(camera clicking) (upbeat music) (people cheering) (camera clicking) (upbeat music) (people cheering) - I'm Natalie Hodge and I'm on a journey to zero waste.

I'm exploring ways that I can make a difference and help slow climate change.

Today I'll be talking with people who are passionate about fashion and how we can work towards reducing clothing waste in landfills around the world.

(upbeat music) My first stop is Virginia Commonwealth University's Department of Fashion Design and Merchandising to talk with Associate Professor, Kimberly Guthrie.

So, fashion is all about colors and textures and fun, but it's also about waste?

- Globally, we are producing 92 million tonnes of textile waste every year.

- 92 million.

- So 92 here, 92 next year.

And they're just either torching it, burning it, letting it rot, whatever.

Of that 92 million tonnes, the US, you and all of us, are contributing 17 million tons towards that 92 million number.

So what can we as a country do to reduce our waste?

You know, we buy 400% more clothing than we did 20 years ago.

That's a lot.

- That's a lot.

- Well, the average garment is worn.. eight times before it's tossed?

We are contributing to the microplastic problem and the ocean at an amazing, amazing amount.

I mean, forget what the laundry detergent bottles and everything out there, 'cause we wash our clothes every day too.

And we don't have filters on our washing machines.

So if you have a polyester based, acrylic based, nylon based garment, you're gonna release- - And so it's washing?

- The amount of plastic in the ocean, over 30, almost 35% of it comes from us, from our clothes.

- How is fast fashion playing a role in this?

- The issue with fast fashion is they're making it so fast that the consumer thinks they have to buy it that fast and then use it that fast and then it's done.

So the lifecycle of that garment is not reaching its full potential.

So if you make something out of polyester, polyester is plastic.

That garment can live for 200 years in the ground 'cause it's made of plastic, just like a water bottle.

- So what would be a good lifecycle for a garment?

- So circular fashion, it's, you know, it's a newer word than the word sustainable.

And for something to be circular, it always has a use.

The loop never closes.

I mean, it never, like, never ends.

That's a really hard thing to accomplish.

So a good lifecycle would be for a designer or a brand to know that they're gonna work with a mono material, 100% whatever, cotton, linen, poly, wool.

Same thing with your jeans.

How can you design jeans with less hardware, easy to dismantle zippers, no blending, so you don't gum up the machines with the spandex?

Again, thrifting is part of that loop.

It keeps that object, that product in use for a little bit longer.

And then there is a process.

There are systems defined that when that cotton is done, it can get recycled and turned into fresh cellulose, turned into fiber, turned into whatever else.

Polyester, is the same way.

So that to me is the beauty of circularity, is that we would not have...

The waste would go away, right?

Then we could have this thing maybe called zero waste because waste is a design flaw.

And if people understood that, the creatives in the world, the designers in the world, and just had that at front of mind, we would be having a totally different conversation.

'Cause it's a responsibility.

You wanna play a fiber game.

- Okay.

Alright.

- So I want you to dig into one of these boxes and see if you can identify what the garment is made out of.

- Okay.

I'm gonna say that this is not real leather.

(bell dinging) - You are correct.

- Ah, so a pleather, if you will.

- But what kind of pleather?

Well, interestingly, this is polyurethane.

Viscose, polyester and some spandex.

This is gonna rot for a long time, okay?

- Right, that polyurethane- - That's a little scary.

- That doesn't sound good.

Soft.

- Soft, yeah, soft.

- Hmm.

Cotton?

(buzzer buzzing) - It's fooling you that it's cotton, but it's actually acrylic.

- Really?

- Which is another type of polyester, which means it will pill.

You'll get those funny pills in your sleeve.

- What?

- It'll make you so hot.

'Cause plastic holds in heat.

So it's gonna make you hot, you're gonna sweat.

- This is very tricky.

- This is very tricky.

There it is, 100% acrylic.

- Get out of here.

- Yes, it can be kind of confusing to understand all this, what this polyester word means.

'Cause it's lots of different things.

At the end of the day, they're petroleum derived.

So yeah, polyester, nylon, acrylic are the three ones.

Oh, and acetate, which is mostly linings.

Those are the three or the four most popular polyester words that most consumers would be able to understand.

- So this was an assignment where we used a zero waste approach where we had to take three yards of cotton fabric and we had to use all of it.

