Earth911 Podcast: The Apparel Impact Institute’s Kurt Kipka Maps the Path to Sustainable Fashion

Earth911 Podcast: The Apparel Impact Institute’s Kurt Kipka Maps the Path to Sustainable Fashion

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Fashion makes us really feel elegant and prosperous, creating distinctive appears to be like that enable individuals residing in crowded societies to set themselves aside with distinctive kinds. But style additionally comes at a substantial environmental cost. According to many estimates, 10% of the world’s carbon emissions and 20% of wastewater are generated by making, transport, and promoting clothes, a lot of which results in landfills lengthy earlier than the clothes’s usefulness is exhausted. Meet Kurt Kipka, Chief Impact Officer at The Apparel Impact Institute. This nonprofit is working to cut back the attire trade’s unfavorable environmental and social penalties. The Apparel Impact Institute created a technique known as Clean by Design that helps textiles and clothes producers determine points, get funding to trial new methods, and propagate options throughout the trade. The group emphasizes the significance of objectively measurable progress towards utilizing much less power, water, and chemical substances and lowering waste within the manufacturing course of.

Kurt Kipka,
Chief Impact Officer at
The Apparel Impact Institute, is our visitor on Sustainability In Your Ear.

The American Chemical Society, funded by the plastic trade liable for the rise of the supplies that allow quick style, claims the amount of style manufacturing will develop by 300% earlier than 2050, which is unsustainable. Our society may be buried in its clothes waste. Kurt outlines the trail to a extra sustainable style trade, together with utilizing pure and recycled fiber, decarbonizing manufacturing, and shorter supply chains constructed round native clothing hubs that promote, resell, restore, and recycle clothes. Today’s quick style merchandise that prices $10 and is worn thrice earlier than being discarded may grow to be a sturdy piece of clothes that’s offered, resold, loaned, and traded in lots of occasions, with the style label incomes income at every flip because the facilitator of the expertise of buying high quality, long-lasting clothes. You can study extra concerning the Apparel Impact Institute at https://apparelimpact.org/