Category: Sustainability

Though only a small fraction of the United States population wears diapers,  a report from the Environmental Protection Agency found that our nation adds a whopping 20 billion disposable diapers to landfills each year, amounting to 3.5 million tons of waste. That waste, the report found, takes half a millennium to fully degrade; while degrading, it releases toxic chemicals into the air we breathe.

Kim and Jason Graham-Nye, the cofounders of GDiapers, think their product is a big part of the solution to this problem. In 2005, the founders launched their “hybrid diaper” — the world’s first “cradle to cradle” certified disposable diaper insert.

As part of our series amplifying solutions for a more Circular Economy, we spoke to the Graham-Nyes about their innovative product, why it’s so hard to bring circular solutions into a linear world, and the opportunities that circularity creates. This is what they had to say.

NationSwell: Tell me about how your company was founded.

Kim Graham-Nye, Co-Founder of GDiapers: 19 years ago, we were pregnant with our first child. While we were preparing, we read an article that said one disposable diaper takes 500 years to biodegrade. And in the same breath, it mentioned that 50 million diapers were going to landfills each day in the United States since 1970. And that’s just one country! Globally, the number is up to 300,000 a minute.

That’s the waste from just one type of product, used by 5% of the population for what’s usually 3 to 4 hours at a time. It’s a problem hidden in plain sight: one baby, five thousand diapers a year. People don’t really think about that! We talk about coffee cups when we talk about waste, but nothing really compares to diapers. It’s just not sustainable. Every parent needs them, so why isn’t anybody doing anything? Why are the only options cloth or disposable? How can you have a category that has only two choices within something that’s such a big industry?

So we got really excited about it, and we tried to research and find alternatives — but we couldn’t find anything at all, anywhere in the world. And so we initially left it there, thinking, it was possibly a really great business, but maybe not for us. We thought, we’re not chemical engineers, we’re not product engineers, we’re not designers, and we’re not into consumer manufacturing. None of that is our space, but this is a brilliant idea for somebody else — a hole in the market for somebody to create a better diaper. But then, after I was pregnant, I had to wear a diaper, which some parents who give birth do, even if we don’t really talk about it publicly. And the disposable diaper my husband brought home for me was plastic. It didn’t breathe. And it was becoming summer, so the heat of it was gross on so many levels. 

And I thought to myself, “If every parent had to wear a disposable diaper, that would be the end of the category overnight.”   

So suddenly, we became obsessed with the idea of making a better diaper. Eventually, at a trade show for baby products, we met an inventor, a woman who had made these compostable and actually flushable pads that went inside these really cute cotton washable pants. And we partnered with her. We ultimately launched in the US on November 29th, 2005 at Whole Foods.

Jason Graham-Nye, Co-Founder of GDiapers: My background is as a Japanese interpreter. I had worked in the stock market in Japan, out of university, and made a lot of money, but there was no meaning. And then I switched into teaching, and I found a lot of meaning in my work — but no money. Then I met Kim, and Kim had kind of a similar journey where she was working for the U.N. in Zanzibar doing HIV/AIDS research, the other pandemic. And then that made a lot of meaning, but not much money. And then she came to Australia and built a really successful business financially. It was very financially rewarding, but not much meaning. So our whole life has been about asking the question of how you find meaning and money from the same venture.

And we realized that we could do that with — of all things — diapers. But we didn’t have a consumer goods background. We didn’t spin out of Proctor and Gamble. We didn’t spin out of Kimberly-Clark. So the insanity of moving 10,000 miles to America with a baby, pregnant with another one, to fundraise. It’s been a trip.

NationSwell: What were some of the challenges to creating a product with circularity in mind, as opposed to a more linear model?

Jason: In the beginning we were asking moms to change their behavior. 95% of moms in America use disposable diapers, which have almost zero commitment. You just buy it, use it, throw it, that’s it. It’s classic: Take and make waste. There’s maybe no better example of the linear model than diapers. And so, to introduce a product that was a hybrid and outer pad, that you had to wash, and then there was this insert, and you had to get the fit right. That’s hard. I’m a third of the way through a Ph.D. in Circular Economics, looking at the barriers and enablers of a circular diaper solution in the developed and developing world.

