S2 EP9: The Afterlife of Clothing Feat. Liz Ricketts

[Music] This episode is brought to you by Index. I like to describe it as the LinkedIn of the fashion industry, but better. It's a rolodex of all talent working in the fashion industry. A platform connecting the creative talent with the global brands. You create a profile with your portfolio and resume and it's horizontally transparent, so you can see all the job openings in the brands and the other talent as well. To log on to the index THENX.com. Welcome back to the cutting room floor. Today we are at the University of Cincinnati with someone who is very special to me. Liz Ricketts is a UC and Harvard graduate who after working in New York, relocated back to Cincinnati as a professor. The fashion program here at UC will really specifically under Liz's leadership as of the summer she's no longer there, but it is one of the most responsible fashion programs I personally have ever seen and I've been to a lot of fashion schools. Liz has made it a point to make sustainability a fixture in her curriculum. I mean for these students sustainability, it's not an option, it's not an elective, it's not a trend, it's just the only way to problem solve. And you know educators today, they're so undervalued and every once in a while, you get that one teacher who just changes your outlook on life forever and Liz, Liz is one of those teachers. I spent a few days here in Cincinnati and the genuine love and respect and patience she has for these students and the respect they have for her and return, it's just, it's a blifting best way I have to describe it. Today we talk about the afterlife of clothing. So many of us demand to know how and where our clothes are being made, but so few of us were asking where they go once we toss them out. There is a clothing waste crisis and it hugely, hugely talks about the single second hand clothing economy and so I'm here and honored to introduce Elizabeth or Liz to the cutting room floor. Here we go. Good afternoon, Liz. Hi Rachel. Thanks for having me. Let's start with what is sustainability and why do you think it's a difficult word for people to understand? So I think it's easiest to start with what it's not because I think we've been fed a specific narrative so sustainability is not a product and when I say that, I mean that your goodness cannot be expressed or achieved simply by buying something and I think that we have this narrative of voting with your dollar that it's possible for you to move your capital from one company to another and pat yourselves on the back and that's enough, but it's honestly just a big distraction to believe that you can change the world by buying better stuff. And so what is sustainability? I think the simplest way to think about sustainability is to think about meeting the needs of today without compromising the needs of tomorrow and very important that I said needs right we're not talking about desires we're not talking about wants we're not talking about greed and it's really important for we're going to be talking about today in terms of like what poverty actually is or what a deficit myth is because you know poverty exists because of greed and structural inequities not that's on a character flaw right yeah the reality is is that there is a crisis right now so why do you think it's a difficult word I know for myself I truly didn't understand it's almost like I over stood like it went over my head I think sustainability is a hard word to understand as it relates to fashion in part just because we don't have an industry worth sustaining so I think there's a lot of people are like why are we even using that word I think we put up more barriers like you're saying you were overthinking it I think we put up way more barriers than we need to enter this conversation about sustainability and that's where you see some of your people getting into these arguments over semantics in this the same old-fashioned community or in the climate change community when essentially they all agree on the same thing but I think at the end of the day it's just we need to do better we know we need to do better the argument which word to use is really very ego-driven and I think we really need to get away from that what matters is whatever word you want to use you need to approach it with urgency the easiest way for me to understand it was just that there's a crisis like full stop the reality is there is a tipping point now in the urgency it's forcing people to come to terms with it and you'd also said that we're kind of past the time for panels and conferences and discussions why is that so many conversations that happen at these conferences are really about semantics and less about doing something it's obviously is very complex but there's always simplicity on the other side of complexity so like the maximum that we always use is simply that we're producing more than we can consume we consume more than we can use and we waste so there's just too much clothing too much clothing not enough fashion too much clothing not enough culture too much clothing not enough innovation okay we've had this conversation we are extracting finite resources to produce an infinite amount of stuff and there's no way that we can just repeat that one more time yes we are extracting finite resources to produce an infinite amount of things yeah drive it home let's drive it home there's just no way that that computes and it doesn't compute on a million different levels right resources it also just doesn't compute on behavior it doesn't compute on attention span one of those resources that we have a finite amount of is attention and again this goes back to why I think the narrative around like voting with your dollar is problematic because the conversation around sustainability is asking people to expand their attention to let to an infinite degree we're saying as a conscious consumer you should know everything about where your products come from you should know like the farm that the fiber was grown on and we've diluted ourselves into believing that it is possible to solve this problem by doing literally anything except just stopping yeah yeah yeah yeah so sustainability is not a product meaning that when we're talking about this crisis we cannot shop our way out right as crisis right because with all the greenwash marketing that's the very approach that they're taking my introduction to understanding even a corner of sustainability the method in which I understood it was through waste can you speak a little bit about that and how the waste and especially in fashion is out of sight out of mind yeah totally so I think we have a very interesting relationship with fashion as like a commodity right fashion is very personal it's very emotional so it's not natural just cognitively you're not going to buy something that you love that is beautiful that is going to make you beautiful you can't have that thought and then in the same instance have this vision of you putting it in the trash it doesn't make sense oh they're not sharing the same there's a disconnect when we're shopping