Fashion has a pollution problem -- can biology fix it? | Natsai Audrey Chieza

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4.1 • 11.9K Ratings

🗓️ 29 November 2017

⏱️ 13 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Natsai Audrey Chieza is a designer on a mission -- to reduce pollution in the fashion industry while creating amazing new things to wear. In her lab, she noticed that the bacteria Streptomyces coelicolor makes a striking red-purple pigment, and now she's using it to develop bold, color-fast fabric dye that cuts down on water waste and chemical runoff, compared with traditional dyes. And she isn't alone in using synthetic biology to redefine our material future; think -- "leather" made from mushrooms and superstrong yarn made from spider-silk protein. We're not going to build the future with fossil fuels, Chieza says. We're going to build it with biology.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This TED Talk features designer Nafai Audrey Chiesa,
0:04.0	recorded live at TED at BCG 2017.
0:08.0	You're watching the life cycle of a streptomyces CD color.
0:13.0	It's a strain of bacteria that's found in the soil
0:16.0	where it lives in a community with other organisms decomposing organic matter.
0:23.1	Seedy color is a beautiful organism,
0:26.8	a powerhouse for synthesizing organic chemical compounds.
0:30.8	It produces an antibiotic called Ectino-Hodin,
0:35.0	which ranges in color from blue to pink and purple,
0:37.4	depending on the acidity of its environment.
0:41.6	That it produces this pigment molecule sparked my curiosity and led me to collaborate closely with CD color.
0:45.0	It is an unlikely partnership,
0:47.2	but it's one that completely transformed my practice as a materials designer.
0:52.2	From it, I understood how nature was going to completely revolutionize
0:56.8	how we design and build our environments,
0:59.7	and that organisms like CD-Colour
1:01.7	were going to help us grow our material future.
1:05.5	So what's wrong with things as they are?
1:09.2	Well, for the last century,
1:10.6	we've organized ourselves around fossil fuels.
1:13.7	Arguably, the most valuable material system we have ever known.
1:16.9	We are tethered to this resource,
	...

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