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.

Watch the video and find out more about the fashion industry's pollution problem at TED.