with the way that we believe fashion acts in our lives with the way we're actually behaving which is that we're barely wearing our stuff and we are putting it in the trash right we're buying more than we can possibly wear and for us waste has become like such a powerful touchpoint because I don't think people know how to articulate that dissonance but I think that once it's pointed out to them it's very obvious and also waste is just very personal to all of us like all of us stand in front of the closet and look at all the clothing that we have and say we have nothing to wear right we all understand that feeling then all of us feel overwhelmed like we have too much we don't want to wear that anymore what is an extrend etc it can be really dizzying so it's it's become a really easy entry point it has to talk about this conversation something that you said was that we've gone from looking at clothing as a durable good to now a disposable good where we used to pass it down right but clothing was once a currency excels were a currency and now we just create an abundance waste is an assumed part of the business as seen as the cost of doing business honestly so many things get marched down places like czara h&m they have new product in the store every two weeks let's just say brands across the board right high street luxury fast fashion who are creating product knowing they will not be able to sell at all knowing they're going to need to market down and even after they market down I mean this is why Burberry came under such fire for being exposed for you know literally burning a large part of their merchandise that was a easy way for me to build context into this because it's assumed that you're not going to sell it and that you're gonna it's terrifying I think brands do that because we've conflated abundance and excess and this idea of thriving so it's like you talk about this lot when you go into a grocery store if you go into a grocery store and there's empty shelves like it's an alarm for people like in the United States specifically can we go back expound on this you said that we have conflated abundance with excess correct and I think when I say that I think the best example is thinking about a grocery store so you walk into a grocery store if you see empty shelves you're like oh something is wrong yeah I'll probably go with something yeah what's happening there's not enough food that what are we gonna do so we have to overstock the shelves that leads to food base etc etc it's the same thing with fashion you walk into a your favorite retailer if the racks or empty, you would be like, oh, this is an impoverished situation, like this is not luxury. Why am I here? Right? And I think that is changing because we have e-commerce. And so there's a different way that we can start to think about, like scarcity versus abundance and excess. But it's just very ingrained in us to conflate these two things. And so you're right, it is built into the business model. And I think such an excellent example of what that looks like is the news story that came out last year that H&M had $4.3 billion worth of merchandise that had gone unsolved. I think it's impossible to imagine what $4.3 billion worth of merchandise actually looks like. So to us, that's very overwhelming and very alarming. And I think it's like, wow, that's the problem. But if you dig deeper what the real problem is or what is so scary about that story is that H&M still experienced economic growth. Like they still open new stores, they still made shareholders happy that year. And so what that means is that that $4.3 billion worth of lost merchandise, lost money, was not felt as a loss, which proves that not only is waste built into the business model, but it proves that the value placed on the labor and the resources, natural resources used to make our clothing is so low that when it doesn't sell, it's not a problem. And it's produced with reckless abandon. And you're right that we have found every excuse imaginable to convince ourselves that growth is good because we live in a capitalistic society, these people employ other people. There's technology being developed like there's all these external ways that we place our conscious on like, oh, they'll figure it out. And now we're looking at like recycling as our savior, new recycling technology, specifically. Again, as a society, we really need to question like where that comes from that we turn to recycling automatically instead of the reduce rate. Like we all grow up in school learning reduce reuse recycle. And before that now it should be refuse. Like that's a new end that people are adding. But we don't talk about reduce because that's I mean, that calls capitalism. It also calls in for accountability. It's like we know about it in theory, but we can put it in the back of our minds because we don't want to have to actually do anything about it. Yeah, it's out of sight out of mind and we've made that very easy for us here in the United States. But I think there's also like we have a spiritual relationship with this idea of recycling that I think needs to be talked about more and talked about a little bit in the book cradle to cradle. But I think what isn't better than like having a flawed garment, a flawed object, something that is no good, no one wants it. And it goes through this magical process and you know is reincarnated into something amazing and beautiful that we can use again. Like we that connects with us, right? We want that to be true. We want it to be ourselves. We want that to be our own narrative. So of course, it's super attractive and super seductive. We need recycling at this point because we've reached peak stuff. But it's not going to save us and recycling. We also can't recycle our way out of this problem if we also don't do the other things. If we don't refuse, if we don't reduce, if we don't reuse, right? We can't isolate one of them and think that it will make up for all of the other actions. So let's talk about the deficit myth. In short, what is the deficit myth? The deficit myth is simply it's the idea that you believe that someone else somewhere in the world needs death that you no longer want. People are poor. Some people still think that there are still people walking around this planet, but naked because they cannot get any access to clothing, which is just not true. That's just an idea that we promote. It's related to convenience culture. I just promote the dissonance, right? Yeah. That there are people who do not have clothes. And that's not true. But when you're seeing things on the television like for 10 cents a day, you can help this little African boy. It allows you to keep consuming and think, oh, I'll just give it to a goodwill. I'll give it away. It's very convenient. It's extremely convenient for us. It's very convenient for brands. Again, we accept this idea of access or that we have to mention or a closet because we assume that there's somewhere for it to go. So it removes the accountability. It encourages the saviorhood, the exceptional superiority mindset of the West or like you say, we