Luxury, Not Landfill — the Waste-Free Future of Fashion | Joon Silverstein | TED

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,

this is the waste left behind from the making of products

such as our quilted tabby shoulder bag.

As you can see, 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 thought.

But there are 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 scrap yards.

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 and 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 the 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.

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.

This is a bag designed specifically to be made from the waste

of our top-selling quilted tabby shoulder bag.

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.

(Applause)