Recycling: So many solutions, so little unity

I recently attended the 2015 International Fiber Recycling Symposium in San Francisco. That title may sound rather specific, and, truthfully, it is. But not specific as in this is a small scale issue - no, the issue of fiber recycling is MASSIVE.
Through out the week, we heard repeated over and over the shockingly large numbers that have to do with waste in the textile recycling space: "over 400 gallons of water to make a new t-shirt"..."the average America throws away 70 pounds of clothing per year"..."producing 14.3 MILLION TONS of textile waste per year"...
The list went on and on.
Besides the numbers, another thing that struck me was how many amazing, intelligent scientists and thought leaders attended this conference - and how specific each person's area of research was. And how little people seemed to know about what everyone else was doing.
Amazingly intelligent people doing incredibly important things - and as each person got up to give their presentation, the crowd would gasp with amazement at what they were achieving all in the same field.
And that's what conferences like this one are for. The amazement and revelations prove this conference did a good job at connecting people working on similar things and sharing breakthroughs in the field. But I couldn't help but wonder how we couldn't connect these researchers, these scientists, these thought leaders on a daily basis. We live in the most interconnected age in the history of the human race - I can see cat pictures from a blogger in Japan in milliseconds with the correct hashtag search on Instagram, and these people were not aware of each others' research projects?

I am excited. I am excited for the possibility of what will happen now that these people have met. While I hope conferences like these will lead to further collaboration and demand for connection, just the existence of this conference - and what everyone there is trying to achieve - gives me so much hope for real, innovative solutions that are coming in the field of fiber recycling and these difference these solutions will make in the world.


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