go up on North. What I love what you said is that waste management as seen as it's like charity work, but in reality, it costs money. It's not goodwill, right? Like like the store. It's just so funny what we've convinced ourselves of. We drop off our clothes at like a goodwill for instance, when we think, you know, we buy into this narrative that they're going to automatically do good somewhere. They're going to make it somebody in need. And this is not goodwill's fault. We can talk about that later. But the point is is that it's absurd that we would ever think that that entire process of sorting our use stuff, most of us drop off our clothing and garbage bags. And then we have the audacity to say it's not garbage. We literally drop it off in a garbage bag. Like crumbled up, most people don't clean it. You're not irony. You're giving your worst stuff, you know. And then you say, this isn't garbage. It's going to save somebody's life. And then we think that all of that can happen for free, which is ridiculous. What I want to drive home is that it's not free. People were always buying and selling the waste. Correct. So you have to. Right. Because there's labor involved, logistics, shipping. It can never be free. Let's talk a little bit about the statistics. So we're saying a new statistic that's coming out basically in 2015, it was 100 billion items a year. We think it's now 150 billion items a year being produced by the fashion industry. And then we know of that at least 20 to 30 percent are never going to be bought. Right. So that goes back to this point of waste is built into the business model of fashion. But then obviously we're accelerating the pace of production. So it's more than doubled in the past 15 years, which means that even if we're not buying all of it, we are buying more than we used to. Right. So it's the consumer side is of course mirroring the production side. We're spending 20 percent more on clothing than we did into the year 2000. The average American is buying 66 garments a year, which may not seem like a lot to like young people, but imagine accumulating 66 new items every single year. Like that's going to add up. Right. So that's sort of what we're looking at. And then what happens with that? Okay. So again, too much clothing, buy it all can't keep it all. We have to do something with it. We have two options currently. We can either send it to landfill. We can put it in our bin out of site out of mine. I'm going to go somewhere or we can donate it. Right. Now this research that you started in Ghana for what the have passed how many years? I've been going to Ghana since 2011. You described part of the problem as being largely the responsibility of the global North. We are the ones producing a lot of stuff and we're handing it off to somebody else to deal with. You said you had three major questions that kind of inspired this work and what were they? So we can either trash the clothing, send it to landfill or we can donate it, but the question is really like how different are those two things? So what happens when you actually donate clothing or put it in a question bin question? Who's actually taking it to a landfill? I think everyone donates it, right? No. What you think people are like taking yourself in Brooklyn and dropping it off at a landfill? They're putting it in a trash can. Yeah. Oh, meaning they're just not even sorted. The majority of clothing is going to landfill here in the United States. So when you say that, you mean people are not sorting it or even taking it to a donation place? They're just putting it in their kitchen trash can essentially. Correct. Okay, got it. Those are the two options that we have. I see clothing like like overflowing in trash cans here in Cincinnati all the time. So these donation centers or the recycling collectors, they can only basically process or sell 10 to 20% of it here in our country. And then another maybe 30 to 50% is going to be downcycled into things like wipes or insulation. It's going to be mostly like 100% cotton thing insulation. She means inside of walls of buildings of homes. Yeah. And then the rest of it is going to be exported. And it's going to be exported primarily to the global south. There's markets all over the world. And so that's why we started looking at the second hand clothing market in Ghana because we saw that, you know, people are demanding more transparency and the more complex narrative around how our clothing is made. You know, we want to again know where the fiber was grown, who said my garment, etc. But in the same breath of demanding that, we aren't demanding any transparency when it comes to talking about the waste stream of fashion. There's a demand for the consumer to know, but there's not enough people asking what happens to it after we are done with it, including academics or people in the sustainable fashion space. So there's just not a lot that's known. And that is again so ridiculous because at least like half of our global population relies on second hand clothing. So again, in Ghana, 99.9% of people in Ghana are using second hand clothing as their primary like source of consumption because it almost sounds like we're contradicting ourselves. And the one hand we're saying, Hey, there's this deficit myth. There's no one really walking around naked. There's way too many clothes. We don't need them. And on the other hand, we're saying, Well, 50% of the world is reliant on this second hand clothing. So which one is it? Doesn't that sound like it's a conflicting narrative? Absolutely. I think the question is whether or not they want to become reliant on it? Just because we are shipping our clothing to Ghana, for instance, doesn't mean that after someone in Ghana wears it once or twice, that it's not going to their landfill. We have like the appearance of a solution, but not an actual solution. Do everyone's kind of wasting their clothes? Basically, we entered this research with three questions. First one was, how is the second hand clothing industry in Ghana? How is it impacting consumer behavior? And before you go on, I want to also say to the listeners that we're going to be talking about Ghana for the rest of this episode as a case study. This is where Liz has been doing her research. And this is only in one market in one city in Ghana. So, you know, keep that in mind as she tells you about her research, but you started this research with three questions, three questions. One, what is the second-hand clothing trade doing to consumer behavior in Ghana? Two, again, if we're sending everything there to be reused, to have this environmentally positive impact, how much of it is actually being reused, and then three, what does a labor look like? So again, if here in the global north we're saying that we want to divert clothing from our landfills here through reuse in the global south, that's like our mission, right? When people in Ghana who work in the second-hand clothing industry are essentially laboring in service of that mission, so we have a responsibility to understand what that labor actually looks like. This episode is