The more people that do this, the more we see a solution, the Fashion outdoor fabric manufacturers designer told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. “My job is to keep innovating and pushing forward and creating new things for people to rip off.Silverstein, whose fashion company is Zero Waste Daniel, creates clothing from bits and bolts of leftover cloth, with an eye to using, reusing and recycling all that he can.
From a storefront studio in the city’s Brooklyn borough, he makes unisex jogging pants, teeshirts, sweatshirts, hoodies and jackets, mostly black with colorful patchwork, as well as cloth pouches and patches.A standout piece is a bright orange coat created from remnants inherited from the New York City Department of Sanitation.He typically starts with fabric from FabScrap, a local non-profit where designers and other clothes makers deposit a cornucopia of leftover bolts, samples, scraps, zippers, buttons, yarn, tassels and ribbons.
I see potential everywhere,” Silverstein said. “It’s about looking at things from a different perspective. You only see trash if you choose to.I am able to look at these little scraps every day and say, ‘You’re going to leave here as something beautiful and not in a garbage bag,’ and that feels really good.”Nearly three-fifths of all clothing winds up burned in incinerators or dumped landfills, according to the New Standard Institute, a fashion industry sustainability group.The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimated that in 2017, about 17 million tons of textiles were created in the United States and more than 11 million tons were deposited in landfills. About 2.6 million tons were recycled.
Hoping to have an impact, Silverstein is one of several designers paying attention to sustainability in their work.Women’s clothing designer Eileen Fisher has a program for buying back and reselling used pieces, and online clothing retailer Reformation lists a sustainability measure for each item for sale on its website.Outdoor clothing retailer Patagonia runs an online store called Worn Wear for buying and selling its used goods, and its competitor Columbia makes high-performance rain wear out of recycled plastic bottles.
