Alden Wicker: Responsible Fashion

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0:50I'm Guy Kawasaki, and this is Remarkable People. We're on a mission to make you remarkable. I'm pleased to share the stage with Alden Wicker, a distinguished investigative journalist, and Madison Niesmer from the Remarkable People team. Today's episode has a twist. Usually, I'm the one conducting the interview, while Madison ensures that everything runs smoothly. Today, Madison will be stepping into my slippers and leading the conversation. This is because Madison is passionate about ethics and sustainability in the fashion industry. Let me give you a brief introduction to Alden Wicker. She has contributed articles to the New York Times, Wired, and Vogue.

1:37In addition to her journalistic endeavors, Alden is also the founder and editor of EcoCult, a platform that focuses on sustainable and ethical fashion. Millions of visitors, including designers, consumers, and professionals regularly seek critical information at the site. Alden has penned a book called To Die For, how toxic fashion is making us sick and how we can fight back. Die, in this case, is spelled D-Y-E. I love a clever title. This book not only sheds light on the issues within the fashion industry, it also provides readers with practical steps that they can take to make a difference. And now, let's dive into the conversation with Alden Wicker and Madison Niesmer.

2:28Take it away, Madison.

2:33so I just want to start off by saying that I think the work you do is absolutely amazing when I was 16 about 10 years ago I was a sophomore in high school and I came home from school one day and I watched the true cost and it just shook my world and ever since then it was a starting point of asking why in different sectors of life whether it be like food clothing just ethics within everything. So I really look up to you and I'm excited to ask you some questions. Thank you so much, Madison. That's so wonderful to hear. You're welcome. I first want to start off by asking, so you were supposed to tell the world about your book yesterday, but the lawyers shut you down.

3:14So what's up with that? Yeah, it was an emotional rollercoaster. I was supposed to go on a news segment for a large news organization. I had my makeup done. I was ready. I had picked out a natural fiber dress to wear. And 20 minutes before I was supposed to leave to go to Manhattan, I was told that the lawyers had gotten really nervous about the content of the book. And they were afraid that it could open to lawsuits from, this is what I heard, petrochemical companies, fashion manufacturers and fashion brands. And it was really disappointing because I paid for a fact checker to go through the book with a fine tooth comb.

3:59And I empowered her to push back against anything that she thought was a stretch or not warranted or just fix little things that were wrong. And I take the accuracy of my reporting incredibly seriously. I investigate, I'm always trying to figure out what's actually going on. And I talked to a lot of researchers and scientists. I really went out of my way to find primary research about this. And it was just really disappointing that they felt that they were so scared of just the idea that they could be sued for having me on a six minute segment that they would torpedo the whole program. Wow, that is crazy.

4:41Well, I'm sorry to hear that happened. And it's just another testament to how strong you are in speaking up and the work you do, like people need to hear it. And it just shows maybe some of the guilt that they carry with knowing what they're doing is wrong. So my next question hits a little close to home too. And it is, how is your copy editor's father now and the tumors that were caused by his Australian bushfire? That's such a good question. The last time I heard he was fine, but now I'm going to make a little note here to check in with her. She actually emailed me the other day just to say like, I'm very excited for your book coming out.

5:16It's changed the way I've shopped. And I feel very negligent that I didn't check in with her about her father a lot. So I'm going to put it in my notes to do that. And was that hat ever tested? No, I think he threw it out. And also in the book, I decided to go through my own testing and it cost me almost$10 ,000 to have five things tested for a limited number of chemicals. Testing is not available to normal people. A lot of places won't even test things for consumers. They will only work with companies. So this isn't something that normal people can do. Yeah. And I think I remember you started off with more items and it was costing you upwards of, what was it, like$42 ,000?

