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Courtesy Slow Factory
Courtesy Slow Factory

A Garment Recycling Program Confronts Global Textile Waste Head-On

Michaela Trimble

September 7, 2022
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In co-founding Slow Factory in 2012—a Brooklyn-based nonprofit dedicated to advocating for slow fashion and advancing climate justice and social equity—Lebanese-Canadian designer, writer, and researcher Céline Semaan—the latest guest on our Time Sensitive podcast—created a platform to further one of her life missions: to replace socially and environmentally harmful and outdated systems with replicable, zero-waste solutions.

Her latest project, the design program “Garment-to-Garment,” aims to educate designers on how to eschew composing garments from fresh rolls of raw fabric and instead create clothing from discarded apparel, returned goods, and textile waste. The program, which Semaan and her team have been prototyping for more than five years, is an ambitious upcycling project aiming to eradicate the climate education gap and combat ever-growing levels of textile waste worldwide. “Our goal is to create a program that intercepts mass-waste in the Global North before it reaches the Global South, which creates a climate hazard for these communities,” says Semaan, referring to the increase of microplastics and toxic chemicals textile waste deposits into environments. “But the key to our project is scale: We’re going to show the world how to successfully replicate a pollution-reduction program for greater worldwide impact.”

Slow Factory’s program, which is rooted in the concept of open knowledge-sharing, comes at a time when many of the world’s big industries are in dire need of climate solutions. In the fashion industry alone, it’s estimated that an average of 92 million tons of textile waste is created annually. This total is only projected to increase, by an estimated 60 percent between 2015 and 2030, to reach an annual total of 148 million tons.

Semaan at a landfill for another of Slow Factory’s recent projects, “Landfills as Museums.” (Courtesy Slow Factory)
Semaan at a landfill for another of Slow Factory’s recent projects, “Landfills as Museums.” (Courtesy Slow Factory)

Set to pilot this fall, the “Garment-to-Garment” program will officially launch next spring with the opening of the Slow Factory Institute at the “Made in NY” campus at Bush Terminal in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, a district home to the second-largest concentration of garment manufacturers and employees in New York City. The nonprofit’s first brick-and-mortar space, Slow Factory Institute will host educational programming and workforce training, a product studio, and a research and development lab all under one roof. The campus will also include a physical home to Slow Factory’s “Open Edu” program, a free and accessible education series on climate justice, climate solutions, and climate-positive design, of which the “Garment-to-Garment” program is a part.

Slow Factory Labs, a physical manufacturing facility for regenerative material innovation, will also be onsite. In the space, Semaan and her team will continue to work on proprietary projects to better the planet and create opportunities in historically marginalized communities, including the development of Slowhide, a first-of-its-kind leather alternative naturally dyed with bacteria procured from discarded coffee and tea waste.

“Climate justice used to sound drab and soulless,” says Semaan. “It’s traditionally been led by a colonial system where it’s deprived of joy and creativity—with no musicians or artists involved. Our space will be innovative, inspiring, and alive. We are reclaiming climate justice.”

# Climate# Fashion

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A New Zine Highlights the Poetry and Beauty of Food

Each of us has our own individual way of following the changing of the seasons, a private choreography in relationship to the calendar. For interior designer and prop stylist Olivia Sammons, the produce available from the farms, orchards, and markets near her family’s Hudson Valley home marks time for her, leading her forward through the year. “I spend so much time thinking about food,” she says. “What I’m going to eat, where I’m going to find it, which orchard has the best blueberries.” This focus led her to create the new zine Is My Favorite Flavor, which just launched its first issue, appropriately titled Summer! Is My Favorite Flavor, at the design-focused Head Hi bookshop and café in Brooklyn.

Photo: John C. Hawthorne. Courtesy Alex Tatarsky.

culture

Alex Tatarsky on Art as a Means to Live Out the Absurd

It’s late August, and I’m walking on Grand Street in Lower Manhattan. It’s one of those summer evenings that’s cooler than expected, a pleasant foreshadowing of fall. I’m on my way to discuss compost with the artist Alex Tatarsky, and as I head east from the subway, I pass through the dense, networked scents of the edge of Chinatown: the briny tang of fish markets, the sweet snatch of a fresh egg waffle from a rolled ice cream shop, the yeasty cloud that floats around the famous bialy shop. Approaching Abrons Art Center, where Tatarsky is doing pick-up rehearsals for an out-of-town run of their show Dirt Trip, this close-packed olfactory landscape opens up into something with more space: a faint vegetal whiff from a small vacant lot, the not unpleasant chemical tang from a passing truck, and beyond these, the smell of a certain rot rolling in from the East River.

Courtesy Blue Note Records

culture

An Album of Cover Songs Honors the Legacy of Leonard Cohen

Though nearly six years have gone by since Leonard Cohen’s passing, the long shadow cast by his legacy as one of the 20th century’s most esteemed and idiosyncratic singer-songwriters shows no signs of lifting from the public’s imagination anytime soon. From the enveloping warmth of “Suzanne,” to the high drama of “Hallelujah,” to the chilling minimalist and gospel juxtaposition of his swansong “You Want it Darker,” Cohen managed to constantly reinvent himself, leaving behind the rare achievement of a musical body of work whose most impressive moments exist across eras.