Student Worksheet

Find out: Sustainable fashion: The basics

Listen to the snippet of the This Hoodie is ReclAIMEd episode of the Making of a Hoodie podcast from 1:51 to 10:37. This section is about business owners who run sustainable fashion businesses. You can find the transcript for this section below.

Jack Manning Bancroft (AIME)	Welcome to the Making of a Hoodie Podcast. We're in the middle of our ReclAIMEd investigation to explore what we can do with this problem around dead clothing at the end of the line — the problem that sees mountains and mountains of clothing in India with cows walking over them; the problem that sees clothes going to the Third World and the Third World saying, "We don't want these anymore, ’cause we've got enough"; the problem which sees fast fashion having people wear something for a moment, have no identity or connection to it and then throw it out; the problem that within a generation has seen no-one own something for more than 20 or 30 years. So we're here to explore how we can try and reclaim that dead stock, how we can utilise the cloth that's already been created and work with it and see how we can regenerate it.
Celeste Tesoriero(Sonzai Studios)	My name is Celeste Tesoriero, and I have a sustainability consultancy called Sonzai Studios. My background is in design — fashion design. I've been a designer for 15 years. I've worked for many other people and also had my own brand, and having my own brand was my first awakening into the problems that fashion can create for people and the planet. From that ‘aha’ moment that I had producing, that was a ripple effect for me and just really snowballed into every facet of my life.And I think with sustainability, once you start learning about it, you can't unlearn it. So for me, there was no way I could go back to working for brands not doing the right thing. So I came to work for AIME a few months ago now specifically to do brand partnerships on the ReclAIMEd projects. Hearing about this project really ignited my excitement from the bat because it's solving a few challenges all at once — the dead stockj problem for fashion brands [and] also raising money for kids to be educated and closing the gap for marginalised kids. This launch of ReclAIMEd is really exciting because to really make this project have a massive impact, we need to be able to work with the biggest brands in the world and the smallest brands in the world.
Athena Saavas (MJ Bale)	I'm Athena, the sustainability and projects manager at MJ Bale. The ReclAIMEd project is something that jumped out at me, but it's also something that jumped out at the business a few years ago when you were in your earliest stages, back in 2020. We did that vintage student collaboration with Indigenous artists to kind of revive some of our old suit jackets and turn them into walking pieces of art, really, and it was beautiful.So when we saw the the call-out for brands, again for ReclAIMEd, we were very interested and keen to jump back on board, especially because the key phrase in the project is reimagining dead stock and especially moving forward in the fashion industry, and a huge part of our sustainability focus is looking at textile waste, which is such a huge component in the fashion industry.It's what I think definitely can be called a wicked problem. I don't think there is a silver bullet or a clear solution that's available that we can all just tap into right now, but it's something that we do need to start peeling the layers back of what the problem is. Where does it stem from? What's the situation? And as you said sharing: not having secrets and rather learning and sharing what we learn and what the other brands can learn on this journey all together so that we can hopefully come up with finally a few solutions to what is currently a wicked problem.
Dale McCarthy (Bondi Born)	I'm the founder of Bondi Born, which is an Australian luxury swimwear and resort wear brand. We only use sustainable fabrics. We make very small runs here in Australia so that we don't have a lot of dead stock or dead fabrics, but it's unavoidable to a certain extent in any brand. We have a no-waste policy, though. We keep selling whatever sales stock we have left, and then we donate it. We donated thousands of units to the flood victims in northern New South Wales recently.So there's always somewhere that you can send your beautiful clothes that haven't sold. Unfortunately I do hear horror stories about some brands that just burn them, which is just tragic. We know we give away our fabrics to fashion colleges and blah, blah, blah. We're only relatively small compared to a lot of big commercial brands, so I imagine the bigger you get, the more commercial you are, the lower your margins, and you are going to have a bigger problem with dead stock and waste.It definitely is a problem in the fashion industry, because we are meant to be the second-largest industry for producing carbon. A ridiculous percentage of the plastic in the ocean comes from synthetic garments that are washed in your washing machine and go out into the water system.
Elisabeth Harvey (Nico)	I'm the founder and director of Nico. We're an Australian-based brand. We make intimates and leisure wear. I think sustainability has been part of our journey from the beginning — kind of unconsciously in the beginning, just becauseit was my personal value, I suppose. I wasn't really even conscious of bringing that into the business back then. But as I started working in this space I became so much more aware of the problems, right? There's so many problems with the way that the system operates and the way it's set up. Over time it became one of the cornerstones of our business to focus on sustainability and minimising our impact as much as we can, which of course we can't do 100 per cent, but we're working in the best direction that we possibly can.But it's true that dead stock is a huge issue and that waste is such a big part of the fashion industry. No matter how much you try to minimise, there’s always an element of waste I think. So I was really excited when I heard about this project because I think this kind of creative unheard-of thinking is really what's needed in this space. The tried and tested ways of doing things aren't coping with the demand of the fashion industry right now, so we really do need new and creative ways of thinking about it and trying to solve those issues. So I was really stoked because I think it's a really clever way to deal with it.
Qiulae Wong (B Lab Australia & New Zealand)	I've just moved back to New Zealand and started as the Aotearoa New Zealand manager for Lab, which is the organistaionorganization that looks after B Corp certification. Essentially B Corp is a certification for businesses that started about 15 years ago, and it's really about driving economic systems change, so getting businesses to consider all of their stakeholders in decision-making, not just their shareholders, and therefore considering the environment, the people that work for the company, the communities within which they operate — all of that goes into decision-making processes, not just thinking, you know, ‘Is this decision going to make the most money for my shareholders?’.
Dale McCarthy (Bondi Born)	We are one of the very few Australian fashion brands and luxury brands in general that are B Corp-certified. And B Corp-certified, just something I love about it, is that the premise of it is that they believe business can be a force for good, which matches a little bit with your lovely saying about fashion waste for good. We think that you should be able to operate a business in a way that helps the planet and people and brings joy to the people that wear the clothing et cetera but doesn't harm and isn't negative.
Celeste Tesoriero (Sonzai Studios)	Even though ReclAIMEd is just one idea of this, utilising everything — if we think about how much we have to learn from Indigenous culture, I'd love it to definitely connect to that, acknowledging that that idea is really old and waste has been invented. Waste used to never exist because we used to use everything that we had.

