So, scientists have been warning us that we're wreaking havoc on our planet.
We're told about how our soil is getting deteriorated
and our fresh water supply, as we just heard, is getting polluted.
We're told about all of these problems,
and we're told how it's going to impact us.
It's not just our polar ice caps that are going to be melting,
but it's going to impact our coastal cities.
We're told about all of this,
but then we're not really given many options
on what we might be able to do about it.
We're told to recycle, use fuel-efficient cars,
maybe turn the lights off when we're leaving the room.
We feel powerless against this issue.
And it also seems
as if it's the responsibility of government to take care of.
And yet we know that government is in gridlock.
So now, what are we left to do?
Well, what if I told you that we actually do hold the power?
And that power is what we wear every day.
It's our clothing.
Because what people haven't told you
is under the radar,
the apparel industry has actually become
the second most polluting industry in the world.
So, I'd like to talk today about how we got to this place
and how we can take back control and use our power
to both answer the question, "What am I going to wear today?"
and the world's more pressing problems.
So, it's the leadership of Ikea that recently said
that we have reached peak stuff.
And that is certainly true when it comes to our clothing.
You see here, in the 1960s,
the average American invested in 25 new pieces of clothing every year.
A generation later, today, and we purchase
three times as much clothing as we did in the 60s.
So how did this come about?
Did we just decide one day,
"Oh yes, I want to purchase a lot more clothes of less quality.
Sign me up for that"?
It didn't happen that way.
It started as trade barriers actually came down,
which created financial incentives
for brands to move their production overseas.
And this generally created a trend for cheaper and cheaper clothing
using cheaper materials and cheap labor.
Meanwhile, these fast-fashion companies -
and that's what this industry is called -
these fast-fashion companies had huge marketing budgets
to try to convince all of us
that their cheap clothing was somehow covetable.
So we bought more and more.
But more isn't always more.
You see, in the 1960s,
when we were investing in 25 pieces of clothing -
and they really were investments because at that time,
we spent over 10% of our salary on clothing every year -
95% of American clothing, what we wore, was American-made.
Today, it is less than 2%.
And that drop actually represents an 80% drop
in apparel-manufacturing jobs in this country.
So, I'm sure we all have our own experiences
of dealing with fast fashion and experiencing fast fashion.
I have my own.
Having come from Minnesota, I remember going to New York when H&M first opened.
And I was so excited, I have to admit.
I loved the size of the store and the lights,
and the smell was kind of crazy,
and there was this blasting music,
and I just ate it up.
And I bought clothes by the bagful.
And I didn't really think that I - maybe knew what I wanted,
but it didn't really seem to matter, because the prices were just so cheap.
I mean, a jumpsuit for less than $20!
But what I ultimately found out is that all of that cheap clothing
has huge consequences
both for the environment and for the people making our clothing.
So let's take a look at why that is.
So, it turns out that the fast-fashion industry
is fuelled by a new type of fiber: polyester.
You can see there, there is a line:
H&M opens in New York in 2001 - that's when I was visiting -
and you can see, at that stage, that was when cotton was no longer king.
And just take a look at the rise of polyester
as fast fashion has come onto the scene.
Polyester, for those that don't know,
is a polluting plastic made from fossil fuels.
And it's now in over half of our clothing.
Let's talk about why that might be an issue.
There are four primary things that we need to think about
when we think about this rise in polyester.
First of all, it's non-biodegradable.
Consider this: every piece of polyester that has ever been produced
is still on the planet today.
So, when you think about the fact
that there are 150 billion new pieces of clothing
being added onto the planet every year,
that's a lot of plastic that's not going away.
Second: these polyester fabrics, when you wash them,
thousands of these microplastics are shedding,
and they're entering our water systems and ultimately our oceans.
And what's happening is that the fish are consuming these microplastics
and we are consuming the fish.
There was a recent study in California,
and they went to the fish markets in California.
And they found out that actually
one in four of the fish that are sold at the markets
contain these microplastics.
And researchers are saying that while the big plastics you can see,
the greatest pollution is actually these microfibers.