brought to you by Index. I like to describe it as the linked end of the fashion industry, but better. It's a rola decks of all talent working in the fashion industry, a platform connecting the creative talent with the global brands, you create a profile with your portfolio and resume, and it's horizontally transparent so you can see all the job openings in the brands and the other talent as well, to log on to the index THENX.com. So let's talk about Contamonta. What is Contamonta? Where is Contamonta? Okay, so Contamonta market is located in Accra, Ghana, the capital of Ghana. It's the largest second-hand clothing market in West Africa, but also possibly in the world. There's not a lot of research on them just generally. When do a little brief on the history of Contamonta? Yeah, so I think the most important thing to understand about Contamonto is that the second-hand clothing trade really grew after independence. When did Ghana get its independence? Ghana got its independence in 1957, which means there is a colonial mentality where while they were under colonial rule, if you were wearing "western dress" that meant that you had proximity to power. So when we started creating more and more clothing and had this excess, of course people in Ghana, there was a market ready to absorb it and wanting it in terms of breaking down some class barriers, but then today, a lot of the reason that it continues to be imported is because it has created jobs, it's created an economy, but also some of the richest people in Ghana are working in this industry as importers. So there was some wealthy families in Ghana? Correct. And for them, it's worth it. I don't think that people in Ghana view the second-hand clothing trade very positively, and it has been credited with dissolving some class barriers because the clothing is cheap. It's also access to a lot of variety of clothing, so if you're somebody that cares about style, it's really easy to go to the market and get a bunch of stuff that no one else is going to have. And so that's really exciting for consumers. So I wouldn't say, I don't think people view it as necessarily bad for Ghanaians, like the second-hand clothing trade. And that's one reason why it will never be banned in Ghana. And then the other reason is that yes, this trade is very beneficial for importers. So it started with a few families who had capital to invest in this business, started importing, and now let's say it's maybe like 100 families in Contamonto. So where does a term debt of white man's clothes come from? When this clothing started coming to Ghana, people called it Obrini Wawu, which is the econ phrase that just means the white man has died. And they called it that because they assumed that the only way that we would be sending all of this clothing is if people had died. Like why else would you send perfectly good clothing? It's not, you know, there's not holes, it's still wearable, etc. So we assumed a large quantity of white people had died, in order to justify why they're the ones who have seen all of this clothing. Or they just assumed that it was all coming from old people. So that term debt white man's clothes, how is that used now? Is that like colloquial? Is it like, hey, what's up? Yeah, people say it's like Obrini Wawu is used like how we would say, like, I like your fit or something like that. It's still used. I mean, people find it funny, especially when they're talking to us, I'm white. But they know that the white man is not dead. No, they know that, no, there's also so much clothing coming, that it would be impossible to imagine that it's all coming from dead white people. Let's just walk through this process a little bit. Okay. You won't be able to go into full detail, full colorful detail. She's restraining. The West, and these are the largest culprits. The United States, Europe, but very much the UK, Canada, you know, Germany, China are the number one producers of this waste, and they are bailing it up, which are then on containers. But these bails are what, and their value is defined by two factors, you said, which are what? One is the contents of it. So what is the garment type? All bails are just one specific garment. So men's jeans, women's tops, ladies' dresses, men's suits, etc. And then that is combined with what country it's from. So each country carries a different value, and that's about how that country is sorting the clothing. So basically, are they doing a good job of taking out the trash, or are they doing a bad job of taking out the trash? So the highest value bails are coming from the UK. They're known to have the best sorting. They're going to have the best quality bails. There's going to be no, like, just outright trash, like, plastic bags, tampons, things like that. The United States, on the other hand, is known to have the lowest quality bails. We tend not to send high quality garments. I can talk about that more later, but also it's just that we tend to actually just throw trash, like stuff that's not even clothing, or we'll label something like a men's jeans bail, and it'll have ladies' tops in it. And that's a problem for people who work in this market. How many containers are going into Contamanteau? 100 a week. 100 containers a week. So 4,000 bails, right? 100. There's a minimum of 400 bails on each container. You've seen the bails? Yes. I've seen the bails. Lots and lots of bails. A lot of bail back homes in the United States. Yeah. So the importers, they're selling it to their buying loathe, they're selling it high, and they're selling it to hoot. Who are these retailers? Correct. So Contamanteau has 5,000 registered stalls. There's 30,000 people working in Contamanteau, and the majority of them are involved on the retail side. So there's two sides to this market. They're the importers, and then they are the retailers. And from what you've explained to me, those are two completely different worlds. Correct. Why is that? It's a completely different world because the risk is completely different. No one knows what's actually inside of the bale, because the bale is wrapped in opaque plastic. Sometimes it's even a color, and it's like compacted with wire. You have no idea like the quality of the goods that's actually inside. And it's not for importers. It doesn't. It's not a concern. Yeah. They're like whatever we're going to buy right now. They're not, yeah, because they're not, they're not interacting with the consumer. So it's the retailer who's show, shouldering a lot of this risk, because their livelihood is dependent on selling it. So on the retailer side of the market, there are specific days called market days. Those are Wednesdays and Saturdays. And every retailer is going to open a new bale on those days. So consumers know most consumers are going to come on Wednesdays and Saturdays, right? That's when the new stuff's coming. So when a retailer gets a bale, they're going to immediately cut it open, and they're going to start sorting it into four piles, which are called selections. They're four piles, four selections. This selection is the best quality. So those are