Transcriber: Rhonda Jacobs Reviewer: David DeRuwe
So I have a confession to make.
I have a hard time getting dressed in the morning.
It never used to be this way,
but a few years ago, I discovered an oil spill in my closet:
polyesters, acrylics, nylons.
How did all these fossil fuels seep into my clothing?
Now, as a career marine biologist,
I’ve spent 30 years in and around the ocean,
and I’ve seen many, many of my study sites filling up with plastic trash,
and many of the animals I love so dearly.
But my clothing?
Did my clothing have something to do with the plastic pollution crisis?
Well, I started to pull on some threads,
and I found that 60% of our clothing is actually petroleum based.
And the fashion industry is responsible for 8% of greenhouse gas emissions.
And when we wash and dry these polyester clothes,
they shed trillions of tiny little microfibers into the environment.
Thirty-five percent of the oceans’ microplastics come from our clothing.
And a little closer to home,
it’s in our salt;
it’s in our beer -
hmm, that one really hurts -
it’s in our babies’ poop.
What?!
We’re even breathing these fibers into our lungs.
But they’re so tiny. They’re plastic. What difference does it make?
Unfortunately, peer-reviewed study after peer-reviewed study
shows that these little microfibers sop up heavy metals,
as well as other organic pollutants like PCBs and DDTs,
and these are linked to cancers, immune dysfunction
and a host of serious health concerns.
And there’s a heck of a lot of them.
A study out of the University of Newcastle added it up and calculated
that over the course of our lifetimes,
each one of us will eat an estimated 40 pounds of plastic.
Now, this is not the fiber-rich diet we’re looking for.
(Laughter)
So the more I started to unravel my closet,
the more entangled I became.
What about cotton?
Cotton’s biodegradable, right?
Yes, but when grown at industrial scale,
conventional cotton is a thirsty, fossil-fueled crop,
drenched in petroleum-based pesticides and herbicides.
Thirsty cotton crops nearly drained the Aral Sea in Central Asia,
leaving behind a dried-up lake bed
that releases petroleum-laden chemicals into the atmosphere
that have sickened nearby residents
and ended up all the way down in Antarctica in the blood of penguins.
No, not even penguins are safe from our clothing choices.
When we dye and finish our garments,
all those nasty chemicals get into our freshwater systems.
On top of that,
many of our garment workers don’t earn a living wage
and have miserable working conditions, as evidenced by the Rana Plaza disaster,
which, when it collapsed, killed 1,100 workers.
And, ugh, screw it! I’m just going to go naked!
(Laughter)
But then I remember the words of Mark Twain, who wrote,
“Naked people have little or no influence on society.”
And I think, “Ahh, if I’m going to do anything about ocean plastics,
I think I need a little bit more than my birthday suit.”
So this got me thinking:
What did we wear before the oil spill?
Before fast fashion and social media hijacked our shopping experiences
and convinced us all to buy 400% more clothing
than we did 20 years ago?
Well, to answer that question, we’ve got to do a little bit of time traveling.
We’ll go back in time,
you know, back to when we had our built-in wardrobe of fur.
And then about a million and a half years ago, we lost that fur -
our personal hirsute, we lost that -
and needed to don some new duds.
And we came up with ingenious ways of clothing ourselves.
About 8,000 years ago,
we’d come up with felt from wool of sheep as well as cotton and hemp,
and by 5,000 years, we had linen from flax as well as silk from worms.
It wasn’t until the 1950s and the advent of nylons
that petroleum oozed into fashion
and kept spreading to become a huge problem.
Now, can’t we use that same inventiveness
that gave us polyesters and acrylics and nylons
and figure out something more biologically friendly
to wrap our hearts and our parts in?
Well, that question has put me on an incredible odyssey
where I’ve met the most amazing friends,
like my nonprofit partners Carroll Dunham and Lesli Robertson
with Around the World in 80 Fabrics.
Together we are meeting the most sensational inspired group of makers,
across the globe.
From every corner, from the Arctic to Asia to South America to everywhere in between.
Working with the mind-blowing diversity of raw materials.