Third: have you noticed that recently, you have been sweating more?
This is not just a coincidence,
because polyester, it turns out, is non-breathable,
unlike the natural fibers.
So, what that means is that heat is trapped into your body
and you sweat more.
Finally, polyester is extremely energy-intensive to create.
Just how energy-intensive?
Take a look at this graph.
This is showing the relative energy-intensiveness
to create each type of material.
This linen sweater that I am wearing
requires just [one eighth] of the amount of energy
it does to create polyester.
So, now we have a tripling of the amount of clothing that we buy,
this clothing is no longer made from natural materials
but incredibly energy-intensive polyester,
and now we have to think about where this clothing is being made.
Take a look at this graph.
This graph shows the total apparel imports into the US by volume.
You will see here that China is actually our biggest trading partner on this -
a little more than 40% of our clothing is coming from China.
Remember this graph,
and as I show you this one,
take a look at this map.
This is a map
of the energy-intensiveness of the power grids
of where we're getting our clothing from.
Consider this:
in China, 3/4 of the energy supply is coming from coal.
So when we are churning away all of that clothing,
it's coming from the dirtiest form of energy,
which is coal.
Even in the United States, which itself is not the cleanest power grid,
it's not 77% as in China, it is about 33%.
So, now we know we're making too much clothing,
it's being made of a very high-intensity product
in a place that is taking up a lot of energy.
And all of this is adding up to the fact that the apparel industry
is responsible for 10% of the total carbon output
for the entire world.
To put that into some perspective,
that is five times more carbon output
than all airline travel combined.
But that's just the environmental impact.
Now we have to consider who is making our clothes
and what is happening to them.
If you remember where our clothing is coming from,
now we're going to look at the Department of Labor
and where they are finding forced labor and child labor.
And you're going to see that they match up almost exactly.
It is believed that one in six people around the world
work in some part of the apparel industry.
So, it employs a lot of people.
About 80% of those people are women.
And 98% of them are not receiving a living wage.
What that means is they are getting locked into a channel of poverty.
So, that's the bad stuff.
But it seems, in all of this,
that no one is really winning.
Nobody in the supply chain, no one in the value chain
is really winning,
except for maybe two CEOs of fast-fashion companies.
And perhaps nobody is winning - even us, the citizen consumer.
Because if you take the interest in tidying up
and the best-seller Marie Kondo's The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up,
you see this explosive growth in interest in cleaning all of that up.
And I share that personal interest.
After living over a decade with my fast-fashion habit,
I was so tired of shopping all the time and never having anything to wear,
my closet in New York bursting open with clothes,
always trying to struggle with what I'm going to wear every day.
So, one day I decided I had had enough.
And I wanted to understand:
What exactly in my closet did I enjoy wearing?
And why did I enjoy wearing it?
So, I was digging through things and looking at tags
and I started to google.
Really aggressively.
And what I found out is that I am actually not alone in this pursuit.
If you type in "is linen" in Google, it actually autocompletes to
"is linen cotton?"
I asked that question myself.
And now I know that linen is not cotton.
Linen - the sweater that I am wearing today -
comes from flax - that's the plant on the left -
and cotton is that thing on the right.
So, I'm googling away,
and it really started for me with a personal desire to buy better.
So, I started to search for ethical and sustainable clothing.
But what I ended up finding, after doing further research,
is that those words are really unregulated.
So, companies can say they are ethical,
and they can show a picture of their factory,
but the picture is hiding a lot of things.
First of all, the picture doesn't say anything about transparency.
Transparency is when a brand is willing to name
the factories that they are working with,
allowing third parties - customers, the media -
to actually research whether what the brand is claiming
is actually what is taking place.
Second, the pictures do not show wages or healthcare coverage.
And when you think back about how 98% of the apparel industry
is not receiving a living wage,
that's an incredibly important statistic if you're wanting to shop ethically.
A picture also doesn't show shadow factories.