6:00It was wild. I was warned that it would be expensive, but yeah, and sending over$10 ,000 and then being told that I had a small budget was very humbling. Yeah. Wow. So the first one is there are tens of thousands of different chemicals used to manufacture garments. How can they all be tested and then regulated? Yeah, the Pandora's box has been opened. A lot of these chemicals are just out there. And what's really scary is that scientists are just finding these chemicals. And when they try to look them up in the literature, they're just not there. Not only have they not been tested, they're not labeled, they're not categorized, especially in the United States, these chemical manufacturers are creating chemicals and releasing them without giving the government or the public the information that we need to know that, first of all, that they exist.

6:50And second of all, if they're safe. So we could start moving towards a better system. The European Union requires chemical companies to provide all of the research available and all the information available. And for any chemical that they create, manufacture, use, import at over a ton. And a ton sounds like a lot, but it's not when you're talking about like an entire continent. So that's something that I would love to see happen. I would also love to see a tariff and tax system set up to tariff and tax chemicals, use and importation of chemicals and products that have suspected toxic chemicals to fund research because we need a lot more research and we need a lot more funding for that research in order for it to happen.

7:40And it needs to be sped up. It can take a really long time. So that's something that I would like to see happen as well. One thing I'm wondering, though, is as soon as a chemical is regulated, won't manufacturers just find something else that does the same thing and causes the same harm but just hasn't been regulated yet? Like, what's the span of time between a new chemical being created and it being regulated? Decades. It can take decades for a chemical to be regulated because, like I said, research can take decades. So first there has to be a clue that something's going wrong. And then the researchers have to get the grants, start researching it.

8:15It can take a really long time for health effects to show up. For example, research on workers in permanent press factories. So these are factories that were taking cotton, making it wrinkle-proof. The research coming out showing that they had a higher incidence or risk of leukemia after working around formaldehyde every day came out decades later after they were there. So that can take a really, really long time to do that. So yes, and what you're describing, which is this chemical is regulated, we're going to create a new chemical to use instead. That's called regrettable substitution. That is when, for example, everybody's scared about BPA, we're going to take BPA off the market, and then we're going to slide BPS in there.

8:59And that's why a lot of advocates are advocating for regulating chemicals as a class. So if it has a similar structure, if it's any type of PFAS, if it's any type of bisphenol, which is bisphenol A, bisphenol S, if it's any type of thing that we know one of them is really toxic, we should be regulating the entire class the same way because we're never going to test 12 ,000 types of PFAS and prove that they're all toxic or not toxic. We should just regulate them all. Yeah, I agree. And I feel I also see this within the cosmetic and food industry. like they take one thing out and then now it's like okay now we're gonna put natural flavors or like a different word for parfum and you're like okay it's pretty much the same yeah yeah absolutely and you know what you're saying is that was one of the more difficult things about researching this book is that a lot of chemicals they have a lot of different names so I would be trying to triangulate I'd be like okay tributyl phosphate what is that and then I would find it with two different other names in the literature.

10:04And that made it really hard for me to connect the dots. So you're right that it can be really confusing. So you mentioned clothing having an ingredients list in your book multiple times. So let's say it happens. Clothing now has an ingredients list. Food also has an ingredients list too, but that doesn't necessarily affect what people are ingesting. So is this going to really change anything in the long run? I think so. I do think So we could look at food. We could also look at beauty products. So the natural organic beauty product market has grown very, very popular. And maybe it doesn't affect right away what people buy, but it does give watchdogs and advocates the ammunition they need to change things.

10:47For example, I don't know if you remember, but Johnson and Johnson had to pay out a settlement because of the asbestos that was contaminating their talcum powder. And so now a lot of people are avoiding talcum in their beauty products because of that. Also, you can easily find out if there's talcum in your beauty products. Right now, we don't have that for fashion because advocates don't even... Let's take a step back. So if I'm an advocate and I don't think there should be PFAS in our clothing. I can't go out there and say to brands, stop using PFAS in your clothing if there's no ingredient list.