So in my literature review, what we find is 114 definitions of circularity. And we go from three Rs — reduce, reuse, recycle — to 10 Rs: refuse, rethink, reduce, reuse, repair, refurbish, remanufacture, repurpose, recycle, recover.

And that row, the last two, recover, recycle, is the least circular. It’s mostly linear. And what we’re finding with big companies, and it’s understandable, is the focus is on recycling. They talk about this as the tailpipe end of the thing. Focus on the tailpipe.

Kim: And if you just focus on the tailpipe, nothing has to change.

Jason: Exactly. So they’ll just clean up the tailpipe and say that’s fine. Because with these big company, particularly in our category and others, the investment in their supply chain, everything they have optimized, the use of plastic to make their products — you can make 500 diapers a minute with the current state-of-the-art technology. If you say, “Well, if you use different materials, you could make 300 a minute,” that’s the end of the business. It’s a low-margin, high-volume business. So I think these bigger companies that say circularity is hard are right. Circularity is hard, but we see it’s the only way we’re going to get out of here alive.

We have to reimagine how we live. We’re the only species on earth that creates waste. That’s fairly profound. We’re the only species on earth that creates waste. And right now, it’s ending up in holes in the ground, or we’re burning it, or it’s going into the oceans. So I’m sympathetic to big companies because it’s such a huge shift.

The other piece is the citizen. And I say citizen, rather than consumer, because I think that’s a really important distinction. We’re called consumers. We’re told we’re consumers. What do consumers do? We consume. But as citizens, for a moment, we can think through how we show up in a circular economy.

NationSwell: But did operating in a circular way also create opportunities?

Kim: Absolutely. It propelled us forward.

What’s frustrating, and why you probably don’t see a lot of companies actually actively selling in the circular way is because it only really works for business if everyone is circular. But trying to be a circular player when your competitors are linear doesn’t make sense. It’s not a fair playing field. It’s rigged in their favor. Forget the fact that our materials are more expensive, so are our diaper is more expensive because that happens now in sustainability. The sustainable products, the organic broccoli is more than the regular broccoli. But now we’re adding a circular system where we’re the ones who collect and compost it, too.  Well, guess what? That costs money. Anything I do, anything is more expensive than free. And yes, I can make compost, and we can sell the compost, but that’s not enough to subsidize the 100% of the cost of it.

So you have to then get creative on, wait, there’s this price differential, which is one of the biggest barriers to the market. Now, my product is more expensive. And now you have a service that right now I don’t pay. I don’t feel that I’m paying for my diapers to be collected in Sydney because they go in my rubbish bin. In America, I know you guys pay for your bins directly, but it’s not the same. If suddenly you needed a diaper service, it’s a new bill that you’re paying.

So the idea that in a linear world, consumers don’t have to pay for any of the damage they’re doing, and the companies don’t pay for any of the damage. So we’re not accounting for true costs. Where when you bring in a circular solution, I’m saying to the consumer, “Pay for the circular product,” it’s a premium, and most people will not pay that premium. But on top of that, why should they pay for a service for the end of life of it. Why should that be on them? It really should come back to governments.

Jason: If you tax a bad behavior and you subsidize a good behavior, lo and behold, everything changes.

Kim: This is where, when the companies say, “It’s hard,” whether it’s Pampers or Coke, or anyone because they’ll say, “Well, but it’ll cost $4 a diaper.” No shit. It’s supposed to cost $4. And then taxing and subsidizing would make us cheap or comparable. This is why it’s so hard to bring circular solutions into a linear world.

Nicole Bassett is on a mission to solve one of the retail industry’s most costly problems. In doing so, she’s not only helping those companies save money — she’s helping to save our planet, too.

The Renewal Workshop, an Oregon-based company she co-founded in 2016, seeks to “bridge gaps, connect systems, and mobilize leadership to make existing linear manufacturing practices circular.” They do so by “taking discarded apparel and textiles and turns them into renewed products, upcycled materials or recycling feedstock,” creating a “zero waste system that recovers the full value out of what has already been created as a way of serving customers, partners, and planet.”