And it is this wondrous journey
that’s restoring my faith in humanity and my dreams for the future.
Weaning ourselves off petroleum-based clothing -
it’s not only possible, it’s a massive business opportunity,
and it’s going to be a win-win for the life on this planet.
Plus, it's incredibly urgent.
Oil and gas are making up what they’re losing to renewables -
they’re making it up in plastic production.
And by 2040, it’s estimated we’ll have 800 million tons of plastic waste,
twice what we have right now.
And that’s waste that doesn’t degrade for hundreds and hundreds of years.
But there are so many exciting alternatives.
So let’s dive into the world of biofabrication first.
So this world filled with brilliant fabric alchemists
harnessing the power of biology to conjure all manner of new materials.
Like, for instance, mycelium.
This is the subterranean Infrastructure of mushrooms
that can be molded into everything from packaging to shoes to garments.
Or what about pineapple leaves and banana trees
that are being made into vegan leathers and backpacks?
And we’re also harnessing the power of of microbes, bacteria,
yeast and microalgae,
as these fermenting living factories that can conjure new materials,
and fed off a mind-blowing diversity of feedstocks
from agricultural waste and coconuts to leaf litter,
to the CO2 emissions waste from steel mills.
And much, much more.
All these companies are scaling up to meet the growing demand
for non-petroleum, ethically-sourced textiles.
The vegan leather market alone is set to be worth about $90 billion by 2025.
This is a huge market.
Another key benefit of many of these startups
is that they can really reduce the length of their supply chains,
putting the the sourcing of their raw materials
next to their manufacturing,
next to their centers of demand, which reduces miles,
as well as infuses job opportunities and new skills into local economies.
Really a win-win.
But these high-tech innovations, they’re just a part of the story.
What I find equally exciting and underappreciated
are the millions of small-scale makers
that have tapped into Earth’s existing biodiversity
to create fabrics that are enriching and restoring their environments
as well as their cultures.
So let’s meet a couple of them:
Here we have Fred Mutebi and Aloyzious Luwemba.
These Ugandan bark cloth makers are preserving an 800-year-old tradition
of harvesting bark cloth from the Mutuba tree.
Now, these trees can be harvested annually up to 80 to 100 years.
The trees can be grown in polyculture with eight other crops
like bananas and coffee.
They combat deforestation; they sequester carbon.
And when worn against the skin,
this bark cloth reduces the spread of MRSA, 95%.
Plus, it’s inspiring new generations
to revere their cultural heritage and make a good living off it.
And what about Devi Maya Thami,
who gathers nettle and makes a nettle fabric
which is stronger than cotton, linen and hemp;
can grow on otherwise unarable land;
doesn’t need pesticides or herbicides;
and is giving a livelihood to hundreds of farmers throughout Nepal and beyond.
Or how about Charlie Mallon and Helen Keyes,
who are reviving Irish linen making outside of Belfast,
which used to be the linen capital of the world In the 1700s
before cotton took over?
Flax doesn’t require any irrigation, no pesticides.
It’s restoring biodiversity, like the linnet bird.
And the older generations still know how to work the machinery,
so their knowledge and self-worth is being woven back into the social fabric
and making them feel less ostracized by the today’s digital natives.
Ever heard of qiviut?
Qiviut is an incredible fiber that weaves together many Arctic cultures.
It comes from musk ox,
which shed about five pounds of it every summer.
And it’s super soft, eight times warmer than wool.
And Elaine Moses from the Yupik tribe
is able to weave her native designs into qiviut garments
for the Oomingmak collective in Anchorage,
make a good living
and maintain her ties to her ancestral homes
in the islands off of Alaska,
which unfortunately are becoming increasingly uninhabitable
due to climate change.
So popping down into South America, let’s meet Nilda Callañaupa Alvarez,
a master Quechua weaver
who’s created a collective with hundreds of modern and traditional Andean weavers
that are creating beautiful textiles,
naturally dyed,
like what I’m wearing today is from Nilda’s collective.
In her collective, she says:
Every piece of cloth ties together with an endless thread
the emotional life of her people.
