Transcriber: Zacharias Athanasakis Reviewer: Peter Van de Ven
For almost 15 years,
I have been researching the fashion industry
and in particular
the sustainability charges against the industry.
The fashion industry currently is under attack
for its business models, that promote overconsumption,
for its high carbon footprints,
and it’s vowing,
even under the UN Sustainable Development Goals,
to clean up its act.
Within the last two years, activism has raised a lot of awareness.
Brands and their subcontractors are changing operation,
and innovation is happening towards more sustainable fashion options.
And they’re dearly, dearly, needed in the industry
that has grown in volume and in type.
That growth, unfortunately,
has been based on the acceptance,
involvement,
support,
and even innovation
of petrochemical inputs.
Polyester is now the leading fabric, the leading input in all of our clothes.
Most of the clothes that we wear are no longer 100% anything -
unless they’re 100% polyester.
They’re probably blends.
They’re a combination of natural and manmade yarns.
The problem is
that as much as we like how they feel -
they’re very soft;
they’re very versatile; they’re stretchy;
they are even able to bring us things like e-textiles and smart clothing -
they’re not biodegradable,
they’re very toxic to produce,
and the versatility that allows us for wonderful and affordable creations
that have changed the way we see our image in this digital world
are actually produced in extremely toxic ways
with technologies that are half a century if not older than that,
that involve carcinogens and elements that are hard to treat,
almost impossible to filtrate,
and again, they’re producing a product, an end product
that is impossible to recycle.
What is happening in the fashion industry?
There’s investigations of the large scale of pollution
that is being created around a typical apparel complex.
Images from some documentaries
that are doing investigative reporting on the ground
are showing that there are entire aquifers, entire rivers
are being polluted as a function of fashion dying and coloring.
The images that I’m showing right now are from a documentary called “River Blue.”
Αnd activist Orsola de Castro says that in China,
you can tell the color of the season
by the color of the rivers.
They’re creating such large volumes of pollution
that you can see that folks who are living in those communities,
they have to use that water for subsistence agriculture,
for fishing
and bathing.
We don’t see this here.
We don’t see it as part of the fashionable advertising
that permeates our world.
We try to think that there's regulation that handles that kind of pollution.
And there is.
Regulation is something that is complex.
It’s a function of social and political dynamics
of the countries where production happens.
Right?
So, we like to think that governments are in charge of zoning,
of mandating filtration and purification systems.
We like to think that somebody else is handling the pollution,
but unfortunately, it’s not really happening,
because most of the pollution has been removed from where it started,
which is this area, really.
We are the birthplace of the global textile industry.
We build American industrialization
on the wings of the textile revolution here in the 1800s.
Now it’s moved to the developing world,
where developing countries, eager for investment,
are not prioritizing environmental stewardship
and allowing conglomerates to pollute,
using the existing technologies that are available to them
in order to attract investment and lift their people out of poverty.
And you can’t blame them.
This is what we call global environmental injustice.
We are moving toxic production
away from the wealthy citizens of the world
to the most vulnerable places that are looking for commerce
and economic development.
What activists are doing
and when they are investigating the outcome -
this is another documentary that just came out last year
from French documentary company Art,
and it’s “Fast fashion: the real cost of cheap clothing” -
is showing the public health catastrophe
that is occurring in these communities.
They’re filming kids being born with birth defects,
workers working in factories that are so dire in health conditions,
that have no public health, they have no clean water.
And you want to see the faces of the folks most impacted by that.
They’re the most vulnerable folks that we know.
They’re kids, they’re young people starting work in the factory
as children.
I want you to remember their faces.
It is important to think in terms of
“Who is making the yarn and then the fabric
and then the little blouse
that I just went into Target
to buy something that I wasn’t looking for.
Oh, look at it. It’s on sale!
It ended up in my cart.”
This kind of commerce that I’m describing is the backbone of modern retail.
It’s called impulse purchasing.
And psychologists are liking it to a clinical condition of addiction.
We all do it.
I don’t know if we realize it.
How many times have you gone into Kmart for a greeting card
and wheeled out a cart full of clothing?
Every time.
Right?
Think about their faces.
Think about the fact that even when it comes to regulation,
we're still dealing with it here.
We have moved that pollution away from our backyards.
We call it, in public policy, “Not in my backyard,”
because our backyard is this.
This is Ashland, Massachusetts, right down the street,
known as a cancer cluster.
One of the first Superfund sites in America
of the Nyanza coloring plant,
that, according to local records,
supposedly was mitigated as early as the seventies.
But guess what?
Pollution stayed in the land up until the mid 2000s.
There were all these cases of particular sarcoma
that local residents were suscepting to,
that is very aggressive, untreatable.