I spoke to Bassett about her company’s bespoke system, her passion for operating within circularity, and what’s next for the Renewal Workshop. This is what she had to say.

NationSwell’s Anthony Smith: Tell me about how your professional journey led you to cofound the Renewal Workshop.

The Renewal Workshop’s Nicole Bassett: I used to work in sustainability and sourcing for apparel brands. When you’re working in that space, you’re always asking yourself, “How do I do it more sustainably? How do we do better?” You’re always trying to find the root cause, trying to find the levers that you can pull to start to make change.  For so many of these big apparel companies, the only way they think they can grow their businesses is by making more stuff.

Our mission is to enable brands to think differently. The better the brands are at doing this, the more the brands become circular; and the more the brands become circular, the more our apparel industry can actually shift and change.

Circularity isn’t just about selling something again. Real circularity is about actually changing your entire business model from linear to circular. You can’t just have this side business that’s circular while the main business stays linear. You have to change everything.

NationSwell: How do you start to do that?

Bassett: When we get started with a brand, it’s typically because they’re paying us to renew their product. That’s how our business model works. Primarily, we enable them to resell their product because we have the technology and a storefront. The brand pays us for those services, and they get the revenue off the sales of their resold product. So it’s a whole new business channel for something they previously considered unsellable.

As we renew all their products, or as we’re cleaning and repairing things, we’re documenting everything, and we give our brand partners a report that says, “Here’s why your products are here.” Some of it could just be human use, like stains or dirt or something. And some of it’s construction issues, like if they used bad zippers, or buttons, or snaps, or something like that. So they get that feedback, and that feedback informs their design decisions.

We also work with designers and teach them how to do circular design. Not only does that benefit us as a company — because ultimately, we’ll have a better product that arrives at our door — but it also allows them to have a better sales channel down the road.

So in a nutshell, we get paid by brands, they become our client, and help our clients become more circular.

NationSwell: What’s the impact of your work so far?

Bassett: When we first started in 2015, we would knock on doors of brands and say, “Hey, we have this idea. You could recommerce your product, and we can give you the tools to do it.”

The brands would say, “That’s weird.” And they were very concerned that they would cannibalize their first price sales. They were very hesitant that their brand and their product would show up in the market in less than good condition.

And so we had to do a lot of convincing them that actually, this is really an additive thing. There is a consumer out there for these products.

And at the same time brands, third-party marketplaces started to just explode. All of a sudden, brands were like, “Oh my God, my product is getting sold somewhere else. And that’s a customer I don’t get. And they’re having an experience with my product that I don’t get to control.” So we use the example all the time of the car industry, where you have Joe’s Car Lot down the street, and you’re just buying a car and it’s whatever. Or you go to Toyota or Mazda or whoever, and say, “I like you as a brand, and I want to have a brand experience, and I want the confidence that I’m not buying a lemon.”

So the growth in interest has definitely changed. We started out with five brands; now we’ve got about 20 brands now that work with us. We have taken back over 400,000 pounds of textiles that otherwise would have gone into landfill. And we now are recirculating that into the economy for a brand.

The other thing that I think is really important is that we renew all this stuff in market. So we have a factory in the United States, and we have a factory in Amsterdam, and we’re renewing that product. So we’re not sending it overseas. We’re really focused on living wage jobs. We’ve got a very diverse employee team. There’s this opportunity to create new types of manufacturing jobs, and that’s what we’re doing here.

NationSwell: What would you say to people who might not understand why this is important?

Bassett: People are just at the precipice of understanding what the linear economy has done to our world. I just don’t think it’s a word people understand. People just think, “I go to the store, and I buy a toaster oven, and I take it home, and I throw it away.”

And so I think what’s really, really important is how much this is a system, which makes it harder. And that’s where I think that there’s a lot going on in this space, but I would say we’re still not at the place where systems change is happening. But a company who makes something has to decide they’re going to take accountability of that thing for its entire life cycle. And ultimately, if they’ve planned for that, they’ve planned the pricing of that, they’ve planned the disposal of that, they know where it’s going to go. If it needs to be repaired, it knows where it goes to get recycled. And they would never design anything that would be waste because then they are responsible for that waste.