11:27First, I have to pay somebody to test the clothing, to prove that there's PFAS in the clothing. And then I can go and say, you have PFAS in your clothing, you need to get it out. So it really hampers our ability to make change and hold brands accountable when And they don't have any ingredient list whatsoever except for the fiber content. Also I think that people would be really shocked if they saw the total ingredient list because right now there's sort of like, hey, if you don't recognize it, you probably shouldn't buy it thing. But here it's like, if people saw the ingredient list, they'd be like, oh, I know what lead is.

12:03I know that lead is bad. I think it would really empower people in that way. And especially people with allergies. If people know they're allergic to something, they can avoid it in food, in cleaning products, in beauty products, but they can't avoid it in fashion. So for all those reasons, I'm really, really excited about this one change I'd like to see. It's going to give people proof. And there's always going to be those individuals who are going to speak up and spread the word to others, those advocates, and it gives them something to go off of. So I feel it's really important as well. So I'm wondering, what is your BS detection method when deciding if a clothing brand is acting responsibly for the environment and its employees or just using greenwashing tactics?

12:44I lean on the work of a few different advocacy organizations. Fashion Revolution puts out a transparency index every year. Transparency does not necessarily mean sustainability, but it's a really good way to... I used it to start my research and they actually share their data online. And one of the things they looked at, which made my job a lot easier, is they looked at does a brand even have a restricted substance list? Is this even on their radar? And so that was really helpful because they share that data online. Also Remake, which is an organization out of California, they've done a lot of work to track the responsibility of brands.

13:22They have an accountability index as well. So I lean on them. There's other organizations that look at whether or not brands are hewing to their emissions promises, they're cutting down their emissions. So there's a lot of really good nonprofits that I use to look at just to see their rankings. But also, I know enough at this point that when I read a brand's sustainability or about page, some of them just use a lot of words. And some of them actually share details. And I think that's really, really important. So you go to some and they say, we use sustainable materials whenever possible and we care deeply about the environment and our workers.

14:05Okay, prove it. Others are like, we care deeply about our workers. Here are the organizations that we work with. We've done an audit of our living conditions. We think the living wage is important and we've surveyed our factories to see, we're working with these organizations. They can provide a lot of detail. And so the more detail, the better. That's really good to go off of. And it's also nice to know that there are resources out there that people that are a little less informed can go to just to get clarification. Because yeah, I do feel that greenwashing in many different forms, whether it's like clothing or cleaning products or anything, it's sometimes hard to tell, you know, who's really telling the truth.

15:00So if you were going to buy a pair of jeans because you truly needed a pair of jeans, which brand would you buy from? Oh, okay. I have lots of jeans that I love. Before I name a brand, I will say that I am a 100 % cotton hard pants girl when it comes to denim. I love the way it looks. I think it's more flattering. I'm a real denim person. So what's interesting about denim is there's real denim and there's fake denim. So real denim is almost 100 % cotton. It could have a little bit of stretch. When you flip it over, you can see the warp in the west. So it's like darker blue on one side, and then it's lighter blue on the other.

15:40And denim can be really safe. There's just really not a lot of risk in buying real denim. When you get into fake denim, so things that look like jeans, but is mostly synthetic and doesn't have that warp and weft, doesn't have that lovely vintage feel, isn't dyed with indigo dye and doesn't get that fading. That's where you start to get into a little bit of dangerous territory. So it's really more about the product, but Levi's has been working on non-toxicity for a very long time. They're not perfect as a brand, but I think if you're going for affordable denim, they're really good. I also really like Moody, technically a men's brand, but their stuff looks really good.

16:20All bodies, basically all genders as well. So they're really good. Kings of Indigo is a great brand. So I would recommend all of those. Okay, awesome. And I want to ask a little bit about vegan leather too. So what technically is vegan leather? So technically vegan leather is plastic. There is one vegan leather alternative that does not have fossil fuel based plastic in it, which is natural fiber welding. They make Mirum. They're around. You can find them. They're really cool, very transparent startup. But all other vegan leathers have a good portion of either polyurethane, which is a synthetic plastic, or PVC, which is a very toxic synthetic plastic.