And when some of the local political elite folks became ill,
they started an activism.
So the cancer cluster story came out,
they revisited records
and wanted to know what can be done to educate the folks
that are actually living in these toxic communities.
This is just one of them.
There’s Superfund sites all over the south coast.
I live in New Bedford. Half of the town is a Superfund site.
Right?
So what they did is engage the Harvard School of Design,
where Dan Borrelli, the director of it, told the story in lights.
So this is the public works, the street lights,
where for years now in Ashland at night,
the town is lit,
and there is a map at a community center
where folks are being told what the colors mean
and what the colors are showing the residents of town
is where the concentrations of pollutants are
so that they know where it’s safe to let their children play,
where it’s safe to plan a community garden.
Who is doing this for the people of Bangladesh?
Of the communities in India that we just saw around viscose factories?
And more recently,
the largest growing textile production hubs in North Korea,
where Chinese conglomerates are now exporting their own textile pollution
and their own not-in-my-backyard policies
to even more vulnerable and less regulated lands.
We need to think about that
because when we know as a society that this is a problem that’s occurring,
we look for solutions.
Academics, activists, scientists,
they are looking for solutions.
What can we do to lower that toxicity,
that we’re not poisoning communities around the world beyond recognition?
And there are solutions out here, and they’re hyper-local.
One of them is a new business model in the fashion industry
known as upcycling,
where retailers are using
unsold merchandise, unused product,
and turning it into a new product.
Innovators like Refried Apparel, right here in New Bedford,
this is part of their product line.
That company has created a business model
on having contracts with major sport franchises.
You know, sports teams are always selling you merchandise
with their logos on?
Well, they can sell all of it.
And when it’s not sold, they give it to Refried Apparel.
And Refried makes it into new apparel and makes it into accessories
and even home products.
And you know what?
We can support that
because we can make a conscious choice
if we know what options we have
to not go to Kmart or Walmart or any of the box stores
and impulse purchase
but to say, you know what, I want to support those innovators,
I'm going to go on their website.
The beauty of technology is
that now it’s allowed us to be not in a retail outlet to buy stuff.
We can make a choice of where to order it, how to order it,
and how to consciously change our behavior
so that we can lower our own carbon footprint
and we can support innovators.
So innovators are happening.
Innovation is happening on the retail level,
but it’s also happening on the production level.
And these are also local folks, folks that are now still working in labs,
raising capital,
and they’re looking for our awareness.
Companies like Ever New, out of Seattle,
that is pioneering a whole new way to recycle clothes,
because as much as what you’re hearing
about recycling and the promotion of it,
you never hear the actual truth that you cannot recycle clothing.
There’s only one technology that currently operates at scale,
and that’s Renewcell, out of Sweden,
that has finally developed a way to recycle denim, and only certain denim,
to only turn it into Circulose,
which is their product,
that then needs to be turned into viscose.
And those pictures from India, that was a viscose factory.
So it's not really a solution, but still, it's the only technology out there.
They’re working on better technologies.
They’re raising capital. They’re building up to scale.
But when I talk to the managers of these companies
and in certain cases of the owners of these innovators,
and I said, “I’m going to give this talk. Send me some free clothes” -
it wouldn’t be fashion unless someone is asking for free clothes -
I said, “I would like to model what you’re making,”
you know what they told me?
We don’t have any yet. We’re still raising capital.
We’re still in the lab stages. We’re still bringing it up to scale.
Now Natural Fibre Welding
is the only one with product,
but unfortunately they make fake leather.
Now they have a product of wallets.
And I wasn’t going to walk around with a big wallet.
But they were the only ones, out of Peoria, Illinois,
that right now are developing a technology
where you can replace the plastic binding in fabric and material
with completely natural inputs.
So these are plant-based and mushroom-based product,
and they’re coming.
And we need to be excited about that innovation
because what we need to remember is that the culprit in fashion production
is the use of petrochemical inputs.
Yarn is plastic.
We think in terms of lowering our plastic consumption
across product lines,
and in society, we think in terms of climate change
is what we can do with our purchasing habits
In order for us to make purchases
that support businesses that are lowering their carbon footprint.
We can choose to have solar panels on our homes,
we can choose to bicycle to work,
we choose to use cloth bags and not plastic bags at the grocery store.
So I need you to remember that, unfortunately,
currently, your clothes are disposable plastics.
They’re made from the same material
as the plastic bags that you’re not using in the grocery store.
You need to know that
so that every time that you make a purchase of an outfit,
you ask questions.
“What’s in it?”
“Is there reclaimed material in it?”
Or “Do I really, really need it?”
Thank you.
(Applause)