Man: Mainland man here.

Just got a big order of clothes delivered.

So, I thought, why not do a little try-on haul?

Feel like it looks quite classy and I really like it with these jeans.

Narrator: Fast fashion.

You see it scrolling through your social media feeds, influencer try-ons and links, monthly subscription boxes, discount codes.

The list goes on.

Woman: Fast fashion, the goal is to make as much profit as possible in the shortest amount of time, and with the least amount of cost.

Narrator: The options to a new outfit are endless and affordable, or so it seems.

But the cost has to go somewhere, right?

The fashion and textile industries make up 9% of ocean microplastic pollution a year, use about 15,000 chemicals, and take up close to 215 trillion liters of water, which could fill 86 million Olympic-sized swimming pools.

Woman: The fashion industry is probably responsible from somewhere between 2% and 8% of the total world global carbon emissions that's being spewed out.

Narrator: So, how do we stay trendy while reducing the climate impact?

Announcer: This presentation is made possible in part by a grant from the Orange County Community Foundation.

Narrator: Today, American consumers purchase roughly 4 times as much clothing as they did over 4 decades ago.

In Los Angeles alone, there are over 70 tons of textiles discarded annually.

Woman: 100 million pieces of garment are pushed out every single year.

And that doubles what it was in 2000, roughly.

Man: Fashion as an environmental problem is fairly recent.

It's gotten a lot of heat for waste that shows up in open dumps in the Atacama Desert in Chile, in West Africa.

If we do those lifecycle assessments of apparel and we get very consistent findings, the environmental hotspots are always material production, followed by what we call the use phase, which for apparel is basically washing and drying.

Man 2: The big issue is when we scale things up to the magnitude that we need for clothing our world population, that's where we get into some big problems.

There are many processes within the making of fabric, and there's also the question of new colors, new finishes.

All that requires having chemicals to be able to produce that.

You have to treat the fibers, adding chemicals, and then there's washing steps in between where those chemicals are synthetic or natural.

That has a significant impact on the environment.

There's a number of steps that modify the fiber surface so that you can actually have the dyes attach to the material.

As the fabric is being used and worn or even processed, they begin to shed these, these smaller particles.

So, these are materials that are being slowly released into the environment.

Narrator: To know how we got to fast fashion, we have to go back in time.

Prior to World War II, clothing production was still small-scale, happening in workshops and mostly in people's homes.

But the war created rations on fabric that made mass-produced fashion acceptable to the middle class, and clothing companies exploded across the country, churning out standardized items that we now take for granted.

Lin: I think fast fashion started with Zara.

That term came from a "New York Times" article that talked about at the time, you know, that brand basically able to include a collection in 15 days, which is unheard of.

So, normally in the traditional fashion world, it's like you have two collections a year.

But it did so well, they sold so fast, and that model worked so that you had tons of copycats, like small copycats to humongous, right, corporate copycats out there.

Narrator: Shopping malls dominated while reducing costs.

Going abroad and hiring local cheap labor were the norm.

Then came the internet.

With each passing decade, the amount of garments increased, but their quality, longevity, and labor costs decreased.

This dynamic reached its zenith with fast fashion in the early 2000s, when online shopping began to replace malls, and companies produced clothing at an unprecedented pace.

Lin: Right now, the average American owns about 110 pieces of clothing.

Now you can buy 6 seasons in a year.

So, I think that model of selling more cheaper clothing, more collections, more trends, all kind of fed on itself.

Narrator: At UC Santa Barbara, scientists are experimenting with and measuring microplastics that come off materials through a wash cycle.

Geyer: I look at the whole life cycle of products when I investigate the environmental impacts.

We realized that a significant amount of clothing is now made out of synthetics.

So, now suddenly, fashion also is part of the sort of plastic pollution problem.

Lots of other uses of fibers in fabric.

Towels, linens, fabrics in cars, other transportation.

My group actually did a big modeling study where we estimated that washing alone of this global apparel stock generates around 360 kilotons of microfibers.

So, there's no impact-free material to make apparel out of.

There's a lot of research activities trying to understand what these microfibers that don't biodegrade, how they interact with these environments.

We spend a lot of time looking for technical solutions for what are essentially behavioral problems.

Woman: We've known for a long time, through other studies, that the fibers that are released through domestic laundering ultimately end up in the soil and end up in the water.

Our work is in collaboration with a big fast fashion industry.

So, we're working on a question that matters to them and it matters to all of us.

Man: So, we have 4 clothes today.

Holden: We're doing this study with collaborators in different places in the world using similar washing setups.

Man: So, we want to do a hot run?

Man 2: Yeah.

Holden: There's evidence that the type of the washing machine, for example, a top loader versus a side loader, that can make a difference.

So, the type of agitation.

The temperature of the water.

Man: The objective of the experiment is to determine how much mass is lost from synthetic garments during the washing process.

