P.S. I Love You, Earth | Young Entrepreneurs Sew Sustainability Into Fashion

Here is a reality check!

One garbage truck full of clothes is burned or dumped in a landfill every second. 

Clothing production has roughly doubled since 2000 and while people are buying about 60% more garments as compared to the year 2000, they only end up keeping the clothes for half as long.

The fashion industry produces 10% of all carbon emissions, more than international flights and maritime shipping counted together!

About 93 billion cubic meters of water which is enough to meet the needs of five million people is used by the fashion industry each year.

About 20% of industrial wastewater pollution originates from the fashion industry worldwide. 

Do these facts and figures make you uncomfortable, a little bit? Don’t they trigger your sense of responsibility towards Earth and its resources? They indeed made some young entrepreneurs turn towards sustainable fashion. Let’s meet these Gen Z problem solvers. 

Fabrics that 'plant' sustainability 

Divisha Sharma is a NIFT graduate who started her sustainable clothing brand- DSI during the COVID-19-induced lockdown. She works with fabrics that are not only plant-based but are also hand-woven. The fabrics are directly procured from weavers across India as Divisha believes that this would provide employment opportunities to the small-scale weavers. 

One of her fabrics is made by extracting cellulose from orange peels that are discarded after industrial processing. Not only oranges but rose, banana as well as milk also go into manufacturing the DSI fabrics, thus making them biodegradable in nature. The dyes used in her fabrics are sourced from plants that are safe for the skin as well as for the environment, unlike the chemical dyes that are a cause of serious concern for Earth. 

“Sustainability in fashion and living has long been a choice for us, but with the current winds of change, it has to become the only way to keep moving forward,” Divisha says. 

Towards circular economy

Kanika Ahuja did her Bachelor of Engineering in IT from Manipal Institute of Technology (MIT) and MBA from Sri Ram College of Commerce (SRCC) and started working in a market research firm. However, she later joined her parent’s NGO in 2016. As she worked in the NGO, she began to reassess the work she was doing and this eventually led to the birth of her company- Lifafa in 2017. Lifafa upcycled discarded plastic into various products such as bags, wallets, bags, mats, etc. The goal was to reduce the amount of plastic that lands in landfills, thus reducing the waste load on earth.

What started as a small venture with an investment of INR 10,00,000 lakhs has turned into a 1 crore business. But for Kanika, the real feat is that she is able to do her bit for the Earth by taking this step towards a circular economy. Today her brand upcycles close to 1 tonne of plastic per month which is indeed commendable. 

Plastic to Fantastic! 

Student of the Mayo College Ajmer, 18-year-old Aditya Banger from Bhilwara Rajasthan is surely setting an example for others to follow. His company, Trash to Treasure, recycles plastic into fabrics that can then be sewn into anything. While the bulk of the plastic comes from local waste collection centers, Aditya also requests people to directly deposit the waste plastic with his company. 

He says, “The plastic needs to be PET grade and does not need to be washed or cleaned. It can be sent to our unit as is and we will clean it before using it for yarn.”

Aditya is able to recycle up to 10 tonnes of plastic per day to make fabric through his venture! 

The fashion industry is surely one of the biggest polluters in the world responsible for 92 million tons of solid waste dumped in landfills each year. However, such initiatives are proving that fashion can co-exist with sustainability. As someone rightly said, Earth is what we have in common, promoting and switching to sustainable living is not only everyone’s responsibility but the only way forward to let our planet survive. 

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