Luxury, not landfill — the waste-free future of fashion | Joon Silverstein
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You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hume. Fashion. So many of us love it. The fast-changing styles and trends, all the different ways to express ourselves. It's also a multi-billion dollar industry that is inherently wasteful.

June Silverstein wanted to find a way to address the sustainability problem that's baked into fashion. So in her 2024 talk, she shares one way they're doing it at a brand she heads called Coachtopia. It's after the break.

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By harnessing the power of innovation, Palo Verde is dedicated to delivering generation for generations. Learn more at paloverde.com. And now, our TED Talk of the day. In nature, there is no waste. What's left behind by one organism becomes fuel for another. It was human beings that invented the idea of waste, of using things once, then throwing them out. In many ways, waste has driven human progress.

Disposable diapers helped women get out of laundry rooms and into the workforce. Disposable plastic syringes enabled mass vaccination, saving hundreds of millions of lives. And even the most dramatic example of human progress, space travel, has been powered by single-use rocket boosters. But this most significant of human inventions, waste, is today so successful that it threatens our very existence. Each year,

over 150 billion disposable diapers and 16 billion disposable syringes end up incinerated in landfill or simply polluting the environment. By 2050, there may be more plastic waste than fish in the world's oceans. And outer space is now so full of waste that it's jeopardizing future missions. In the industry I work in, fashion, waste is a particular problem.

Over the past 20 years, fashion consumption has increased by 400 percent. Yet 85 percent of materials produced eventually end up incinerated or sent to landfill. The relentless production of new materials accounts for 38 percent of fashion's greenhouse gases, and is one of the reasons fashion is the third most polluting industry in the world. Fashion is an industry built on waste.

And while some companies are making good progress in setting carbon reduction goals, using recycled materials or offering trade-in and resale programs, few are daring to challenge the fundamentals of the fashion system. But as our climate crisis escalates, it's clear that this linear system cannot continue. This is what I was thinking four years ago as I was at home with my young kids during COVID.

feeling increasingly anxious about fashion's future and my role in contributing to that future. At the time at my company, Coach, we were taking many steps to improve the sustainability of our brand, including launching programs to give used and damaged products a second life. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized this wasn't enough. To solve the problem of waste, we would have to reinvent it.

and the system that created it. This is what led me to create Coachtopia, a new Coach sub-brand designed not to improve our linear fashion system, but to pioneer a circular one in which products are made with waste, designed for multiple lives, and have clear circular pathways so those materials stay in circulation. We reframed our understanding of waste. Let me explain. First,

We had to make our waste visible. In fashion, we normally create products without thinking about the waste we generate. In fact, when we first started looking for our waste, it was actually hard to get the full picture. We measure what we make, not what we leave behind. But these waste streams are vast and deep. For example, the scraps left over from the cutting of the bag patterns are not easily usable. They're small, scrappy, irregular.

Typically, across the industry, these scraps are sent to landfill, almost without a fob. But they're up to 30 percent of each leather skin. At first, the scale of the problem seemed daunting, but we soon realized that the scale was actually the opportunity, that in fact, we could create a whole new supply chain built on waste. So we started collecting, sorting, classifying and storing our leather scraps. And now,

Instead of a pile of waste, we have a rich supply of materials collected in what we call our leather scrapyards. Next, we had to reimagine the value of waste, thinking of it not as a byproduct but as an inspiring raw material. And it started with reversing how we design. In the usual process, we design forwards,

We imagine the ideal product in the ideal materials and colors, and we harness the power of our supply chain to bring this vision to physical life. But in a circular world, we have to design backwards, starting with what already exists and using our creativity to turn those materials into beautiful new products. This was scary. What if we wanted pink, but there was no pink?

What if the only pinks that were available were the wrong shades, no longer on trend this season? What if we fell in love with a color of scrap, but there wasn't enough? Or we ran out before we could make enough units? Our challenge was to see these constraints not as obstacles, but as opportunities for innovative design. And now, back to the episode. This is what led us to create our signature checkerboard pattern.

which we created to help us put a system of order on the often unpredictable, continually changing nature of our raw material supply. The checkerboard allows us to easily swap in and out different colors while maintaining the same system of scalable production. Along the way, we had to learn to embrace imperfection. In the luxury world, we often talk about uncompromising quality. But as Coach, the American House of Leather,

we're also responsible in some part for defining what quality means. An aha moment was when we went to one of our partner factories and saw the parts of the leather they trimmed away because the grain was uneven. The natural grain of the highest quality leathers had become a defect to be trimmed away because it didn't fit an aesthetic preference for uniformity.

In that moment, I realized just how much the way we consume is linked to the way we make. I myself was one of those consumers who asked to see three of every bag when I shopped in a store, looking for the perfect one without any marks or imperfections, without thinking about the fact that to get a perfect finish, you need to waste more materials. Seeing these perfectly usable materials thrown away really brought home the fact

that the idea of waste is closely tied to what we choose as a culture to find beautiful. As producers of fashion, we're responsible for helping create this ideal of beauty. And so it's important at Coachtopia that we challenge it. Finally, we had to shift from designing with waste to designing out waste.

In Coachtopia, we set out to transform the waste Coach generates into beautiful new products. But once we started really thinking about waste and what we choose to consider waste, we had to ask ourselves another question: What if rather than reimagining waste once it was already created, we started thinking about it before it was created? So we looked at our upcoming lineup of Coach bags,

And then we thought about the waste that would inevitably be a byproduct of producing those bags. And here is what we created. We transformed the small and irregular leftover scraps of leather, some of them rejected because of their natural grain, and stitched them together to create a whole new bag with a 59 percent lower carbon footprint than the comparable style made with new materials,

and also a 46 percent lower price than the quilted tabby, as we pass on the savings of using these scraps to our consumers. And now we're applying this approach more broadly to other top styles: the Brooklyn, the Hamptons and more. It's luxury born out of waste. We're beginning to build a whole new system that's more like nature, where what's left behind by one entity, Coach, is used by another, Coachtopia.

And that makes me so happy, because I love fashion. I love the joy it brings us and the way it allows us to express ourselves. I believe that the steps we're taking, though of course imperfect, will help us build a new kind of fashion that doesn't come at the expense of the planet. But what I'm even more inspired by is the idea that by changing the way we both make and consume,

we can start to build a future where waste isn't the unwanted consequence of linear growth, but the fuel for a new model of progress, a circular one. Thank you.

Support comes from Palo Verde Generating Station. At Palo Verde, innovation is at the core. As the nation's only nuclear power plant not located on a body of water, Palo Verde recycles 20 billion gallons of wastewater annually to cool its three reactors. As the nation's electricity needs continue to change, Palo Verde is incorporating creative technologies to meet those demands.

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That was June Silverstein at TED Next. This talk was made in partnership with Coachtopia. If you're curious about TED's curation, find out more at ted.com slash curation guidelines.

And that's it for today. TED Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective. This episode was produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, Autumn Thompson, and Alejandra Salazar. It was mixed by Christopher Fazi-Bogan. Additional support from Emma Taubner and Daniela Balarezo. I'm Elise Hu. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed. Thanks for listening. PR.