Columbia University, in partnership with the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT), part of the State University of New York (SUNY), has received an $11.5 million grant from the Bezos Earth Fund, a $10 billion initiative by Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez Bezos to fund climate and nature programming. Columbia and FIT will use the grant to advance their PRISM platform, a framework to develop a high-performance textile fiber grown by bacteria fed on agricultural waste, which will require no land, be compostable at the end-of-life, and produce no microplastic pollution.

PRISM, which stands for Precision, Regenerative, Intelligent, Scalable Materials, is a five-year research program that will address key scientific and technical bottlenecks in control, predictability, and scalability in the production of bacterial cellulose fiber, a biomaterial that can match the strength and elasticity of synthetic fibers like polyester but will also be compostable. Using bioengineering, synthetic biology, theory, machine learning, data science, and textile science, PRISM is focused on materials innovation for the fashion industry and beyond.

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