fciwomenswrestling.com femcompetitor.com, pexels.com Spencer Selover photo credit
June 4, 2019,
Good ideas, no matter the industry, are much needed.
Great ideas are very rare.
Unused ideas, especially if brilliant, can be innovative and industry changing.
Certain aspects of the global fashion industry, especially in regards to waste, need to change.
The sooner the better.
It is widely agreed upon that the fashion industry is one of the major polluting industries in the world.
The production and distribution of the crops, fibers, and garments used in fashion all contribute to differing forms of environmental pollution, including water, air, and soil pollution.
The fashion industry is responsible for 10 percent of the carbon footprint of the world as well as being the second greatest polluter of local freshwater in the world.
Some of the main factors that contribute to this industrial caused pollution are the vast overproduction of fashion items, the use of synthetic fibers, and the agriculture pollution of fashion crops.
The statistics become increasingly sobering.
The amount of new garments bought by Americans has tripled since the 1960s.
A vicious cycle begins and spins a yarn of an industry out of control.
This exponential increase causes the need for more resources, and the need for a speedier process from which clothes are produced. One of the main contributors to the rapid production of pollution is the rapid production of clothes due to the rapid consumption of customers.
Rapid, rapid, rapid.
Hello Fast Fashion.
Every year the world as a whole consumes more than 80 billion items of clothing.
One day this ton of fabric will be thrown out. New or used.
What a waste.
According to the Environmental Protection Agency 15.1 million tons of textile clothing waste was produced in 2013 alone.
When textile clothing ends up in landfills the chemicals on the clothes, such as the dye, can cause environmental damage by leaching the chemicals into the ground.
Fortunately there are some in the fashion industry who are making a great effort to do something about this global crisis.
Ms. Stephanie Benedetto, a co-founder of Queen of Raw is extremely effective at presenting un-used ideas.
The key to innovation.
We visit her profile at linkedin.com. “Corporate attorney turned fashion tech and sustainability entrepreneur, Stephanie is the Co-Founder of Queen of Raw, a marketplace to buy and sell unused textiles, keeping it out of landfill and turning pollution into profit.
Prior to starting Queen of Raw, Stephanie worked as a lawyer in the fashion, media/ entertainment, start-up, and technology industries and co-founded a sustainable textile manufacturing facility.
An advocate for women in business and sustainability, her companies have been featured in NPR, Good Morning America, NYTimes, Vogue, WWD, ELLE, Cheddar, Parade, WCBS, United Nations, Fortune, Entrepreneur, WIRED, Ellen MacArthur Foundation, and Fast Company.”
Keeping the garments out of landfills is a task of the highest order.
When textile clothing ends up in landfills the excess waste also contributes to the issue of using so many sites just to store waste and garbage.
Another vicious cycle. The more you throwaway, the more landfills that you need.
At her home queenofraw.com, Ms. Benedetto shares, “Queen of Raw is a marketplace to quickly and easily buy unused fabrics online.
Because today more than $120 billion worth of excess fabric sits in warehouses around the world! These materials end up burned or buried. And we’re here to rescue them. Making these sustainable materials available to you, at any time, from any place, is our mission.
The right raw materials are out there for you. Find them here.”
She has a vibrant and special fashion site. You should check it out.
Others in the industry appreciate what she is trying to accomplish.
The team at launch.org announces, “Although some textile manufacturers are taking innovative steps toward sustainability by creating fabrics derived from recycled plastic bottles, using such biological sources as milk, coffee, fruit, and bacteria to create fabrics, or printing fabrics on 3D printers, waste is still a huge problem in the textile industry. As there is no easy way for designers to source these materials directly from suppliers, and since many suppliers do not keep sufficient track of their inventory, the resulting excess stock remaining in warehouses ends up in landfills. Queen of Raw is the solution.”
That is a bold statement. That is saying a lot.
They continue, “Queen of Raw is an online marketplace connecting designers with global suppliers selected for their innovative raw materials, sustainability value, and avant-garde approach to fashion and technology.
On QueenofRaw.com, designers can create digital mood boards for their collections and then purchase these raw materials with the click of a button directly from suppliers. Through Queen of Raw, traditional brick-and-mortar suppliers are given the opportunity to compete in online retail, offload their overstock, and reach a new customer base.”
That is high praise indeed. Well deserved.
More praise and admiration is coming the way of Queen of Raw.
WBUR-FM is a public radio station located in Boston, Massachusetts, owned by Boston University. WBUR is the largest of three NPR member stations in Boston, along with WGBH and WUMB-FM.
They enjoyed an extensive interview with Stephanie. There she explained Block Chain Technology can improve the fashion waste crisis.
Our star founder explains to WBUR, “Blockchain technology is revolutionary for supply chain. It means that we are able to verify data and know at every single step of a really complicated supply chain, millions of people across the globe being connected as products move from place to place. We can now use blockchain to verify data and know who said what when, who’s doing what when in that supply chain, and really in real time control the data and the analytics.”
Here is the significance of that technology.
An enterprise, customer, any of their vendors or suppliers in their supply chain, can verify data from an app on their phone, which can tell them what is being done with those fabrics with an eye upon where they are at that specific time in the process chain.
As an example, if they received 200,000 yards of fabric, but they only use 50,000 yards to make their t-shirts, they can click a button and an alert occurs, and now they know that there is a waste of fabric sitting at that location.
Stated another way, they can pinpoint where the other 150,000 yards are.
Now a manufacturer can make a decision as to how to quickly address that problem before the product becomes out dated and relegated to waste.
Makes sense?
Sure it does.
This makes sense too.
Regarding Queen of Raw’s mission, greenconnectionsradio.com adds, “Look around you. Everything you set your eyes on came from raw materials of some kind. Your clothing, the chair or seat you’re sitting on, the desk you’re sitting at. Natural resources were used to make it anew. What if it was made from materials already in the marketplace instead?”
New and un-used now is once again available for use and not thrown away into landfills.
Great idea Stephanie.
This future thinking executive seems to have an un-used idea that absolutely needs to be used over and over again.
The health of the fashion industry and the environment may depend upon it.
Just goes to show you.
You can never have enough intelligent and innovative un-used ideas.
~ ~ ~
https://www.launch.org/innovators/stephanie-benedetto/
https://www.launch.org/history/
https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2019/05/24/fashion-industry-waste
https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephaniebenedetto
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_fashion