things that look like they were never worn. A lot of it is dead stock. So coming directly from retailers, things like Adidas Nike, things people really want. First selection is going to make up roughly 18% of every single bale. But there's second and third selection are just different varieties of low quality. Then four selection is actually just trash. So retailers, when they immediately open the bale, there's usually a percentage of the bale that is automatically trash, and they just kind of throw it into the aisle way. So what's most important to understand is that first selection only makes up 18% third selection is a majority, but retailers have to make 70 to 90% of their money back off of first selection. And they have to do that typically within less than 24 hours. And that's because there's going to be more clothing coming in next day. But the pace at which the new clothing is coming in to the market is so fast, it's driving fast, fast-fashion behavior. And as a consumer, you're going to want the best stuff. So if you come to the market late on a Wednesday, for instance, and a retailer only has second and third selection, you're probably just going to wait for them to open a new bale. And so a lot of these retailers are not making their money back. Only 16% of these retailers that we interviewed are actually making a profit. So a majority of this is waste, but they're still too much waste because even if they can't go through it fast enough, it's too much. They're just simply too much. It's not reuse is good, but there's simply too much. 40% is wasted, right? And then that waste stream has to be dealt with in two different ways, formal and informal. Formal just means that it's picked up by the government. This clothing waste represents the largest consolidated point of waste in the entire country of Ghana. It represents 30% of the waste picked up by the Central Business District in Accra and what is so scary is that it represents 20% of the planned capacity of that landfill, which might not seem like a lot to you, but if you look at a lot of the research coming out of the United States, it's usually like eight to 10% that is clothing. And so how are they doing with the waste informally? So another 500,000 pounds of clothing is picked up weekly by what are called informal collectors. So just people working for themselves, and that is going to be dealt with in three ways. It's either going to be dumped directly into the ocean, or it's going to be burned openly, which is very toxic. bad for the environment, right? Or it's going to be dumped in what we call informal landfills. Better terminology makes us feel better than saying slums. We're dumping the clothing on people. It's where people live. In the backyards of schools, they're playgrounds. That's where the clothing is going. And these informal landfills, one of them is where a lot of the people who work in Continental live, what are considered like invisible workers in the market. You have a really unique story with a woman that you met named Asana, what's her story? So Asana is a taeye, which basically just means headquarter. And so these are women who are responsible for carrying the bales on their heads. And the only way that the clothing can move through the market is on people's heads. So her job is absolutely essential to this trade. If I can be use wheelbarrows or trucks. Because of the structure of the market. So part of it is that the aisles are not wide enough. Part of it is just that it's so congested. You're talking about 30,000 people that basically work in a market that's seven acres big. And so you can't move freely. And also the floors are not even. It would be impossible. I don't know. It's really difficult to conceive some of these things if you haven't experienced it. So we're talking about really, really, really congested crowded markets. There's goats, there's children. There's everything happening. Everything happening. You can buy food. Right. Asana is one of the kaeye that we've met. And someone that we've come to know really well. Asana is 18 years old. She basically came to work in Contamanto because she could be considered a climate refugee. So she is coming from the northern region of Ghana. They have floods. They have droughts. And there's enough money for her family. Right. So she's coming down to a car to help to try to make enough money to send back home. And she's also hoping that if she's lucky, she'll be able to save some money to be able to go to nursing school. So what Asana does is she wakes up every day, very early. She gets ready. She's in the market by seven o'clock. She goes to the importer. She's going to carry these bales anywhere from half a mile to two miles on her head. And she's only going to be paid between 30 cents to one dollar per trip. These bales again at a minimum are 120 pounds. Asana basically weighs 120 pounds. You're not supposed to carry more than 20% of your body weight on your head. So this is a very difficult job for these women. It literally is back breaking. And then at the end of this horrible work day, she goes home and she lives in one of the slums where we're dumping the clothing waste. And this slum is also right next to an e-waste dump called Agua Bloshi. You can google it. There's a lot of information about it. But it's considered one of the most toxic places on our planet. She doesn't have a mat to sleep on. Sleeps on a concrete floor. So this is all just to say that if she continues doing this job, it's also unlikely that she'll be able to survive her environment. There's a lot of diseases that's very unsanitary. If she does have an accident or something and you know can't pay rent, she's going to be thrown out of where she's staying and sleeping on the street. And that makes her vulnerable to theft, rape. She's very vulnerable. This is a vulnerable population that we're talking about. And it's also it's becoming more and more extreme. There's an increasing number of girls who are actually dying because their necks are breaking basically under the weight of the loads that they're carrying. It's absurd that that would be happening and absolutely unacceptable. Asana's job again is essential to the reuse economy in Contamanto. There's no other way for this clothing to get to consumers. Again, we think about the second hand clothing trade often as charity. But what it actually is is just a necessary outlet for our excess. Asana, the retailers, the importers, they are all players in a global waste management system and it's pointing us in a direction of what do we do about it? Well, you would say that Contamanto actually represents the future of fashion. Contamanto represents the future of fashion in the sense of I think that there's a lot of different ways to hear this story and to view it perhaps as like a poverty narrative. But also Contamanto is responsible for reusing a lot of clothing and consumers in Ghana are choosing it over new clothing and that's something that we should be celebrating. So, you know, here in the global north we're celebrating new technology driven reuse companies like