Lin: One of the biggest pollution sources is water, right?

So, whether that's using chemical dyes or washing jeans or just growing cotton by itself, there's so much water use.

Actually, it's 2,500 gallons that's used to make one pair of jeans from beginning to end.

What we want to do is not focus on the number, but instead to focus on what different alternative activities they could do.

So, instead, maybe they don't use the traditional way of washing jeans.

There's lots of new innovative technology that's becoming more and more affordable.

Man: And the soil is light.

Then we can start now.

Man 2: We meter the water coming into the washer.

We capture the water that's leaving the washer.

We filter that water.

We dry the filter.

We weigh that filter.

And from that, we're able to determine the percentage of the original garment that was lost in the washing process.

Holden: Washing at cooler temperatures using colder water can decrease the amount of fibers that are emitted in machine laundering.

Man: We actually measure the weight of microfibers obtained during the washing and drying.

It's just a tiny amount, but if we use microscope to observe it, you can find there's millions of microfibers on this filter.

Since millions of people actually do laundry every day, there are huge amount of microfiber discharged into the air, the wastewater, and further into the ocean.

So, that could be serious, a big problem.

It's just a matter of the weight of the microfibers.

It's only about, like, 0.5 grams.

Comparing to the weight of the garment, it's, like, one kilogram.

So, it's actually less than 0.1% of the garment.

But however, this amount needed to multiply by millions.

Geyer: Apparel companies actually tell their consumers to wash their clothes less than they do.

Detergent companies tell their customers they should use less detergent.

They can completely use cold water and get the same outcome.

That's a very simple way to address multiple environmental issues generated by apparel.

And then, of course, at some point, apparel becomes waste and then we need to find ways to responsibly deal with this waste.

Holden: Landfilling and incineration... may not be the only ways to manage the solid waste.

We've talked about consumers and fiber emissions in domestic laundering.

What goes down the drain in our households or what comes out of the dryer vent?

And we've also talked about fast fashion as inherently being kind of sale and turnover of textiles and clothing in the hands of consumers and that there's a waste stream from that.

Part of the endeavor of the scientific community is to try to look at plastics altogether, but also synthetic textiles as a sort of plastic.

Can we decompose those solid materials, either into the building blocks of plastics and then make a similarly valuable item?

Davis: So, what we're doing here is we're taking materials that would normally be put into the landfill when they're discarded at the end of their life and repurposing them through a process called pyrolysis, where we heat the materials up to just over 700 degrees Fahrenheit, and all of the materials that are non-carbon- based basically burn off in the absence of oxygen, and we are left with a pure carbon kind of skeleton of the fibers.

OK.

So, it's been a half an hour.

Turn off the power.

End up with something that's like, almost like a carbon black that you can put into soils.

You can use it in amendments.

You end up with a usable material that is not being discarded and has many applications in industrial environments.

Holden: There's been some discussion and some attention to heat treatment that produces a charcoal-like substance that can be ground into a powder, and it really has a lot of the characteristics of other particles that are made and used widely in tire manufacturing and in building products, in printer's ink.

It would generate an end product that we really need, and a lot of other things that we use on a daily basis.

[Whirring] Of course, we have to do the studies that show that we're not causing some other kind of problem, or at least that we can prevent other emissions.

Whether it's a cotton/poly blend or pure polyester, whether it has one set of dyes that we don't really know about or another set, it would be fairly agnostic.

It's early, but we're optimistic.

So, we can take care of a lot of problems.

To me, that's very exciting because there's a different mindset in that and that we could scale up.

Narrator: Scientists are not the only people looking at different ways to explore limiting the environmental impact of fast fashion.

Porfirio Gutierrez, a Zapotec textile artist and natural dyer, is using ancestral knowledge to understand the complexity of transforming nature into artistic material.

Gutierrez: Making clothing historically was purely for everyday use and for ceremonies.

As an artist, it is very important to continue looking back into the culture that allows me to connect with the traditional practices.

Fast fashion does not honor clothing to think of it as more of a disposable.

We're so deep in the culture around us about consumption, how we're being taught to consume things.

I myself try to navigate how things could be made in a different way, and how slowness could be incorporated into this industry.

[Engine starts] Growing up, the tradition of natural dye was already extinct in my culture and in my community.

Chemical dyes, repetitiveness, making something fast had already taken over and oppressed these processes.

For me as a maker, I had to relearn these processes.

You have to know the date and time where these plants are grown, because not all the plants gives color.

I'm going to harvest here a little bit.

My work is driven by the cycle of nature and availability of material.

It is an instinct.

Everything has its cycle.

You have to know the science and the chemistry.

Because the plant or the flower is yellow, that does not mean it's going to give you the same color.

When I think about harvesting every season, I'm actually collecting a DNA of nature that represents that time in history that will never be repeated again.

What side of the mountain you're harvesting.

