John Oliver has a thing or two to say to the Fashion Industry

If you are in the apparel industry or involved in labor rights, I am sure you spent the 17 minutes to watch John Oliver share his insights into the Fashion Industry on Last Week Tonight in the most recent episode.

If you have not seen the video - check it out here:
JOHN OLIVER - Sheds a little light on the fashion industry

As a person who has worked inside the industry for years, it is great to see some obvious thoughts be called out in mainstream media. First is the fact that intuitively we are SHOCKED at the price of some clothes - there is no way they could be that cheap. Well, that is because there are reasons that they are that cheap.

Some of modern lower pricing is achieved legitimately without harming the people making the clothes or the environment directly; scale does play a large part into reducing prices. (Still, scale has its own set of problems, which I won't go into in this post.)

But the other question is: what corners were cut to make clothing this cheap? Working conditions, safe working environments, workers rights, and environmental harm.

It doesn't mean that just because an article of clothing is expensive that it is made in the perfect factory under the best conditions. So the point is to ask yourself, "what do I know about this brand and are they committing to high standards from their suppliers and holding themselves and those suppliers to those high standards?"

If all of us asked the question and demanded that  respect for human rights was part of our buying criteria, it would change the world. Businesses are lead by their customers. Enough market signals and you get brands to wake up and see what customers are demanding.

So if you are interested in demanding human rights for the people who make your clothes - ask the question to the last company you bought a piece of apparel from. Ask them to tell you in detail what standards they are committing to, and how they are verifying those standards, and even ask them how they are ensuring that the way they practice business does not infringe on those rights.

The company may not have the perfect answer, but you asked the question. And just like our intuitive reaction of shock at how incredibly cheap clothing can be and how it could possibly be made for so little money - you will intuitively know if a brand is committed or not.

REPOST: Care2's "The World of Fair Trade Apparel: A Q&A With PrAna’s Nicole Bassett"

REPOST! Read more at http://www.care2.com/greenliving/the-world-of-fair-trade-apparel-a-qa-with-pranas-nicole-bassett.html.

The World of Fair Trade Apparel: A Q&A With PrAna’s Nicole Bassett

Clothes may make the man, but who makes the clothes?

This is the question every conscious consumer asks before they make a purchase. Were the farmers that produced the cotton for my t-shirt compensated fairly? Was it sewn in safe working conditions? Fair Trade Certification is still relatively new in the clothing world compared to the food industry, but the growth in availability and demand is steadily increasing. Companies like prAna, Oliberté, Patagonia, PACT and Indigenous Designs are a few of the companies who have set the scene for fair trade clothing.

We talked with Nicole Bassett, Director of Sustainability at prAna to find out more about their company’s strategies and successes in going from a garage-based business in 1992 to a powerful force of good in the industry.

prAna was the first major company to bring Fair Trade apparel to market in the USA. What was that process like?

It was a bumpy ride. There were a lot of questions we had to figure out to see if Fair Trade could even work in apparel. [We] had to make a product and we needed our customers to want it. Luckily all the pieces came together and we now have a wide Fair Trade product offering. Also major brands like West Elm and Patagonia are now doing Fair Trade.

The positive impact of Fair Trade goes beyond workers to the families and communities behind the products. Where have you seen the biggest impacts?

I have seen firsthand how it has changed workers’ lives—giving them access to communication tools with management and receiving funds to improve their personal lives. In addition, we support Fair Trade Organic cotton farmers, with the goal of ensuring that these farmers see organic farming as a sustainable livelihood and take care of their local environment and communities.

Your business has a three-part sustainability focus—from the materials in your products, to the materials and energy servicing your business, to people and their working conditions. Which area has been the greatest challenge? 

Interestingly they have different challenges, so it feels like we have to create three strategies. For our products and supply chain, the challenges in general come from our size and our ability to effect change.  While we have made a lot of progress to access more sustainable materials and better factories, it is slower than we would like as we don’t have a lot of buying power or leverage to change factories or suppliers.  So we chip away where we can.

The resources to service our business come from getting everyone on board to make different decisions every day—to use better materials and make better decisions. Essentially we are educating the whole company to work differently. This is time intensive on top of making sure the business is running well. So our challenge is getting the time of all employees and using their time well. We have made a lot of progress and have leveraged our early adopters, but we are also human and hard to change!

How important is transparency in your business operations?

This is probably one of the biggest drivers for us to be able to have an honest conversation with our customers and our factory partners.  There are so many issues and questions that come up, so we need to know our supply chain and how to respond to inquiries. Some of our supply chains are much more transparent than others, and we have a lot of work to do to get to where we feel comfortable with every garment, trim, fabric etc. But it is an important part of our sustainability program.

What is your advice for new businesses with a desire to operate sustainably?

Build it in from the get go.  It is actually harder to change your business [to become more sustainable] than if you have strong standards from the beginning.  For example, when a company is used to things costing a certain amount, the cost increase of adding in a more sustainable material, dye stuff, or factory is harder to back in.