Threadup, which they're great, real real, etc. They're amazing. You should definitely use them. But at the same time, the amount of attention that they're getting is perhaps not so fair considering that Threadup, for instance, in the last five years has been responsible for upcycling 65 million items of clothing. Contamanto, on the other hand, is responsible for upcycling 65 million items every 10 weeks. For us, it's really important that we understand the work and that we honor the work that people in Contamanto are doing within this larger narrative of what sustainability looks like. So, to us, that's why Contamanto could represent the future. Like, most people in Ghana are used to buying cloth and designing things with a tailor. So, there's also just a tremendous amount of agency with this clothing where people are looking at it more as material, right? They're screen printing on it. They're cutting and sewing it. Like, we go to malls, but the malls aren't also factories or studios. Most malls don't have a place where you can sew something. My real question is, how do we get people to give a shit? Why would anyone care? I mean, think about it. And this sounds harsh, but the dissonance. How do you combat the dissonance? If something is on in front of you, if it does not affect you, if it is not touching your pockets, if you're not losing any money, how do you get people to care in a world where everyone is concerned about their own vested interests? That's a good question. I mean, I think, first of all, we get ahead of ourselves. We let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Like, the reality is that when you're tackling these issues or if you feel overwhelmed or apathetic, we don't need a few people doing sustainability perfectly. We need everybody trying, caring, doing something, right? So, I would start there. So, what's scary is that we are a culture who's forgotten what it's like to actually make clothing. What we can do is learn from the relationship that people have in Contamanto to clothing, right? We can start to look at this distance that we feel from how our things are made. One simple way is that everyone should learn how to sew. Everyone should make a shirt from start to finish. And that's not because you want to be a fashion designer. It's because we all wear clothing and it's something that everyone should know how to do, right? When I talk to students, I talk to them about the fact that we all eat, we all wear clothing, right? If I was to go around the room and ask you, does everyone hear not how to make a grilled cheese sandwich? Like, people would be very embarrassed if they didn't know how to make a grilled cheese sandwich. But I can go around the room and ask somebody, is anyone here know how to put a button back on their like shirt, right? And no one's going to feel embarrassed that they don't know how to do that. Because we've gotten to a point where we are so distant and we're looking at fashion only in the abstract and not as something that has a skill behind it. Everyone thinks that they should learn how to code now because we're all staring at computers and at phones. So why don't we have the same attitude about fashion? Not even about fashion, but clothing. But you could say the same thing about anything. Nobody knows how to farm. Nobody knows how to. Yeah, nature has become a place that we visit. It's not something we actually understand or have a relationship with, right? Definitely not respecting it. I'm also guilty of it. I'm very guilty of it. It's super easy. We all live in cities, right? You know, we all have migrated to cities where we just naturally have distance. And the majority of our clothing, majority of our food is being produced outside of our immediate environment. So how do you think we can combat the distance? I think we have to bring it back to our proximity. There's a limit to our moral imagination, right? The majority of our clothing is being produced abroad and it's not that all of us can be altruistic. That all of us can have so much empathy for people that we're never going to meet, that live in places that we've never been to. That's demanding a lot of us, right? And so we don't need to bring back all production, but again, looking at what this supply chain looks like here. And that's something I'm getting involved in in terms of hemp and looking at like farm to closet denim, but I think it's a huge opportunity. And we hold each other more to account when the people making our clothes are our neighbors. Where the people that are buying our produce from is at the farmers market. The maintenance guy in my apartment, and he's someone that I see often, my UPS guy, who drops something at my house. Relationships. Yeah. I see him on a regular basis. It feels local. I think when people say the future is local, this is not, again, people don't really know what that means. It's hard to know what it means if you don't know what the problem is. Everything that we get is made in mass, and it's made at a distance. So whether it's our meat industry, our food industry, our clothing, almost everything outside of like a haircut is something that's being imported from somewhere else. And that's terrifying, I think. It's definitely terrifying. But I also think it's such an interesting way to frame the problem because is there a certain percentage of our clothing or a certain percentage of our food that should be produced within a certain radius of where we live? Are there solutions like that that we can start looking at? Well, I think everyone complains about about these corporations. and the 1%, but we're doing so much to feed into that. If there's only a few people who are owning the supply chain, there's several different products and services, then we're only gonna go to them and we can actually look to our neighbors. - Correct. - You also said, something that was interesting, I gotta stop saying that phrase, something that was interesting. But the idea of being connected, like how the internet has connected all of us in a different way, but also we were already connected. - Through the trade of our stuff. - Through trade, like who needs what, how are you doing? - We never learn to read objects. We never learn to look at an object and ask a bunch of questions and think about it as a window into the world. We never learned, you know, in school, we don't study objects, we don't look at them as an opportunity to look at and become more interdisciplinary or like whole brain thinkers. And that's a huge missed opportunity, I think, because all objects hold an infinite amount of information and just so much that can open us up to be more exploratory about where stuff comes from. Like I don't think a lot of the work that I do is about how do you create experiences where people can discover the stuff on their own so that they can start to see patterns and their own behavior in their own closet, you know, doing closet audits and seeing like, where is your clothing made? Where are you sourcing it from? And that will automatically lead you to become more curious. And that's not me telling you that