Everything that we cut off had to be put back on the dress.

And in the fashion industry, that's a very big problem, basically before you even put a garment out on the market, you're wasting all this fabric just trying to make what it's going to eventually be.

- Ms. Guthrie's class kind of taught me and brought me more aware of what's really going on in the world.

So I feel like people need to be more aware of the garment.

When I look at a garment, I don't just think if it's cool or will I wear it, I kind of think of, like, the story behind it.

How many hands have touched this garment before I touched it?

So that's where I kind of had the idea to upcycle .. - People care so much what they put in their body, but not what they put on their body.

Everyone can do that, 'cause it always has the fabric content.

So it's very easy to just look at it and understand, you know, understanding the different kinds and what's good and what's not.

- I think my tip for somebody who wants to reduce their fashion waste, is to stop buying clothes.

Stop buying clothes, just a hard stop.

Consider what you have in your closet already and what use you can make of it.

And I also think there's something to be said about considering how you can mend your items.

Instead of throwing them away or donating them, you can consider, "Maybe I could fix that hole or maybe I could fix that button.

Or maybe the reason I don't like this piece..." It's a fixable reason.

- What's your big three of how you operate within this structure?

Thinking about fashion and waste and sustainability.

- So for me, number one, it's intent.

Is it a need or a want?

Have I really thought about it?

And, you know, is there room?

Am I gonna get rid of something else in my closet to make room for it?

The next thing is the awareness.

Who made your clothes, how the clothes were made, what they are made of.

That's the awareness piece.

And then finally, back to that term or that question, what is end of life?

So I'm gonna buy it, I'm gonna take care of it, I'm gonna love it.

And when I'm done with it, it is my responsibility as a user to figure out what's the next phase of that product's lifecycle.

- Intent, awareness, end of life.

- The ABCs.

- I got it.

- You got it.

(upbeat music) - [Natalie] Next I'm going to Danville, Virginia to a place called Circ, who handles the last part of circular fashion, the recycling part.

- So Circ is a textile-to-textile recycling innovator.

So basically what that means is that we're able to take clothing and textiles and recycle them back into raw materials for the fashion industry.

So closing the loop.

You can think of this, you know, as an equivalent to what recycling a plastic bottle back into a plastic bottle would mean.

And we're enabling that for clothing.

So the majority of our clothes these days aren't made of just one material.

They typically are a blend of two, three, sometimes even more materials.

And the most prevalent blend of materials is polyester and cotton, and that's at the fiber level.

So you can't really see in a T-shirt the difference between, oh, like, here's the polyester, and here's the cotton in the shirt.

And so if you can think about it, the molecules are sort of blended together.

And so if you can think of the blue Legos being cotton and the red Legos being the polyester, the cotton and polyester sort of separate at a molecular level.

And so we're able to recover both the polyester and the cotton separately in two separate streams.

So these are sort of the raw material inputs that end up becoming, say like a yarn, like Lyocell, which is what we're able to make with that recovered cotton.

- So this is really kind of the end before a garment is made.

- Correct, yeah, so this yarn would then get spun into a fabric, which would then be, you know, cut and sewn and made into something that someone could wear.

- What is the vision of what's to come?

- In order to make a true circular system, everybody has to be able to participate.

And so we are trying to build a world in which you can go into any store, purchase any textile, and it is made using circular and textile-to-textile recycled materials.

So almost that it disappears into the clothing and you don't have to think about it because what you're buying, you know, is sort of already in circulation and not virgin materials.

- Talk about some of the brands that you all have partnered with as you've been working through your process.

- Inditex, which is the parent company of Zara, which is one of the world's largest retailers.

You have the designer Christian Siriano.

We were actually part of his fall 2024 runway show in New York Fashion Week, this past year, which is huge for us.

- [Natalie] So these are all things made with Circ's recycled materials.

- Correct, yeah, so here's a really cool example of how next gen innovations and digital product passports are sort of shaping up.

And when you scan the QR code, it actually takes you to a product page that tells you the materials that were used to make it, where it was made, and even solutions for end of life, what to do with the dress when you've worn it and maybe you want to pass it along to somebody else or return it to Circ for recycling.

- Why is polyester a big deal when we're talking about textile waste?

- We've got a lot of movement right now to make sure that we're recycling all sorts of materials, plastic bottles, cardboard, sort of everything.

