Bezos Earth Fund awards $10 million to Berkeley team for compost-based fibers
In California, Bezos Earth Fund has awarded $10 million to a team of University of California-Berkley researchers to develop fabrics made from compost but inspired by spider silk. Such fabrics would help address the 92 million tons of textile waste generated by the fashion industry annually. Project lead Ting Xu calls the process waste to weave. “We’re breaking down the fibers to the molecular level, to sequences of proteins, and those proteins can come from a number of surprising sources,” said Xu, a professor in UC Berkeley’s Departments of Materials Science and Engineering and of Chemistry. The team includes scientists from six departments at UC Berkeley as well as researchers from Stanford University and the California Institute of Technology. The Bezos Earth Fund is a $10 billion philanthropic initiative created by Jeff Bezos to fight climate change and protect nature.
Category: Chemicals & Materials
