory. Interest from jewellery makers and knife makers has been steady, but she believes it has huge potential by offering a low-carbon, fast and straightforward manufacturing process with convincing results.
Despite mimicking the properties of ivory, Digory’s chemical structure is nothing like ivory, unlike the synthetic ivory created by a group of Max Planck scientists in Germany in 2019.
Using a phosphate-based composition, Dieter Fischer, Sarah Parks and Jochen Mannhart have attempted to closely mimic the chemistry of a real ivory tusk – so closely, in fact, that they say it is sometimes difficult to tell the difference between real ivory and its artificial version.
Natural ivory is a bone-like material made up largely of a mineral called dentine, which lies beneath the enamel of a tooth. And while human teeth are used for eating, ivory tusks are teeth that have emerged beyond the lips, giving elephants an evolutionary advantage.
The researchers behind the synthetic ivory mixed particles of a bio-mineral called hydroxylapatite with dissolved gelatine, which is made from collagen (the organic component of ivory). “What we didn’t try to reproduce was the microstructure of the tusk, because it turned out that the functional properties we were interested in, such as touch and grip, did not depend on the nanostructure,” explains Mannhart.
The original idea to create synthetic ivory came from the desire to replace the ivory veneers on piano keys. Realising the potential of what they had created, the team’s ambition grew and the material is now being commercialised under a company called Ivortec. “The motivation changed over time from piano keys to replacing plastics and tackling the microplastic problem. It’s about having a material instead of plastic that is really green, biodegradable and not resource intensive,” says Mannhart.
Others are looking closer to nature when it comes to ivory alternatives.
At a stall in St Alban’s market in England, Alison Williams has seen her colourful jewellery business, The Happy Elephant, go from strength to strength since it was launched in 2020. It’s no surprise, as whimsical beads are standard fare at the weekend bazaar – except Alison’s jewellery is made from tagua, also known as plant ivory. “Because of its history, people are blown away by what they see and feel,” she says.
Tagua was first documented by Westerners in the late 1700s, when two Spanish botanists stumbled upon it in the eastern foothills of the Andes, according to the book Strange Harvests. They thought they’d discovered an ivory tree (the scientific name for tagua is phytelephas, which literally translates from Greek as ‘plant elephant’). It was so convincing that, as its use became more widespread in the 19th century, the only way to tell the difference between real ivory and tagua was to dab a drop of sulphuric acid on the materials: tagua would turn pink, while ivory would remain white.
The palm is native to the rainforests, cloud forests and coastal plains of northwestern South America. Williams learned about tagua from locals in Ecuador, where she and her husband spent many years.
Holding up a heavy, brown and spiky seed pod called a mococha, Williams describes how it works: “The tagua palm takes 15 years to mature before it begins to produce its ivory nuts. A palm can produce 16-18 of these seed pods each year, and they take 18 months to grow. In the early stages, tagua can be drunk (it is 100% plant cellulose) and tastes like coconut water. It then hardens into a jelly that can be eaten. The jelly hardens in the sun into a nut. About 120 nuts grow inside the “compartments” of the pod.
The nut is then polished, carved and used extensively to make jewellery, buttons or ornaments. The jewellery has such a tactile feel and dyes so well,” says Williams, wearing her own bright green tagua necklace. “One tagua palm can produce as much tagua (or vegetable ivory) in a year as an average African elephant can produce in its lifetime”.
An elephant can live for 60 to 70 years. But within the lifetime of an elephant living today, the species could become extinct in the wild.
Even Mannhart suggests that in some contexts a substitute for ivory might struggle to be accepted, citing the example of the Japanese tradition of name stamps known as hanko. “In Japan, it’s very common for people not to sign by hand, but to have ivory stamps for their names to sign documents. At first we thought it was a fantastic market,” he says. But his Japanese colleague in Stuttgart disagreed. He felt that for some Japanese it was of great cultural importance to continue to use real ivory.
But while Japan has one of the world’s largest legal ivory markets, a recent study found that demand is now a fraction of what it once was. (Some organisations believe that not all the ivory traded there is legal).
Acknowledging such limitations doesn’t stop scientists from trying to find alternatives to real ivory.
Even Vollrath is trying. A few years ago, his team at Oxford University began testing an ivory substitute based on silk cellulose and hydroxyapatite.
The research had to be halted for logistical reasons, but at the time he had just finished making an artificial rhino horn from the material. Vollrath believes this was proof of concept. “I didn’t give up, I pressed pause. There’s a market for artificial ivory.
