What happens to the clothes we don't buy? You might think that last season's coats, trousers and turtlenecks end up being put to use, but most of it (nearly 13 million tons each year in the United States alone) ends up in landfills. Fashion has a waste problem, and Amit Kalra wants to fix it. He shares some creative ways the industry can evolve to be more conscientious about the environment — and gain a competitive advantage at the same time.
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1st like 1st comment.!!!
Oh my god! Now hand the keyboard back to Mommy.
No. 1 moron! Yay! Proud now?
The future is trash. Recycling it, re-arranging it. Making it beautiful again.
I am saving this ‘quote’.
Fashion = a vacuous and total and utter waste of time, effort and money
I agree with you. My comment was more of an ironic @good luck with that’ . I don’t believe it is possible. Not when so many women can’t seem to handle it if another woman is wearing the same dress! 🙂
And yet the fasion industry only works because the same people that all want to be different keep buying all the same ‘must haves’ for the season.
They want to be different… just like everybody else.
Absolutely. You usually find this with younger people and the ‘look she is wearing the same dress’ brigade are going to a party or awards show with older people….
Technology and software are also becoming fashion like. OS’s mix-up the user interface every 5 years forcing people to relearn what they already new how to do in their old OS. Car manufacturers change the body style every few years. Interoperability issues makes the “fashion-business-model” work better for hardware and software than it does for clothing.
In that case, so is art, nice hair, the paint on our house, and swimming pools…perhaps we should get rid of all those things in the world too. Very ignorant statement Stephen Catton.
For this to happen you need to convince women as they drive the fashion industry… I cannot see, no matter how noble your cause, that this will happen. Although I would like to be proven wrong.
Stephen Catton as a women in the fashion industry, sure i admit that consumers need to change their purchasing habit. But the fact is, the industry provides consumer with fast fashion practices that enable this pattern. It’s a profitable model and the industry definitely wont change without global regulation imposing change.
I agree. I believe that it is the continual search to look different (and yet they still somehow manage to all look the same) that drives the fast change and ever-increasing variety offered by the industry. I include my self in this to some degree in that I love tee shirts and have so many that can take ages for me to decide which one to wear. These were not fashion statements (just ask my kids) but either humorous or political But when i was a teenager in the 70s and 80s i had very little choice and yet didn’t feel that I was losing out.
Wtf, no woman in the history of earth has ever been allowed to have power or ever done anything negative. This is clearly entirely the fault of white cis males. Somebody needs to watch more TED videos and become #woke #freethinker #victim4life.
Capitalism drives the fashion industry, not women. All people are targetted by the fast fashion industry, for example (and this is just one of many) the use of advertising common insecurities ranging from anything from feeling lonely, to unlovable, to poor, to sad, as being combattable with the quick fix of buying a new t-shirt or pair of shoes. The reality is that for many, fashion has the potential to be one of the truest forms of self-expression – we unconsciously make our judgments of others by their appearance within just a few seconds! I feel that fashion is really important for many people, but that it should be celebrated responsibly. The horrible ethics of the industry, not just environmental ones but social ones too, are quickly covered up when they rise up into the public eye. I believe that the consumer needs to be educated on the truth surrounding the fashion industry i.e. social, environmental, political and other issues and that’s a change that can only come from the bottom with innovative individuals sparking inspiration such as the guy in this video. It is very hard to change global fashion purchasing habits when there isn’t another major option to shop from, but it is possible to be a conscious consumer or start-up company or advocate. From where we stand as individuals, I think that the only way we can look at our own sphere of influence is the following: the more small pockets of people that start to become aware, the more this knowledge will spread, and then change may start to spread upwards towards those top CEO’s as commercial pressure is applied. hopefully that gives you a little bit of hope!
We donate used clothes to orphanage simple
Thahir Sulthan people trow away and donate so many clothes that most of them end up being shipped to third world countries where they are thrown and where they pollute the land, ruin the environment, and make people sick. Look it up, this is the part they don’t tell you about and it’s actually a huge problem. Not to mention the toxic chemicals in the clothes we wear are also bad for our bodies.
Very inspiring and a wonderful visionary. Thank you.
I worked at a Goodwill type facility. (Almost) everything sold there came from donations. I handled taking in, and sorting donations from people. We got so many large trash bags of clothes daily, that we couldn’t sort them all. We used industrial hay balers to compact them into giant bricks, held together by thick wires.
An entire warehouse wall was dedicated to storing these bales. About 10 bales wide, five bales deep. Forklifts were required to move the bricks. These were then loaded into trucks and taken to be sent to other countries. This happened twice a week at least.
Now, if this only accounts for 15% of all the clothes?! Wow… just wow… I believe it though. I like Amit’s approach. I was told once that so many donated clothes are affecting local textile industries in other countries, so that’s another concern.
Fascinating talk, nice work!
Microfiber, polyester, other petroleum-based fabrics are a real problem. They don’t break down properly. They end up in the food chain as nutrition-depriving particles to the small creatures that eat them. Natural fibers are much better because in the end, when the fabric is beyond reuse, it can still be composted.
The turmeric will wash out quickly.
versus one destructive way to fix fashions waste problem, close it all down, it’s a rip off anyway, endless consumerism
4 would be have no fashion?
Manufacturers need to be forced to make stuff that lasts more than a month! like Rebok classic trainers utter crap hardly lasts a month?
Then there is the landfill brantano and lidl sells that brakes in a few days!
These Ted talks have continuously gotten more vacuous over the past year and a half.
Jacob Hansen This is a huge environmental concern, so I don’t see how this is vacuous in any way…
This isn’t a fashion problem, it’s a capitalism problem. The fashion cycle is just a way to keep people buying new clothes. They don’t want people to keep their clothes for long periods of time.
That’s why this will never be adopted. It’ll still be cheaper to throw things away and squeezing every red cent is the name of the game.
Not me! I’ll wear a tee-shirt until it has holes in it! Then I’ll still keep it another 20 years for painting, yardwork, or grease-monkeying. Then it gets cut-up and used as rags or shop-towels.
Too many women wasting money, trying to impress men, in order to fleece them of their money, in order to waste more money buying clothes, to impress other men, to… (repeat, ad infinitum)
“Fashion” is wasteful. Period. Wear clothes until they wear out. I’ve had four suits for 30 years. They were good suits when I bought them & I’ve taken care of them. It isn’t a matter of money. I’m wealthy. It is s matter of not being wasteful.
Tip: let go of seasonal fashion and wear your clothes (that can last years) until they fall apart, then take them and sow them back together. Buy little, throw away nothing.
I didn’t watch this video but came just to make this comment about TED talks in general, which I was thinking about less than an hour ago as I was driving home:
When I first discovered TED, I thought the talks were interesting and thought-provoking. But after a while I realized that most of them are cheesy over-exaggerations of trivial things. “When I say hello, that’s coming from the essence of who I am. Let my word touch you! When I say hello, don’t dismiss it as a mere hello, but instead be forever hello’d.” Or something like that.