Spider & Silk Supply 

The collection of spider silks comprises the following connotation to provide top-quality dragline silk and to fulfill the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) criteria. We comply with SDG 15 “Life on Land” and will release all the golden orb spiders back to the habitats they belong to after completing the silk collection process. The whole operation will be conducted by two assistants on a daily basis. On each working day, the two assistants will be responsible for driving a car to the fields to collect spiders for silk drawing and to release spiders that had been used for silk drawing back to the field. According to our prior studies, the physical qualities of silks produced by spiders kept in laboratory conditions are inferior to those of spiders living in the wild. Therefore, we will use spiders freshly collected from the wild to obtain silk for our customers. Because golden orb spiders play important roles in the functioning of ecosystems by serving as the major insect predators in the food webs, releasing spiders back to the field after silk drawing the ecological impact of collecting large number of golden orb spiders to obtain huge amounts of silks can be reduced to a minimum. In each working day, an average of 20 spiders will be collected from the fields and brought back to the laboratory. In the next working day, they will be used for silk collection. After the silk collection in the next working day, all of them will be released back to the same site. Spider and Silk Supply is a green company that provides top-quality raw materials to our esteemed clients in an eco-friendly and no-impact way. We will go to different areas of Taiwan to make sure that a sufficient number of spiders can be obtained to achieve our goal. Relevant expenses for daily field trips include personnel, insurance, gas, freeway toll fee, logistics, transportation vehicle maintenance and repair…etc.

 

When the golden orb spiders are brought back to the laboratory, on the following day the two assistants will collect the dragline silk from them. The whole silk drawing process must be constantly monitored by dissecting microscopes to make sure that the silk does not break. According to our previous experience, from 20 golden orb spiders an average of 1,000 threads of two-meter-long silks can be obtained and the whole process takes a working day to complete, i.e., 2000 meters of dragline silks can be obtained in a working day. In addition to SDG 15, Spider and Silk Supply also complies with SDG 12, which is “Responsible Consumption and Production”. A lab space with microenvironmental variables well controlled is specifically designated and all relevant facilities be assembled in that space to perform silk collection on a daily basis. We will be responsible for managing chemicals and waste and reducing waste generation by refining our lab facilities and apparatuses to accomplish the requests from customers in a sustainable way.