Staying in South America, we'll move up to Ecuador to meet Daniela Lopez,
who is learning from her father, Fausto Lopez,
how to weave the toquilla palm into Panama hats, the famous Panama hats,
which actually are an Ecuadorian treasure and a UNESCO Cultural Intangible Heritage.
The toquilla palm is important
to nearly every single Indigenous culture in Ecuador
for its food, fiber and building materials.
And moving up into Central America, we can revisit cotton.
Not all cotton is bad.
There’s some 50 varieties of cotton.
Some don’t need hardly the same amount of water,
and they grow in forests like the Coyuchi cotton,
and provide livelihood for hundreds of farmers throughout Mexico.
So I’m particularly excited about the fibershed movement,
which develops regional regenerative fiber systems
and works with farmers all the way through to distributors
to manage the full lifecycle of garments.
Now, here in Boston,
be sure to check out the Southeastern New England Fibershed chapter.
Very exciting things happening there.
So these are just a few examples. There are skeins more.
Through the millennia, nearly every human culture has had a textile tradition,
and many of these makers still hold deep ecological knowledge
of how to farm their land through regenerative practices
and sustainably herd their animals,
and actually nourish and restore their soil, water and their air.
And granted, many of them may seem small scale,
but you add them up
and they have a disproportionately vital role to play
in preserving not only our cultural diversity,
but also our biological diversity.
So, yes, I still have an oil spill in my closet.
But it’s not getting any larger, and it’s a work in progress.
And now I buy less. I wear a secondhand.
Pretty much everything I’m wearing today is secondhand.
I treat my clothes more gently and with a little bit more respect,
and when I do need to buy something new,
well, then I ask myself a series of questions:
What was the item’s raw material?
Will that raw material degrade in my lifetime?
Who made it, and how?
Does the brand support my ethics?
Do I really need it?
Maybe it will be a little bit more expensive,
but when you add up the cost to the environment and to the workers -
and it’ll last longer than a fast-fashion item -
maybe that price doesn’t seem that high.
As consumers, we can have a huge voice in what we choose to clothe ourselves in.
And from bottom up, the momentum is growing.
We can really clean up fashion with our clothing choices.
And from the top down, there's great momentum building as well.
The U.N. Environmental Assembly just met in Nairobi in March
and passed a resolution to create a legally binding treaty
to stop global plastic pollution.
This was 175 countries that got together to sign this resolution.
The U.N. has the Fashion Climate Act,
which aims to have net zero by 2050.
In the U.S.,
the Biden administration just passed the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act.
And in France, all new washing machines have to have a filter by 2025.
Oh, and just a little ways from here, New York has the Fashion Act,
which is requiring large companies
to open up and tidy up and clean up their supply chains.
And that is critical.
Because you can unravel all the benefits of having good raw material harvesting
by having a poor supply chain
with toxic manufacturing processes and miserable worker conditions.
And there’s incredibly good tools right now
for helping to open up that supply chain
and make that visible and clean it up.
The Open Apparel Registry
is using big data to create open supply maps,
and we can now trace raw materials through their DNA,
as well as weave in luminescent fibers
to be able to track raw materials all the way through to the runway.
So the tools are out there for helping clean up our supply chains.
And a really exciting thing is happening in the online world
with digital fashion and NFTs,
which is which is helping to catalyze
incredible creativity in the fashion world.
Now, if we can just figure out how to reduce the energy expenditure of NFTs
and tie in these developments into our analog world,
we’ll make a lot of progress,
but Web3 is making great headway on that.
So that’s a space to watch.
There’s no shortage of amazing tools to help us clean up our closets.
But this is the big message:
There’s no one hero fabric that will save us all.
Instead, there is a planetful of biodiverse solutions
and four billion years of living solutions to draw from.
We live on an amazingly beautiful planet with so many options,
and we can have a beautifully attired future if we choose to wear it.
So let’s dress for this occasion and use our clothing
not only to express our personalities,
but also to wrap ourselves in meaning, in compassion,
and in a purpose much larger than ourselves.
The ocean, the world and our kiddyumps will thank us.
(Applause)