Bezos Earth Fund Teams-Up with Scientists to Reinvent What Clothes Are Made Of – Announces $34 Million in New Grants

The fashion industry is one of the most creative, dynamic and pervasive in the world — a significant part of everyday life and personal expression. That’s why today, the Bezos Earth Fund announced $34 million to advance breakthrough materials for the fashion and textile industry. Working with scientists and researchers across the United States, new grants build on the Bezos Earth Fund mission to support innovative solutions that benefit the planet, people, and communities. They specifically focus on research and development of next-generation materials that look and feel like today’s rayon, silk, and cotton — with cost, performance, and environmental attributes that improve upon conventional fabrics.

“Fashion has always inspired me. The craft, the creativity, the way it connects to culture. So when I started asking questions about how clothes are actually made, I couldn’t stop. The science happening right now is incredible. These teams are growing fiber from bacteria, engineering cotton that comes out of the ground in color and creating silk like fibers from compost. That’s not just good for the planet. That’s the future of fashion,” stated Lauren Sánchez Bezos, Vice Chair of the Bezos Earth Fund. 

New grants include:

• Columbia University will receive $11.5 million to develop, in partnership with the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT), a high-quality textile fiber grown by bacteria fed on agricultural waste. The resulting fiber will be strong, flexible, soft and breathable. It requires almost no land, is biodegradable, and will not contribute to microplastic proliferation in our waterways. 
• University of California, Berkeley will be awarded $10 million to produce a high-performance biodegradable fiber inspired by the strength and flexibility of spider silk, without relying on silkworms, spiders, or plastic. The team will include scientists from Stanford University and California Institute of Technology.
• Clemson University will receive $11 million to use gene editing and synthetic biology to develop and test, with scientists from the University of Georgia, new cotton varieties with built-in color, enhanced performance, and improved resilience, that can rival conventional synthetic materials with less climate and nature impact.
• The Cotton Foundation will be awarded $1.5 million to support the restoration of the world’s most diverse, publicly accessible, non-GMO cotton seedbank, which scientists and farmers can use to continue to develop and grow improved cotton varieties.   

Together, these grants focus on reinventing the fabrics that clothes are made of — where the greatest opportunity for impact exists. The materials and manufacturing behind the fabrics we wear are responsible for roughly 80% of the industry’s environmental footprint, including greenhouse gas emissions, water use and pollution, and landfill waste.

“At the Bezos Earth Fund we’re constantly looking for groundbreaking new solutions at the intersection of climate, nature, people, and communities to ensure we’re protecting and restoring the world we love,” said Tom Taylor, President and CEO of the Bezos Earth Fund. “We believe sustainable fashion is part of that mission by making sustainable clothing choices easy, widely available, and ultimately better for the planet and for people.” 

Designers need materials that are beautiful and high performing; retailers need consistent quality at viable price points; and manufacturers need materials that integrate into equipment and infrastructure over time. By investing in science and engineering, the Bezos Earth Fund aims to drive performance up and premiums down. 

The Bezos Earth Fund made its first entrance into its sustainable fashion program work in 2025 with the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) x Bezos Earth Fund Next Thread Initiative, a $6.25 million grant with the CFDA to provide awards to independent fashion designers focused on sustainability and scholarships to students pursuing sustainable design.

“Our work is built on a passion to create better materials and reduce microplastics in textiles from the start of the process, and this multi-faceted project has incredible potential for the future of fashion,” said Ting Xu, Professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering and Department of Chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley. “Support from the Bezos Earth Fund will now help advance the progress our scientists and engineers have made, enabling us to move even faster toward the goal of making these materials a reality in the industry.”

“The goal of PRISM is to harness the power of cells for the production of next-generation, high-performance, and regenerative fibers for the fashion industry, and the visionary support from the Bezos Earth Fund enables us to address key scientific and technical bottlenecks in biofabrication by creating a digital map of how cells make and assemble materials across life-relevant scales. Most excitingly, PRISM gives us a unique opportunity to build beyond biology by reverse-engineering nature’s best designs to create brand-new materials that are useful and healthy for the planet.” – Helen Lu, PhD and Percy K. and Vida L.W. Hudson Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Professor of Dental and Craniofacial Engineering (in Dental Medicine), Columbia University. 

“The convergence of biology, physics, materials, and data science allows us to design monofilaments with tailored strength, stretch, and even color, opening a pathway to regenerative fibers that rival synthetics while remaining compostable at the end-of-life. The generous support of the Bezos Earth Fund is critical for developing the Life Cycle Impact Assessment (LCIA) framework that brings scientific rigor and transparency to the environmental and social impacts of textiles, closes loops across industries, and demonstrates that nature-based innovation and climate positive design are both possible and profitable.” – Theanne Schiros, PhD and Professor of Materials Science Department of Science and Mathematics, Fashion Institute of Technology 

“This work fundamentally focuses on how we grow fibers that can be inherently better for the planet by moving color, performance, and resilience upstream into the biology of cotton itself,” stated Dr. Christopher Saski, Clemson University. “This approach flips the traditional model that has been used for more than a century to build a future of sustainable fashion, and we’re excited to have support from the Bezos Earth Fund to help us move this research forward and further.”

“This investment from the Bezos Earth Fund comes at a critical moment to protect one of agriculture’s most valuable genetic resources. By strengthening the foundation of cotton genetics, we can advance more resilient, sustainable natural fibers — offering safe, scalable alternatives to synthetic materials.” – Dr. Chad Brewer, Executive Director, Cotton Foundation.