there's a right way for your clothing to be made or a certain company you should be buying from. It's you just turning to your stuff and choosing to discover things, choosing to study it. - You're an educator, so I think that speaks to your method in teaching and also your definition of learning because even with this episode, there's only so much someone's gonna be able to extract, right? And it also, it's like, it's passive. You're like just hearing, you know, you're not seeing anything. It's just information, it's just words. What are these words even mean? And so yeah, it's gonna be really, really difficult. When I was in our school, I had a professor who had said that knowledge is experience. Knowledge is experience, and she used to always say that over and over. And what she meant by that was anything other than experience, something is just hearsay. So I can tell, you know, a three-year-old, don't touch that, it's hot, don't touch that, it's hot. You're gonna burn yourself, don't touch that. - But they're gonna do it. - It's gonna take her touching it. Oh, shit, that's hot. That experience is gonna stick with them forever. So now they've learned something. Now they know something. This is why even being an educator, I'm sure it's difficult. 'Cause when we had discussed how education is not scalable, and I was like, what does that mean? - Learning is different from information, and learning happens best in experiences, which often include relationships. - Relationships, memories, time. - Right. - Like we have to slow down. If we really want people, I don't think you're gonna persuade somebody on Instagram, but you might choose someone's mind through a conversation. - That's what I love about the work that you're doing with your students, because that of all the schools that I've been going to, the way you guys emphasize sustainability and make it a fixture in the students' creation, I haven't seen it at Parsons, I haven't seen it at Skat, I haven't seen it at Pratt, I haven't seen it at Residee. It's still very much an elective. It's like, here's a separate thing that we-- - A cherry on the top. - It's a cherry, if that. But your students honestly look at all design at that being at the forefront, which I think is innovative. - Yeah, it's a lens. - It's a completely different lens. And so you had mentioned that you force the students to sort through their ways. - Yeah, so we did that by saying, we're gonna clean up our own mess. That's why forces them to see it through lens. And I think it's so simple. - But as a result. - But no one is doing it. - But as a result, you got the students to reduce their waste by 70% was that over a semester, over a year or what? - That was in our first semester. We have a dual-part mission. One is advocacy in our community on sustainability issues. But then two is just keeping all of our waste and reducing it, trying to make the fashion program here at Zero Waste. So we basically found that we were generating roughly 1,000 pounds of textile waste, just like scraps, you know, from cutting patterns. - Yeah, yeah. - In the studios of semester. And simply by sorting it for reuse, sorting it into size, learning what our waste stream looks like. In our first semester, we reduced that by 70%. - Just because the kids were aware, because they could see it, because they were-- - Because it became their problem. - Yeah, they were good people. - It was amazing. - It was always that we're gonna stop making our waste someone else's problem. It's all we did, very simple. - I love that approach to education. I really do. I actually hope, you know, or wish was implemented in all design schools. Because even me, we wasted a lot of fabric in school. And not even just school in my own studio. You waste a lot of stuff. And it's just that cognizant. - Exactly, just by looking at it, again, they're being forced to study what the waste looks like. So they're seeing, maybe you're not placing your pattern in a very like conscious way. Or again, there's specific textiles that people are wasting more than others. But then we're also just saving students money at this point. Because we're taking the waste that we are generating it and we're turning it into a resource for reuse. So we have a reuse room. Students use that instead of going to Joanne's, which is our only fabric store here, sadly. Instead of going there and spending money, their first stop can be our reuse corner. And a lot of them can find what they need there. So that's also a benefit. - Well, I'm hopeful because the way I see young people talk, they're awareness and they're borderline trauma for understanding what's coming. It's actually more prevalent than it is when I talk to older people. They have more distance than the young people. So that excites me. I don't think that they will let it slide. - They won't, they're holding each other to account. But it's also just they've grown up with products being shoved down their throat. I mean, the students that I'm working with are part of that, you know, doubling of production. Like we've doubled production in the last 15 years. That's their life. So they've experienced that, right? And they're tired of it. They're ready to refuse it. They know that it's not making them happy. And they know that their drive to consume more just comes from them feeling like they're lacking something. They're very self-aware. - The jig is up. - Yep. - The jig is up. I believed a lot of the things. That's why I told your students yesterday. Like I grew up believing the marketing campaigns and you have this awakeing up. And with them, I feel like they were born awake. - They were. - When it comes to creativity. - It's incredibly inspiring. - Yeah. - It's also just, I think a lot of people ask me all the time, how do you not get overwhelmed by this work and from knowing all this stuff? And teaching is how I don't get overwhelmed. - Because it's a way for me to think about how to deliver this information in a way that can be received and the way that can be actionable. You know, I don't want to make students depressed. I want them to feel empowered. Like they can do something about it. - But let's talk about different ways in real life today. - So the first thing you can do is challenge yourself to not buy anything new for a year. - Clothing? - No new clothing for a year. If you have to buy something, try to thrift it. But I really believe that probably everyone listening to this could go an entire year without buying any new clothing. And with that, - Well, you could like modify it. That's why you used to do a high school lot. It was like thrift and then so it, but again, you have to know how to sew. In order to modify and learn to mend. Or maybe something doesn't fit you perfectly. I bet there's a tailor in your town. I'm saying don't buy anything new. I'm not saying don't do something new with your clothing, right? Learn to mend it, buy it, et cetera. Another very simple thing is take a field trip to your local landfill, something I tell everybody to do. And that's just because in this country, we have done such a good job of