Apparel is not designed for a system that exists. There are no recycling options for any blended material of textile. So if I create a shirt that’s acrylic nylon spandex, I am creating garbage. There’s no way around it. But if I created a cotton t-shirt, cotton can actually get shredded down and respun into new yarns — and there is a path for that.

Also: waste is being paid for by all of us. So we, as the consumer are now bearing the cost of dealing with waste, and then we as a society are bearing the cost because our municipalities have to deal with this waste. So our taxes go towards dealing with garbage pickup and having to do that. So the brands have offloaded all of the responsibility and all of the costs downstream.

NationSwell: What’s your call to action here?

Bassett: If you are a business or a designer, think about where your products come from, and where it will go next. Are you designing it with an end in mind? And does that end actually exist? So is this something that can get even recycled? Or if not, how do you enable its use again multiple times?

Brands will invest in circular if consumers reward it. I think individuals should look at companies and say, “Are you just doing this because it’s a trend? Or are you doing this because it’s a part of a bigger strategy where you’re trying to truly change your business?” And there are some companies who truly are trying to figure this out. And then there’s some where they’re just like, “Oh, I can sell more of my stuff.” So it does require a little bit of homework on the consumer side — but consumers are going to drive this change.

To learn more about why we need more investment in the circular economy, read our introduction to this series.

Komal Ahmad, the founder of Copia, thinks hunger is the world’s dumbest problem — and not without reason.

Every single day, Americans waste the equivalent of one pound of food per person, or 365 million pounds a day. That’s enough waste to fill a 90,000 seat football stadium to the brim. By the end of 2017, according to estimates from the United States Department of Agriculture, our nation had wasted 81.4 billion pounds of food,

Amid all this waste, 42 million people in America, including 13 million children, experience food insecurity, meaning they do not know where they’re going to get their next meal, if they even get to meet at all.

And in the wake of COVID-19 and its disruption of our economy, and our supply and delivery chains — really, our entire way of life — that number is expected to increase: One early estimate from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities says the percentage of adults “who sometimes or often didn’t have enough food to eat in the last seven days” rose from 3.4 percent in 2019 to 11 percent in 2020.

But as it stands, the numbers behind our waste and our hunger net out to what Ahmad calls a baffling disparity: Americans end up wasting about three times as much food as there are hungry mouths to feed.

“Hunger isn’t a scarcity problem — it’s a logistics problem,” Copia says on its site. “There isn’t a lack of food, but an ineffective redistribution of excess food.”

Copia’s technology allows donors from businesses that serve food — think restaurants, hotels and Silicon Valley’s corporate cafeteria’s —  to use its app to connect them with nonprofits that work with people experiencing hunger. Those nonprofits set up profiles on Copia, answering questions like what food they might need, when they need them, how they need to be packaged and what facilities they have to store them. From there, Copia’s algorithmically pairs nonprofits with donors, then donors use the app to quickly schedule a pickup of their excess food, and Copia dispatches its drivers for pickup and delivery.

On top of this service, Copia’s technology allows its donors businesses track trends in their surplus food, and reporting patterns in their excess back to them in order to help them make better buying decisions.

“With Copia, donors with excess food benefit in three real ways: real time sustainability and environmental metrics, itemized surplus analytics to help reduce waste at the source and fully automated tax receipts and reporting,” the site says. “We help the donors we partner with track trends in their surplus food, and we report back to them in order to make better buying decisions.”

In other words, if Copia’s drivers are constantly picking up celery from their donors’ restaurants, the restaurant owners will get a notification to buy less celery, creating less food waste and saving the restaurant money.

One big client Copia has helped? The Cheesecake Factory. In partnership with Copia, the national restaurant chain created the Nourish Program, an exclusive deal that moved the entirety of the chain’s food waste management and recovery system to Copia’s system. As a result, in 2020, Cheesecake Factory restaurants across the country were able to donate 400,000 pounds of food to nonprofits that feed people experiencing food insecurity.