17:09So there's a lot of hype. There's a lot of vegan leather startups that emphasize the plant in the plant-based without sharing that the binder, the thing that keeps it together and functioning is polyurethane. So don't fall for the hemp. Okay. So then is it better to buy regular leather or vegan leather? Like do we put animal ethics first or toxic exposure? Oh, I can't answer that question for you. That is everybody's moral compass. People get very upset about this. I personally buy real leather. I think it lasts longer. At this point, it's definitely a byproduct waste product of meat production.

17:52If that changes, if suddenly people start eating less meat all over the world, that could change. But right now I feel comfortable with that. But if somebody is very, very focused on not interacting with animal products, then I could see them choosing vegan leather. But personally, I go for real leather. I want to ask a couple questions about privilege now. So what do people do if they can't afford to buy more ethical. Well, we have an overabundance of secondhand fashion. I know there's been some internet conversations happening, discussion about people ruining secondhand fashion. I don't think that's true, or I don't think that's happening for the reason people think it's happening.

18:33I think that's coming from a couple of different places. One is that there's less high quality fashion coming through the front end anyway. So as we're moving to a new decade. Like people are now calling vintage fashion, 90s fashion. We were already well into the synthetic low quality era of fashion when we get there. So there's that. I think also people are starting to compare secondhand fashion unfavorably to new fashion that you can get from Shein, from Missguided, at Walmart, at Target, because they're like, why should I pay more or the same amount for secondhand fashion as what I can get at the Walmart.

19:11Well, the reason why it costs more is because it is a lot of work for somebody to find one piece of secondhand fashion at a time, repair it, wash it, hang it, take a picture of it, merchandise it, all of these different things, rather than Walmart, which can put in an order for 100 ,000 pairs of jeans all at once and optimize that for efficiency. So it's still really affordable, even if it's slightly more than the new fashion from Walmart, going to be safer in terms of toxicity because it's been washed a bunch of times. It's affordable, it's sustainable. We have an overabundance of it. We can't even sell all of it here.

19:52So that's a really good way to get into sustainable fashion. There's also some, what I would call fast fashion brands. So I would warn people away from ultra fast fashion brands like Shein, like Missguided, whatever weird gibberish brand that you see advertising on social media. But there are fast fashion brands that are affordable and care about toxicity. One of them is H &M that I mentioned before. So they've been working on this for a really long time. And then Levi's, Nike, there are those that care about their reputation and you can see them in those reports from Remake and Fashion Revolution that I talked about earlier.

20:34I feel like secondhand fashion has definitely become more popular. I remember when I was in high school and kind of started doing a little bit of it, like people were like, what? And nowadays it's definitely more accepted and there's stores all over that sell it. So that's a really good option for anyone. So I am interested to hear your take on how environmental racism occurs within the clothing industry. Yes. So one way that environmental racism raises its head in the clothing industry is that garment workers are more impacted by the toxins in our clothes than consumers. This is absolutely true.

21:08It's why I traveled to India in order to speak to garment workers for the book. And they're impacted because it's not just in the clothing that they're touching all day. It could be in their drinking water. It can be in the air inside the factory. It could be even in the food because these root vegetables are grown in the contaminated soil. So they're absolutely impacted by this. In the United States, the connection's a little bit fuzzier. There's some research from the team in environmental toxicity at Duke, and they were looking at, okay, how much of these sensitizing azo-dispersed dyes are present in house dust?

21:45And they found no difference between houses of different socioeconomic levels and households with different races. So I think right now, especially because this has been such a well hidden secret right now, everybody is probably almost equally affected by this issue. There are luxury brands that aren't doing safe chemistry. There are very expensive outdoor brands that are not doing safe chemistry, children's brands. This is an issue that affects all types of brands. So right now in the United States, this isn't something that's confined to one race or socioeconomic status. I will say that one of the difficulties of reporting this book was finding people whose health issues could be attributed directly to fashion.

