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Design engineer and biotechnologist Julian Melchiorri, the same person that created the first synthetic biological leaf, displayed this chandelier at the London Design Festival. He calls it Exhale.

The chandelier is made of glass filled with algae that absorb carbon dioxide and release oxygen. It works indoors or outdoors, and the “leaves” can be configured into different forms. Imagine what this technology could do if integrated into future buildings and products all around.

THE VIETNAM WAR (2017, dir. Ken Burns and Lynn Novick)

The truth of the matter is that the fashion industry is incredibly wasteful. Half of what is known as ‘fast fashion’ is disposed of in under a year. The way these products are made are often in sweatshops, keeping folks stuck in poverty working in terrible conditions. The materials being used to create these products are also being sourced in ways that are toxic to the planet. Materials like cotton are grown with industrial agricultural practices that destroy the soil and seep out toxic chemicals onto the water levels, for example.

Yet we keep producing more and more products to satisfy a market full of people that want to serve fresh looks and want to do so for cheap. Over a hundred billion garments are created annually, most of which ends up in landfills. We should be recycling these products. Many times they can be repurposed to create a whole new garment, and often they are perfectly usable clothes that should have ended up in a clothing exchange shop.

We should be aiming to always buy used clothes as much as possible. We do not need to be wastefully creating more and more garments when there are so many already available that end up thrown in the trash or forgotten in closets.

Besides from materials being sourced through industrial/toxic ways, there is also the fact that it takes 2700 liters of water to make a single cotton shirt. It takes us about two and a half years to drink that much water as a single person! But that’s not all since fabric dyeing requires 5 trillion liters of water every year altogether. That’s a lot of water!

Think about these facts next time you want to treat yourself to a new look. There are amazing options out there in used clothing stores. Stop using your money to vote for more fast fashion products, or even upscale brands that continue to contribute to the problem at a higher profit margin. Think about where these new products are coming from, who is making them, where the materials are being sourced, and if it’s really worth going through all that exploitation over and over again…