Ahmad never expected to be the founder of a food startup in the circular economy. But while she was a student at Berkeley with a clear track towards medical school, she had an encounter that changed her life forever.

“One day, I was walking down Telegraph Avenue and I encountered a homeless man who was begging for food,” she said to ELLE Magazine. “Something about him compelled me to stop and ask him to lunch.”

Over conversation at that lunch, she learned the man was a veteran.

“He had just returned from a tour in Iraq, was waiting for his benefits to kick in. He hadn’t eaten in three days. So this was a veteran, someone who made a selfless sacrifice for our country, only to come home to face yet another battle. To add insult to injury, right across the street, Berkeley’s dining hall was throwing away thousands of pounds of perfectly edible food.”

But while researching and coordinating ways to rescue that food from Berkeley’s dining hall, she learned that food donation to nonprofits was something of a logistical nightmare: the kind of nightmare that keeps people experiencing hunger from the food we waste every day.

“I know it sounds unrealistic to say that one lunch transformed my life — but it’s true. It was in that moment that the idea of Copia was born,” Ahmad said.

At present, Copia has recovered 3.4 million pounds of food, and they’ve helped deliver 3.2 million meals.

“[As a nation], we waste over 365 million pounds of perfectly edible food every day,” Ahmad said in Naturalizer. “We simply can’t tolerate a world where we waste three times more food than there are mouths to feed. We have the technology. We have the resources. We have the wherewithal to solve this problem.”

To learn more about why we need more investment in creating a circular economy, read our introduction to this series.

This article is Part Two in our series on the most innovative solutions within the Circular Economy. 

In the United States, there are limited options to dispose of unwanted firearms. Some police departments host gun buybacks, where people can bring weapons in exchange for cash. Other police departments will always accept people’s guns, no questions asked. As a direct consequence of this dearth of options, there are more weapons in people’s homes and on the streets, and therefore more potential for them to inflict needless — and in some cases deadly — harm.

One faith-based nonprofit in Colorado has found a unique solution to this problem: recycling these unwanted firearms by forging them into garden tools at live events, and then gifting the newly recycled weapons back to families that have experienced harm in the hopes that the families will use them to tend garden and create life.

RAWTools, the organization leading this charge, has seen AR-15s become spades, AK-47s morph into plows and gun barrels experience new life as mattocks, hoes and trowels.

As part of our series on solutions in the Circular Economy, NationSwell spoke to Mike Martin, the co-founder and Executive Director of RAWTools, the organization that’s making it all happen. This is what he had to say.

Thank you for taking the time today, Mike. Please tell me about yourself and your organization.

RAWTools is mostly faith based, but we function in a lot of space that isn’t specifically faith related. I come from a Mennonite, Anabaptist background, and that tradition has a focus on non-violence. This program, Swords to Plowshares, draws its name from an Old Testament verse about sitting under a fig tree — a reference people are becoming more aware of because of the musical Hamilton — where everyone has what they need, no longer living in fear of one another.

It’s not that we think we can eliminate fear, but we can build and encourage spaces where fear doesn’t dictate our decision making.

We’re rooted in restorative justice and transformative justice. So a lot of what we do is victim-centered and focused and really informed by stories of victims and survivors of gun violence. Through Swords to Plowshares, we create and encourage those spaces by going around the country doing events where we turn guns that have brought harm into garden tools, and at these events, we invite folks impacted by gun violence to share their stories. After they share their story at these events, they come over to the anvil, and they take a turn with the hammer, and help make the gun into a garden tool. And the community that’s there at the event gets to see that, and that moment where they see it, where they experience each other, that’s why we do what we do.

We do our work to expose the injustices that bring about gun violence, but also to help under resourced communities see the devastation and trauma that gun violence can cause, and that these victims and survivors will have to deal with that trauma for the rest of their lives — that it’s not something they can escape from, that they’re continually healing from it. And it’s hard to understand that unless you hear someone else’s story.

But once you hear it, you’re motivated to take action in your lives, your families and in your neighborhoods, whether it’s with us or not.

What do you hear from people at the end of your events, once they have the garden tool?

I think that folks who have been affected by gun violence, it’s hard for them to imagine a way out. And when we turn, their gun into a garden tool, they see that there’s a way out, a path towards healing.