Shadow factories is a situation that is happening in the apparel industry
as we have been really going on this race to the bottom
when a brand will meet with what is called a "five-star factory"
and they might be taking pictures or doing audits of that factory,
but it turns out actually that to get the prices
that the brand is requiring
or the speed in which they need that product,
they're outsourcing that production to another factory.
It's called the "shadow factories,"
which is where really the production is taking place.
And oftentimes, these shadow factories
have much lower labor and living standards.
And finally, a picture is not showing material sustainability.
It's not showing whether it's organic cotton,
and that turns out to be incredibly important
because cotton is the fourth largest pesticide-consuming crop.
That's why we're having a hard time with the nutrition of our soil.
And it's not showing whether the dye stuff
is actually being handled appropriately.
So, it turns out that not only is the apparel industry
responsible for 10% of carbon output,
it's also the second greatest polluter of fresh water globally.
And that's because dye houses in the developing world,
90% of them dye their products
and then release those effluents, release that dye stuff
directly into local freshwater supplies.
So, as I was doing all of this research,
my research entered a Google document
and I just became really frustrated by the whole thing.
I became frustrated because I saw while we had this interest in food
and we now had organic food options
and we had farm-to-table restaurants,
there really wasn't a resource that was putting all of this stuff together.
And as I was putting these pieces together,
I just saw how huge the problem was.
And so, it was really that frustration
that became the impetus to create Zady.
I wanted a place that distilled that information
and provided an alternative.
So, along with a researcher,
we translated that disparate information on the Google doc
to a plan on how we can actually create sustainable clothing.
Because there isn't an organic standard in the apparel industry.
There aren't the equivalent of LEED-certified factories,
so we really had to do it all from scratch.
And this is what we came up with.
It's called the "new standard."
First of all, we think about user-centered design.
A common theme in this fast fashion is that it's all about what can be sold to us
and the marketing that can be done to us,
but unlike technology,
it's really not designed for us at all.
And so, that's the most important thing:
that we're thinking about
what is somebody doing in their day, where are they going,
and what is the cut and material that is going to fit them best.
And then we use natural materials and we work directly with our suppliers
from the farm all the way through the supply chain.
And that's important, because 90% of brands
actually don't know where their material is coming from.
Finally, we have an open-door policy with our manufacturers,
and we do all of our production domestically.
In that way, we can see whether our production
is actually taking place in the place that we've contracted with.
So, our idea with the "new standard" and creating the Zady collection
was to show an alternative,
that we really can love our clothes again.
And that brings me back to us.
The citizen consumer.
Because what I have realized in all of this
is that we hold the power.
And if we see ourselves as citizen consumers,
and if we vote with our dollars,
we can change the industry
because they're just following what we're doing.
And so, as a citizen consumer,
these are some of the things that you can do.
First, just check the tags; that's where it started with me.
Understand where your clothing is coming from
and what it is made out of.
That already can advance things a lot.
Second, check the seams of the clothing.
In a lot of fast fashion, if you turn it inside out,
even in the dressing room before you have even left the store,
those seams are already coming apart.
So you can really see
whether this is something that's going to last a long time.
Third and most importantly,
love what you buy.
There's so much marketing dollars
being used to convince us that we like something
that we don't really get to focus on what is our style,
what do we really like, what do we really enjoy.
If we focus on loving what we buy,
we're going to end up buying less and enjoying it better.
And finally, as a citizen consumer,
you have the power to ask questions.
You have the right to ask questions.
Ask if the material is organic.
Ask what the names of the factories are.
Ask if the mills are certified -
are they dealing with their dye and water appropriately?
And think of your purchases in terms of cost per wear.
Think of it like an accountant would think of these things.
In that way, you're not stuck just on the price tag,
but you can see your clothing as an investment in the long term.
Because this chaotic and polluting and unjust system
is really entirely within our hands to control.
And what we as consumer citizens choose to purchase
dictates what direction the industry goes.
If we use our dollars to support that effort,
to support slow fashion,
we might find that we feel better in our clothes,
and we'll be using our power to clean up the planet.
Thanks.
(Applause)