22:35And it's a little bit harder to find people who are marginalized, who can attribute their health issues to fashion, because they have so many different exposures. They might live near a highway. People of color are more likely to live near manufacturing plants in the United States. So in order to attribute it to your clothing, you either need to work in the industry or you need to be the kind of person who has access to a good doctor and has control over their environment and all the other products that they're bringing into their home so they can eliminate everything and finally get to the point where they're like, I've done everything, so it must be the fashion.

23:16That's how it manifested in the book in my reporting. And what about when it comes to waste in middle and low income countries? Can you talk a little bit about what happens when Goodwill no longer wants clothing? Where does that go and what goes on? So I mentioned earlier that there's an overabundance of secondhand fashion in the United States. Numbers are a little bit fuzzy, but it seems like we can only sell about 20 % of what we donate here and the rest gets shipped abroad. What happens to that clothing when it gets shipped abroad is, for example, a lot of it goes to Ghana. Ghana has a huge resale market.

23:50You might have heard about it and whatever they can't sell, which is a lot of it, they're not going to sell something with damage. They're just not, it's not worth it to them. So it might get picked up and put in one of these not great landfills, but a lot of it actually ends up in their waterways, on their beaches, and there they leach, the landfills too, the landfills aren't lined. All those chemicals leach out and into the water, and the water is incredibly toxic and dangerous there. And then on top of that, a lot of these landfills will light on fire. Maybe people don't know this, but polyester is very, very flammable.

24:27So they'll light on fire and they'll smolder. And so all the chemicals that are in the clothing end up in the air where people can breathe it in. So are we not phased because we don't see the extent of this or do we truly not care? I think people don't understand. Yes, there's definitely an element of I don't see it. People have a lot of competing priorities, especially in the United States, right? Like we're looking for health care. We're trying to pay rent. We're trying to take care of our kids. And it's really hard to convince somebody to pay$5 more for something that's organic when And they can't see the effect of paying more.

25:04And they're not even totally sure that that money is going to the farmer, to the garment worker. That's the reason why I wrote this book is because I wanted to find a way to connect what happens in factories elsewhere to what happens to us here. And chemicals are that connection. What's happening over there is hitching a ride and ending up on our bodies here. And so we can't say it doesn't matter because it does matter. And if I can get people worked up about this, I think it will greatly benefit garment workers because the best way to ensure that you don't have toxic chemicals on your clothing is to ensure that they're not being used at the factory.

25:57so I'm curious how do we better connect the buyer to the individuals who are like hunched over these sewing machines in bad working conditions I think it's really important that us as consumers realize that it's not just a robot doing a job like it's an actual living human Yeah, I mean, that really is like one of the reasons I focused on chemicals because it's happening to us as well. What's interesting is that I think the Rana Plaza garment factory collapse in 2013 really blew this open for people. At the time, nobody wanted me to write about sustainable fashion. It was impossibly uncool. Nobody cared.

26:37And then this factory collapse, more than 1100 garment workers died. and suddenly people were like, oh, we thought it was robots. It's actually people. And that's really what kickstarted the sustainable ethical fashion movement of this past decade. I think we've potentially reached the limits of that movement being the way it is because of what I just described. It's really hard to keep people focused and to convince them to pay more when, yeah, they're not seeing those people at the other end. They don't see that connection. And I think that's why we're rightly moving into a new era of saying, okay, we're not going to shop our way out of this problem, especially a problem that is so complex and involves things like international development, chemistry, trade agreements, all of these different things that are outside the consumer's control.

27:29And so I'm really excited that the sustainable fashion movement has started looking more seriously at what we can do to put in place legislation to hold brands accountable and bring up the floor. So we can't rely on the good brands to do all the good work because that allows the bad brands to continue doing what they're doing and undercut the good brands. Right. So I think it's really interesting. People always talk about H &M as being an example of terrible fast fashion. And then I was reading a news story and somebody in there said, oh, I would love to buy H &M, but they're too expensive. And that's what happens when we try to rely on brands to do the right thing.