And so the polyester in your clothes is very similar to the plastic in your bottles.

So it would sort of logically make sense that you'd want to keep that material in circulation as well and not let it go to landfill or incineration.

- It was really cool going to Circ and seeing how they're continuing the loop on circular fashion.

But there's another way to keep fashion in the circular economy, another way to give your clothes a little more life and keep them out of the landfill.

Donations.

- So when someone donates an item to one of our retail stores or donation centers, we have a donation attendant who takes it in and does an initial sort.

Is it sellable?

70% of those textile donations are making it onto a sales floor.

So that means 30% are coming in and they are completely unsellable.

They could be stained, they could be soiled.

Unfortunately we have things that get rained on or left outside.

We can't put those items on the sales floor.

If it is sellable, then ideally it gets to our sales floor within the day, hopefully within the first couple hours.

Once it goes onto that sales floor, depending on what type of item it is, it's tagged or it's priced individually, and then it sits on our sales floor for four weeks.

So about 48% of the textiles that make it to the sales floor are actually sold on the sales floor throughout that four-week process.

So after that fourth week, even if they're marked down, they're still going out the door, which is a good thing.

After that fourth week, it's marked down to half price.

If it doesn't sell on the sales floor, then we pull it back and actually send it to what we have as an outlet where everything is sold by the pound.

That's another way for us to make the most of those donations th.. And that adds an additional, anywhere from 10 to 15% sell through on top of that.

And then if it doesn't sell in the outlet, it goes to kind of our last resort, which is that recycling effort.

- My next stop, I'm going to Top Stitch Mending in Richmond, Virginia to learn how to repair my own clothes and keep them in use for a little bit longer.

Alright, talk to me about what you do here.

- Sure.

Yeah.

So this business, we kind of do two things with the same goal.

Our main goal is to keep things out of the landfill.

So one half of that is repairing clothes, and that's anything from like a missing button, anything small, small hole in a T-shirt, all the way to something needing to be rebuilt that's kind of damaged to a further extent.

The other part is teaching people to sew.

The entire goal is to be fully circular where we're not throwing anything away here.

- How does mending fit into that big picture of circular fashion?

- So right now, because a lot of the brands don't do that, things are going, people are wearing them till the end of life, but there's nowhere to return them to.

And so we get to step in and fix it up, get it back to the person, back in their closet.

And sometimes it's something sentimental, something their grandmother made and sometimes it's their $10 Target tank top.

But either way it keeps one more thing out of the landfill.

- Yeah, I think some people get hung up, I know I do, on the things that actually can be repaired, - I get asked a lot like, "What is the thing that can no longer be mende.. And the answer is, it depends.

But almost anything can, if you give it the wiggle room of visible mending, for example, this was my partner's shirt from the '90s and I'm just taking this on as a visible mending project.

I love the color, I wanna wear it and it's gonna take a while to repair.

But I think that's also part of the importance of repair, is it's not always fast.

It gets us to slow down.

Slowing down gets us to think about what we're buying, how much are we buying?

And when somebody learns to sew, they start looking closer at the clothes they're buying and they can see quality.

- Well, let's keep one thing out of the landfill.

A pair of jeans.

- Alright.

- Yay.

Okay, so I brought some jeans today that have thigh rub.

- Alright.

- Okay?

This is common.

- Yes.

I just want this- - Most common repair.

- Yes, yes, yes.

- Our most common repair.

- We look at my thigh rub and we don't judge.

- That's right, we are a judgment free stitchery.

- [Natalie] Great.

- So we're gonna turn them inside out, pull them on here to see.

We usually just hold it up to get an idea of the shape.

We wanna make sure that the patch goes beyond the wear.

And I always use these seams to anchor down.

(upbeat music) - Here we go.

- Alright.

- Don't give me a project now.

(upbeat music) - So for this patch, you tacked down the borders and went around the edge, and then now we're using the mending stitch to spiral in over all of the wear.

- We're bringing it home.

- Yeah.

- Stop.

- Yes.

- [Both] Yay.

- We're back in business.

- Alright.

Oh yeah.

- Yeah.

- Great job.

(upbeat music) - If you've enjoyed this journey to zero waste, subscribe to the VPM Science Matters YouTube channel so you don't miss out on my next adventure.

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