this story is part First Company’s The Most Creative People in Business 2022. See the full list of innovators who broke through this year and impacted the world around us.
In 2019, Maxine Bédat combed a burning landfill in the mountains outside Accra, Ghana, spewing toxic fumes. It was full of foreign branded apparel and accessories. This is a clear indication that billions of pounds of used clothes are exported each year as Americans continually clean out their overproduced closets.Vedha writes in her book untie.
Published last summer and widely reviewed, untie Tracing life across the world of jeans, from the farms where cotton is grown, to the world’s factories where it is manufactured, to its final disposal, the intimate and massive way the apparel industry is reshaping the world. is introduced. world. “We can hear facts. But our psychology works with stories,” says Beda. Former lawyer and fashion entrepreneur (she founded the now-defunct brand Zady), New Standard Institute (NSI), a non-profit organization dedicated to transforming the fashion industry, was founded three years ago.
But she didn’t stop publishing untieIn February, the NSI teamed up with two New York legislators to introduce the Fashion Sustainability and Social Accountability Act (or Fashion Act). Explore your supply chain and disclose where you have the greatest social and environmental impact to reduce your emissions to comply with the Paris Agreement.
If passed at next year’s New York Congress, the Fashion Act will spur New York to lead efforts to bring much-needed accountability to the fashion industry. Meanwhile, legislators from other states contacted her NSI to investigate how similar laws would work in their states.
For Beda, the book and the law go hand in hand. One reveals the problem, the other of him inspires people to action. “We’ve been trained to see ourselves as consumers,” she says. “But we are citizens. We are the ones who can change the law.”