For other people at the events, we also make sure we partner with other organizations — so if someone may not be keen on helping us blacksmith turning guns in the garden tools, they might be really motivated to help the local advocacy group with whatever their passions are. So we try to have multiple organizations represented. Plus, we’re usually in and out of town in a day or two, so we want to help build relationships with other organizations wherever we visit. So a lot of people are grateful for the connections that were made at these events.

Do you ever hear from people that they’re actually gardening with the tools, or does it become more of a keepsake?

Absolutely. I say at every event, “It’s fine if you treat this like an art piece on a shelf, but please, get it dirty once in a while. Put it to work.” Because the idea is that we take something that was made to bring death into something that is made to cultivate life. We recycle them into tools that help bring life into the world, that build a better world, that they can grow, and eat and even sell — and that’s why you have to get it dirty and put it to use.

Since we’re talking about the circular economy, one of the things we’ve found, and that we hear from our participants, is that everything that gets made from a donated gun always sells for more than what that gun would have sold for by itself.

That’s how we make the economics of this work, and the economics of this are really important to me. We think about peace and doing the right thing as separate from increasing your bottom line. And we’re showing that this works, that you can sustain a happy and prosperous life by working to dismantle violence. The earned income from our tools is what’s keeping us afloat right now. As we get bigger, we’re hoping to employ full time blacksmiths, to help more people find their careers in this space that recycles tools for killing.

We hear from people with political careers, or who are directors of other nonprofits, that they have the tools made from repurposed guns on their desks as a way of initiating conversation, a way of opening people up to this. And that’s one way to put the tool to work: If you’re a leader, you can help to break the ice in a in a conversation about transformative justice or restorative justice in your community.

How did COVID-19 affect your work?

We haven’t held any of our live events since the pandemic started, and we made the active choice not to hold digital events. Of course, we’ve taken a financial hit. But more than, it’s just something we’ve deeply missed over this last year — but we feel strongly about this choice.

This doesn’t work over Zoom. When people talk about their experience with gun violence, sometimes they just need — sometimes you just need someone to hug you, you know? You need that physical. You need to see — actually see — their facial expressions as you’re talking to them.

Sometimes you just know you can’t have six feet between you and somebody else.

To learn more about why we need more investment in the circular economy, read our introduction to this series.

Every day, the average American produces five pounds of trash a day.

It’s a number that might not seem like a lot, but at scale, it’s staggering: By the end of one year, America as a nation has produced 268 million tons of new trash — enough garbage to fill 12,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools.

And of those millions of tons of new waste that end up in our landfills, less than a third of it is recyclable. That means that solving this problem will take so much more than just recycling better, and more often — it’ll take radically rethinking our relationship with how we purchase, what we purchase, how frequently we purchase, and perhaps most importantly, what we do with the things we have when we’re ready to throw them away.

In honor of Earth Day 2021, NationSwell is launching a content series exploring solutions from the Circular Economy, which the Ellen MacArthur Foundation defines as “a systemic approach to economic development designed to benefit businesses, society, and the environment. In contrast to the ‘take-make-waste’ linear model, a circular economy is regenerative by design and aims to gradually decouple growth from the consumption of finite resources.”

To kick off this series, I spoke with NationSwell Council member Sandra Goldmark, Director of Campus Sustainability and Climate Action for Barnard College, who quite literally wrote the book on the Circular Economy. Here’s what she had to say.

NationSwell: Thank you so much for speaking with me, Sandra. To start things off, would you be able to define the Circular Economy for our readers?

Sandra Goldmark: A big part of what we do as humans is extract resources from the earth. We turn them into things, and use them, and then we’re done with them. Right now we operate in a linear system where those goods just go right back into the earth, in the form of landfill.

But a circular system, and a circular economy, are different. When we move towards a circular system, we harness those resources and feed them into new processes, products, or goods. And along the way, increase, access, health and benefits for the human communities working on those goods. There’s no material that is ever considered unused. Just like in the natural world, every by-product or outcome of any process gets fed back into another process.

Why do we so urgently need to shift towards a circular system as soon as possible?

