Category: Plastics_CN Shopping_Clothing_Fashion_CN Water_Pollution_CN

Every day, Costa Rica produces four tonnes of plastic waste and a fifth of it ends up in rivers and on beaches.

To tackle this problem, a company called Bionic dispatches teams to collect the garbage, then transforms it into high-performing Gore-Tex fabrics.

To celebrate the 150th anniversary of its famous 501 jeans, Levi’s announced the release of a new plant-based 501 Jean.

If you’re slightly confused by this, you’re not alone. After all, a typical pair of 501s isn’t made of leather or any other animal product. It’s cotton. In fact, its label says, “100% cotton.”

The event, hosted by The Rockefeller Brothers Fund at New York City’s iconic Morgan Library, featured a discussion by Ugandan climate-justice activist, UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador and Nobel Peace Prize nominee Vanessa Nakate; Eco-Age founder Livia Firth MBE and Policy Director George Harding-Rolls; Harjeet Singh, Global Engagement Director to the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative; Rachel Kitchin, Corporate Climate Campaigner at Stand.earth; and Cameren Bullins, Program Associate for Democratic Practice-Global Challenges and Sustainable Development at The Rockefeller Brothers Fund — in front of a full audience comprising business leaders, civil society, philanthropists, UN delegates, climate activists and key fashion industry figures — on fashion’s over-reliance on fossil fuels.

Every morning, thousands of construction workers in Qatar start their day by soaking their uniforms in water. The two-minute ritual kickstarts an important process: When the workers are toiling outside — often at summer temperatures above 120F (48C) — their uniforms can cool skin temperature by as much as 8C (14F), for up to seven hours.

We believe in ethical manufacturing and recycled materials. Because old water bottles and fishing nets look better on you than they do clogging landfills and polluting oceans.
We believe health and wellness come in many shapes and sizes, and that representation matters.

We believe in being transparent, taking care of the people who make your clothes, and never putting our bottom line before what’s best for the planet.

Shirts made from the same polymer as plastic bags. Jeans infused with crushed jade. Garments constructed using computerized knitting for superior ventilation, or made with cooling technology designed for astronauts by NASA.

An explosion in the use of inexpensive, petroleum-based materials has transformed the fashion industry, aided by the successful rebranding of synthetic materials like plastic leather (once less flatteringly referred to as “pleather”) into hip alternatives like “vegan leather,” a marketing masterstroke meant to suggest environmental virtue.

Inside a large industrial building in Jamaica, Queens, I sighed, taking a quick break from ripping staples off of fabric. My back was to the windows, but even if I wanted to look outside, I’d have a problem. A mountain of trash bags blocked any view, each stuffed with thousands of tiny fabric scraps from fashion companies around New York City. I had signed up to sort through the material, but after working for three long hours alongside five other volunteers, we had barely made it through five bags. Dozens remained. I was at the headquarters of FabScrap, a textile recycling company that processes material leftover from fashion production. They’re just one of many well-intentioned textile recycling companies that have bumped up against a painful reality: There is simply too much clothing to process. As it stands, 84 percent of all unwanted clothes end up in landfills, according to Newsweek. In New York City alone, this comes to about 400 million pounds thrown away annually—6 percent of the city’s waste stream. Traditionally, unwanted secondhand clothes are sent abroad, but some countries have started to reject the goods. Technology to transform the old clothes into new items isn’t ready yet, so many recyclers and designers are focusing on something else: getting consumers to buy less. “We have to educate consumers about the mindless consumption being forced down our throats,” says Adam Baruchowitz, the founder of Wearable Collections, a secondhand clothing retailer. “We need to be getting people to think twice about how quickly they consume things.”

At this year’s Consumer Technology Association conference, Samsung — maker of phones, laptops, refrigerators and more — announced a lineup of sustainability initiatives for its home appliances. Among the initiatives was a collaboration with outdoor clothing retailer Patagonia. That may seem like an unexpected collaboration, Mark Newton, head of corporate sustainability at Samsung Electronics America, told TriplePundit, but when it comes to tackling microplastics, he said it makes perfect sense.

Toward is a new fashion retailer that’s taking an unusual approach to promoting sustainability. The company is limiting the number of orders customers can place to twelve per year. Its goal is to encourage shoppers to think intentionally about the purchases they make, to think ahead to what they might need, and to discourage unnecessary overconsumption.