a) Listen out for what these businesses do to reduce waste in their business and list the strategies in the space below.

Take Action: Reclaim and reduce waste

Listen to the This Hoodie is ReclAIMEd episode of the Making of a Hoodie podcast from 25:00 to 26.38.

Athena Saavas (MJ Bale)

The ideas are limitless. We all had different things. Things that came about was: can we turn old things in, can we get offcuts of garments and then cut them up and patch them into a tote bag? Can we cut off arms of jackets and things and thread them back together and almost do like this weird hybrid jacket? Or I think we've got a lot of technical jackets that are really incredible, really thoughtfully made, but what do we do with them? And then we thought, ‘Ah, that'd be fantastic to make a bag out of, a travel bag’. so, what if we thread them in different ways and use the arms as handles? So there were so many different things, but what we ultimately did land on was we wanted to ensure that whatever product we end up reimagining is useful. We wanted to make sure that it's not just a pocket square that was a shirt cut up. I mean, great, it’s not a bad idea, but we really did want whatever we end up coming up with to be thoughtful and to be useful and be something that AIME and MJ Bale can be proud of reimagining rather than just a quick fix.So we haven't landed on an idea yet. The place that we are at now is firstly identifying which stock we want to particularly reimagine. Where is our sticky point? Where is something that we want to do better with? And then hopefully in the next few weeks we'll all agree on an idea. It’s an exciting challenge to set for ourselves. And we're really looking forward to seeing where we end up. Hopefully in a month's time we'll have an agreed understanding of what our reimagined product will be.

a) What are at least 5 different ways of recycling you heard in this section of the podcast?

Reflection

What can we do to make our hoodies more sustainable?

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