Right now, thank God, we are really beginning to take some serious strides on climate change. Biden has laid out a really impressive infrastructure plan. We are all of a sudden looking at transitioning our entire car fleet essentially to electric vehicles over the next 10 to 20 years.

However, if we build all that infrastructure, build all those new cars, build all those energy efficient appliances with the old linear model, then yes, we’ve switched to renewable energy, but we have not eased the pressure on the natural resources, which is a huge problem. We can’t approach our new climate plans as though switching to renewables is the only thing we need to do to be truly sustainable. We need to adopt a circular economy by building new systems and infrastructure and objects with existing, pre-extracted resources — rather than extracting new ones.

In your book, you talk about how the Circular Economy advances equity. Can you talk about how?

My entree into circularity really came from thinking about waste and environmental impacts. But as soon as I began actually looking at it, I realized very quickly that you can’t separate the human, the social impacts and the environmental impacts of these broken practices. Not that they’re one in the same, but they’re so closely linked that you really can’t look at one without looking at the other.

Look at a garment that you might buy. If it is cheap and poorly made, that means that the person making it was paid very, very little. That means that most likely the community where it was made was facing some negative environmental impacts from the manufacturer of that garment. And that means that most likely it won’t last very long and it will go to landfill.

And so if you start thinking about a different kind of garment, one where the person making it was paid a fair wage, where the true cost of the materials and the distribution of it from an environmental standpoint was paid for, you might be looking at a more durable garment. One that is, for example, repairable, where all of a sudden, a local artisan where you live might earn some money fixing it and where it could be passed on to somebody else when you’re done with it — maybe at a lower cost than the original price for a new garment.

And so all of a sudden there are these cascading benefits to rethinking what we pay for the objects that we make. Can we pay a little more to have new objects that are higher quality? Can we pay to have things fixed? Can we pay to have systems for circulating things within the community? And thereby increasing wages for manufacturers, increasing access to quality goods at the local community level and creating local jobs… it’s all there as soon as you start to look.

And in fact, the roots of the problem are also all about how much we’re paying people. Like, there’s no way we’re going to have repair shops exist again in the United States in a robust way if we’re competing against these artificially low wages overseas. So fighting for fair wages overseas is actually, when you’re looking at a circular model, is also a way of fighting for local jobs. Those jobs can be in the reuse and repair sector. It doesn’t have to be an either or. It doesn’t have to be like overseas jobs versus ours. It can be both.

What are things that individuals can do right now to live with circularity in mind?

This is the easiest thing in the entire world. Every single person in the United States today can radically reshift the amount of used goods that they buy, decrease the amount of new goods they buy and increase the amount of used goods. When they buy new, they should make a real effort to buy things that are sustainably and ethically made. And that those new purchases can become much more rare and used goods should be the majority of your stuff diet.

What can businesses do to develop healthy models for growth? And what might you say to an entrepreneur who might be thinking right now, “Sure, circularity is great and everything, but isn’t this all bad for my bottom line?”

We need to rethink our business models for businesses large and small. Most businesses that make and sell stuff are locked into a model where their entire source of revenue is manufacturing and selling more and more new goods. Now, if those goods are green or sustainable, great. But if your only business model is always about selling more new stuff, it’s not going to work. We need to build business models that have some revenue from good new stuff, some revenue from reuse/refurbishment, some revenue from repair/reuse/recycling. We need to have a diversified business model where businesses are actually making money from something other than selling new goods.

What’s the policy side of this? What can we support at the federal or local level?

So the policy part of that is huge. I always like to think about it as small and big. On the small level, there are local municipal level policies that can make a big impact. Pay-as-you-throw waste pickup, mandatory composting, all of these kinds of policies that will incentivize the right behavior. We could begin to be giving tax breaks to repair service providers, to reuse businesses. That’s more like at the city or state level. At the federal level, in this new infrastructure bill, we need to be plugging a huge amount of money into circularity, not just green manufacturing, green remanufacturing. And at the global level, the number one thing that we need to do is demand better international labor standards.

Sandra Goldmark is Director of Campus Sustainability for Barnard College.