Is it on one side of the mountain that receives a lot of sunshine?

Or is it a side of the mountain that it's mainly shade?

How the rainy season?

Was there a drought?

All those things are also going to affect converting these plants into color.

It's going to change a little every season.

And so, you always having to adjust your recipes.

Natural dye uses a lot of water.

You're also going to need a lot of water to grow those plants if you want to scale it.

I think the question is, can we look at the producer's integrity and respect towards nature?

But if it's not done with a true consciousness, then you're terrorizing nature.

Thinking about slowness and natural dyes.

I don't know if big industry could just switch into natural dye and help that way.

If we could rethink things as a consumer, I hope that eventually it's going to then push bigger industry to rethink their way of making clothing.

Narrator: Fast fashion brings in fast cash.

There are about 113 million metric tons of textiles produced every year.

Lin: In the US, the fashion market revenue was about $365 billion.

So, that kind of gives an indicator of, like, how huge that market is.

Narrator: One organization helping people and businesses rethink waste is Homeboy Industries, long known for transforming the lives of the formerly incarcerated.

They officially launched Homeboy Threads in 2023, a certified social enterprise offering ways to reuse and recycle clothing and textiles.

Man: We started getting approached more by companies that were asking us if we could do anything with textiles or help them out with apparel... but often requires paying more than it costs to landfill things to recycle them.

So, we started a little bit of a pilot project.

Woman: One of the fun parts about the job, too, I think, is finding new channels for things.

Our first step, we have a really skilled group of people working in triage who basically get a pallet of a ton of things that are all mixed together, usually, and then designate if that item should be resold, donated, or recycled/downcycled.

From there, we have a team that works to separate different fiber types and then aggregates that material, bales it, and prepares it to send downstream to recyclers.

Every step in the process, we're doing as much as possible to keep apparel and items out of landfill.

Last year, we processed about a million pounds of material.

In terms of this being a good working model, what we're really good at is the sortation process and making the correct decisions on where items should go so that we can channel them to their best use.

Man: Clothes go through triage.

First they come off the pallet.

We separate them from wholesale, donation, recyclable, to ecom.

So, this is ecom.

After we're done quality control, we come here, put them on these wooden hangers right here, and we send them to be listed.

Once we finish that process, it's sent to be photographed.

Man 2: I view the item as a customer would.

When I receive the item, I want the item to be the way that it says right here in the descriptions--what it is, the size, the color, the brand.

These are all the little details that we want to make sure that we have in here.

That way we know the customer is satisfied at the end of the day with the product that they receive.

Zwicke: The business right now is really about helping brands and manufacturers reduce their footprint and their environmental impact by increasing the amount of recycling and reuse of their products.

Narrator: It's estimated that approximately 15% of clothing and other textiles are currently reused, but 95% of materials used in clothing and textiles can be recycled, from zippers and buttons to even certain fabrics.

We might just need to look at that cardigan differently.

Lin: How do you influence the manufacturers and the brands and the retailers and the buyers to get to a point where we embrace circularity?

That's the million-dollar question.

Circularity is this idea that what we produce, we use it again and again, and we are responsible about what that end of life looks like.

We have to think about circularity as just kind of the go-to, not the alternative.

Keller: I know some people do follow fashion, and for them it's important to change clothing on a regular basis, but the more you can use the clothing you have, the longer you can use it, and the more you can pass it along to others to use it, the better it will be.

Lin: Slowdown is hard.

People love new things and new gadgets.

What I would say is focus on quality and value and then focus on your health.

A lot of these materials are not good for your skin.

Geyer: One simple way to do it is just buy better-quality apparel, better-quality fabric, better-quality cutting and sewing, and just use it much longer.

But there's also a lot we can do as individuals and in a collective action, because all we have to do is change our behavior to dramatically change the environmental impact.

I think one of the key things that I hope the industry will embark on in terms of creative solutions is to completely rethink their business models.

Lin: When you have consumers who start understanding the negative impact of fast fashion, their purchase behavior starts to change.

When they think about like, oh, I didn't know that someone's not getting paid a fair wage, or that they're using traditional jeans making and that, you know, direct discharges all these chemical dyes into the river.

And I think consumers start thinking about different purchase choices.

And when the consumer does that, that influences the brands.

Narrator: In 2024, California passed the Responsible Textile Recovery Act, requiring companies to offer a plan to their consumers for the end of their products' lives.

Companies like Levi's and Patagonia already have programs in place to return products for recycling or reuse.

Holden: So, maybe we could change our mindset a little bit.

Instead of going for the latest fashion, think about what's the best-made article of clothing.

What's going to really last?

What could I pass down to my kids, my grandkids?

Those are things we can think about.

Narrator: The future of the climate and environment needs sustainable solutions that stay on trend while getting the most out of our material goods.

So, when you go to buy a new outfit, ask yourself, what will you do with all those clothes when you're done with them?

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