![]() “It’s really fascinating to consider, because when you wake in the morning and get dressed, you never think about that,” she says. Though fashion may seem trite compared to, say, furniture or food, it is anything but, says Emma Williams of C2CPII, pointing out that the World Resources Institute estimates the fashion industry employs more than 300 million people worldwide, is a $1.3 trillion industry, and the equivalent of one garbage truck of textiles or clothing is burned or landfilled every second. Now the institute has an launched an initiative focused on what we wear: Fashion Positive. Stringently, they test every chemical or ingredient that could be used – solvents, dyes, emulsifiers, cleaning agents, you name it, and keep a library of those approved to be safe enough for human exposure or environmental release.įor years manufacturers of furniture, lightbulbs, paints and more have sought certification of their products and made use of the chemical library. It’s an ambitious concept and requires an enormous amount of careful thinking, tinkering and designing in the formation of any product: every single manufacturing step must be re-thought to ensure that not only is nothing wasted, but that every single component is fully biodegradeable and nontoxic. As an example – department store C&A’s solid Gold Level Certified T-Shirts that can be safely composted. Ambitiously, the C2CPII says its ultimate goal is to see consumer products as “nutrients”. In the natural world, there is no such thing as “waste” – everything is recycled down to every atom. ![]() The core Cradle to Cradle concept is to model industrial processes on natural ones – what is known as the “biomimetic” approach. The simple strapline: “Re-making the way we make things.” Today the Cradle to Cradle Products Innovation Institute (C2CPII) certifies thousands of products, ranging from tyres to carpets, soap to construction timber. The concept was devised initially in the 1970s as a play on the phrase "cradle to grave" and was later formalised in the best-selling book of the same name, penned by design chemists Michael Braungart and William McDonough. The more you examine the entire lifecycle of a product the more you realise that waste is always created somewhere.īut what if you could design something so was no waste was created at any point whatsoever? Enter “Cradle to Cradle” manufacturing, a vision of how we could and should make things, everything from shoes to shirts to factories to cities. Upcycling: converting a product into a superior form, such as spinning single-use plastic bottles into polyester fabrics which might be worn for decades.ĭespite their best intentions, all these methods create waste at some point in the manufacturing process, from the pesticides and fertilizers used to grow crops such as cotton, various pollutants in the wastewater from the factories that make them, greenhouse gas emissions or heavy metal emissions from the energy source and so on. Recycling: turning something into the same form of itself (which is easy for things like plastic bottles)ĭowncycling: transforming a product into an inferior one, such as grinding running shoes down to create the surface of basketball courts There are three solutions commonly used by companies at present:
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