My other advice is to go for your ideals out of the gate and leverage tools and resources already developed.  Some really smart people have been working on these issues for years, so ask brands that you admire questions, access information through Textile Exchange or the Sustainable Apparel Coalition and if you are in the Outdoor Industry through the OIA Sustainability Working Group. There is no need to reinvent the wheel!

We were recently featured on Care2's blog! Thank you Andrea Moore and Care2 for the great coverage of an important issue.

Please check out the original post and Care2's website at http://www.care2.com/greenliving/the-world-of-fair-trade-apparel-a-qa-with-pranas-nicole-bassett.html

Design with "The End" in Mind

There is a growing movement surrounding the circular economy right now. The subject of blogs, conferences, new business school curriculum, books, morning talk shows (alright, that last one is a little hopeful, but the rest are highly prevalent in at least my own life).

Finally, people are starting to seriously consider where things go when we are done with them. And they are coming to the very real realization that the "away" from when we throw things away isn't as far away as we used to think. There are other options we must develop. We need to spread knowledge of these other options, work to improve the technologies, and - hardest of all - change our behavior.

Regardless of what these options are, there are steps that can be taken in our normal processes to make this change easier.

Designing with "the end" in mind, or design for disassembly (DfD) as some call it, is a design strategy that considers the future need to disassemble a product for repair, refurbish or recycle. Whatever the intended disposal, this new strategic method of design recognizes that the product at hand will one day have an end. As the average product's lifecycle has been decreasing dramatically over the past couple decades, it is amazing this hasn't been more widely practiced. The largest barrier is this idea of "cheap & easy". We as consumers used to buy products with the intent of keeping them a very long time, and when they finally did stop working for one reason or another, we intended to at least try and fix them. Now we want things so cheap, we have cut out the value of repairs. If this one breaks, it was so cheap anyway, just go buy another.


This attitude has left us with a constant "buy-buy-buy" consumer mentality, purchasing behavior to match, and landfills overflowing with underused, broken cheap stuff.

The time to about face is now. And the design phase is an incredible place to start. Questions to think about when you begin to create a new product with DfD in mind:

• Can the product be reused in a new way (upcycled)? Can it be recycled? Can it be downcycled?
• What parts will most likely need to be repaired? How can I make these parts easy to get to and replace?
• Who will repair it?
• How can the process be intuitive and simple?
• Can the end user simply disassemble the parts in need of different methods of disposal or reuse?

Approaching product design with DfD in mind can lead to savings and efficiencies through out the product life cycle. For example, when products are designed to disassemble easily they usually can be assembled easily as well. This saves a company time and money on labor costs. Also, future repairs can be easy to provide. And while a company may think this simply means for time, it will add value to the customer and where value is added, more value (money) can be captured, either in the original selling process or for future services provided. Also, with a design team being motivated to thing much more strategically and intricately about their designs, they often find inefficiencies they were overlooking before.



All in all, the time to act is now. And many are acting.

Check out:

Best Buy's Electronic Recovery Program: http://www.bestbuy.com/site/Global-Promotions/Recycling-Electronics/pcmcat149900050025.c?id=pcmcat149900050025
Autodesk's Principles of Disassembly and Recycling: http://sustainabilityworkshop.autodesk.com/products/disassembly-and-recycling
HP's Design for Environment: http://www8.hp.com/us/en/hp-information/environment/design-for-environment.html#.VTUMQBPF9sA

Saving ourselves - Technology or Behavior

I am in the middle of an interesting project trying to determine the best type of packaging for shipping products.
The interesting dilemma at hand is how does one make the right decision when you are not comparing apples to apples?

So that you can quickly understand the challenge, I am going to simplify the issue.  Packaging #1 is a recycled paper envelop, while Packaging #2 is a recycled plastic envelop. Sounds similar? Not so much.

The interesting issue at hand is that while intuitively we want to stay away from plastic, the plastic option is actually more durable and seen as a better product. But ultimately this packaging, like so much packaging, ends up in the hands of individuals in our homes and we have limited ways of disposing of it well.

Most waste haulers across the USA don't want soft plastics; in fact only 5% of municipalities will accept it.  This is mostly because of how recycling is sorted in the facilities. Usually there are large conveyer belts that are sorting materials with giant magnets and optical scanners. In this system, soft plastics get caught up in machinery.  And the other issue is that because soft plastics are so light, if they get dirty - that dirt easily contaminates the ability for recycling to occur.

BUT, if there was a way to guarantee we could effectively recapture the large quantities of clean soft plastic, the technology exists to recycle it.

So back to our two options for packaging: Packaging #1 is paper and there for can be recycled (and people already know how to recycle it easily), or worst case scenario is in a landfill and will eventually biodegrade. Packaging #2 - could be recycled forever... but we don't currently have the systems to support that.

Separate bag for sorting soft plastics, next to our kitchen laundry bin

We are living in an interesting time  - where technology and human behavior are needed to work together in new ways to achieve the desired results. And that is part of the equation towards sustainability. All the great technology in the world will not allow us to create better systems, unless we change our behaviors to create those better systems.

So to start: recycle everything you can. And think about which of your systems you can develop -by changing your behavior - to support sustainable change.