putting waste out of sight out of mind. So even when I'm talking about all the waste that's generated in Ghana, like don't get it twisted, right? People in Ghana are generating so much less waste than we are. It just looks different. Like we, we don't see it. - If the garbage man don't come pick up the trash for even, you know, there are two, three-- - Yeah, waste management strikes are very effective. - If there are two, three days behind schedule, there will be an outcry because it's so important. - Yeah. - And New York is the worst, right? And I've never been to a landfill, so I can't even-- - It's very impactful. - Most of the landfills here in the United States won't let you get out of a vehicle. You'll probably have to wear a mask. It's the visceral experience of the smell. It's like standing on top of it, understanding how big it is. You need to understand what this looks like accumulated because if we continue to just put our trash in a bag, we're never gonna really be able to understand what this all adds up to. What all of our individual behaviors look like, that's one of our biggest problems is that we've let sustainability in these conversations about climate change become all about individual actions. And yes, be a better consumer. You do have power, but you don't have power in your wallet. Your power is in your vote. Your power is in figuring out how to work with your-- - I disagree. I think you do have power in your wallet. If you stop buying something, that company's in business. - Stop buying is great. I'm saying like-- - Don't buy ever-ending sustainable bullshit. That's what she means. Okay, I give it to you. - Yeah, just don't move your money from one company to another company. - They will trick you into believing if you want to participate that you should buy our product because it's sustainable. It's like telling someone I have a gluten-free tomatoes, I have vegan salsa. It's like it was never, no, it's not how it works. So now I understand what you mean by it. It's not a money thing. - In your wallet. - It's not in your wallet. I think those are two really good actionable things places to start. Don't buy anything new for a year. Go visit your local landfill. Doing a closet audit really is very helpful. It takes time, like Marie Kondo, tidying up huge success this year, right? Everyone is taking on these closet purges, but the inverse of the purge is the landfill, right? Like you're not necessarily solving anything. So if you're going to commit to doing like a purge or donating a bunch of stuff, at least document everything. So go through your closet, look at the tags. Look at where it was made. Look at what it was made out of. It just will start to educate you and again teach you to read objects, teach you to slow down and appreciate things. - You know, the identity politics thing. You know, I get it, right? I get it, but at the end of the day when we don't have water, when we can't make anymore food because the soil has been cropped. And no one's going to be talking about who's gay and straight and tall and trans and fat. And like it will just be everyone's problem. So unfortunately. - There already is, we should understand it. Well, it's not though yet. The luxury of us not needing to understand means it hasn't really hit everyone as it being everyone's problem yet We still see it as oh it's someone's problem. Who we don't know, but it's not mine. The apathy is real So Liz, Liz is a very strong opinion on single-use t-shirts. They're the worst thing on the planet. Why? What's a single-use t-shirt? A single-use t-shirt is any t-shirt that's made for like a charity for a run or something that represents like your school It's something that you're getting because of you know kind of vent that you're participating in But you're not actually gonna what maybe you're gonna wear it to bed But you're probably not gonna wear it out. You're probably end up gonna end up donating it And then these t-shirts do horribly in the second-hand clothing market because they're still context specific Like no one in Ghana cares about your 5k run that you did in 2018. Your sorority the antibiotic at this new medical conference They're trying to get people to buy So they're gonna go to landfill, right? And they're just the most unnecessary objects It's also most t-shirts are made very cheaply using you know Labor that is really not dignified Resources that we shouldn't be using cotton's not climate. We're treating t-shirts like they're pieces of paper It's always they are willing to throw them away like just throw them around willy-nilly like whatever It's just a t-shirt. It's just a t-shirt Everyone orders t-shirts all the time I mean, even including our university orders them for everybody. It's like a little reward You get this at the end of doing something But t-shirts take a lot of resources three years of drinking water to make a single t-shirt It's just unnecessary unnecessary. So this makes me feel guilty We're trying to find a system that with your t-shirt comes away for you to give a previous homandi t-shirt back to us because someone said I love that. Yeah, someone sent me a picture of it at Beacon's and I was like buy it give it to me We are going to repurpose them as you guys already know we have the embroidery initiative or whether it comes with a bag or something that they can Return label a discount off the new one bring it back. And that's why you're so incredible because you're responding immediately I mean hardly to like I'm part of the problem Imagine if like the next drop we do if I got all the last ones back That's hundreds of units at least again is what you're saying cleaning up your own mess at least I can see what we did with it I mean the fact that split panel T's are so big and people are so obsessed with them shows how absurd the situation is right like the fact that You could literally split a t-shirt down the middle so it with another t-shirt and everyone's like oh my god Fashion yeah That shows how dumb down fashion has become like how boring are we like split plan alt is a really not like the height of fashion That's not but we can blame that month for that anyway, but it's also good. I actually like that is even if anyway No, we're we're doing it because people our goal is to make things that people will never want to give away And I think that should be the goal of any designer. Mm-hmm How do you make something that someone is never going to want to give away? Absolutely Will you tell everybody your Instagram handle? Yes, so the Instagram handle for my non-profit is the or is present TH E O R I S P R E S E and T And then if you also want to see what the students here at the University of Cincinnati are doing that is SFI underscore Cincinnati Yeah, and then the website you can learn more at that white man's close that work, but there's a lot on our Instagram Well, thank you for your time. We are signing out from Cincinnati here at Clifton House We're all for listening and for doing anyway, that's it. Welcome to the cutting room floor where everyone's leaving their fabric scraps on the floor Bye