Founder of Redress, Dr. Christina Dean - The Party of Consumption is Over

Cool, so I'm sitting here with Christina Dean, founder and board chair and co-founder and CEO at Redress and The R Collective. Hi.

Hi, nice to meet you.

Very nice to meet you too. Welcome to the show. Um, Christina, you're just telling me you used to be a dentist.

I did. In a former life, I was a dentist working in London. Um, hated it. And hated it so much that I retrained as a journalist, actually. And then when I moved to Hong Kong, it must have been about 14 years ago or something, I wrote a lot about the environment and was traveling a huge amount within China and Asia and was just truly horrified as a very young person back then with great ideals and, you know, a vision to change the world, etc., etc. C'est la vie. And then I I stumbled on fashion being one of the major polluters. Obviously, China is still the biggest exporter of apparel and textiles and was just genuinely freaked out. But as a, as a younger woman, and that's why I then started Redress, having discovered that back then in 2005, little was being done to raise awareness around sustainable fashion. And if I were to have said sustainable fashion back then to the industry, it would have been certainly in this part of the world and in China, I would have been met with blank face, blank expression, didn't know what it was. Um, and so now of course Of course, that's like, you know, whatever, 13 years ago. Life has changed enormously in terms of sustainability and the industry's adoption, interest, and perseverance to make bigger improvements in the fashion industry. So there's a bit of good news, but still loads of bad news.

In that journey, can you pinpoint a year or a time when you felt like, okay, this seesaw has balanced the other way now?

I would say so. I think, you know, if I had to pick a time, it would probably be the Rana Plaza disaster, um, that was really obviously focusing around transparency and workers' rights and the whole social side of the fashion industry, which is actually not what I'm— I do. But as a key wake-up call for the whole industry and also for consumers, it served to put a rocket up people's, you know what, to say fashion industry can't really go on like this. So that was very useful from a social perspective. Um, from an environmental perspective, I don't like to say— I'm— in fact, I hate to say that there's probably a Rana Plaza going on every single day. It's a drip feed death that we don't actually see. We don't have any sort of disasters like that, thankfully. But it also makes it a little bit harder to press the severity of the situation that we're going— that we're in. Like, when I started Redress back then in 2005, 17 of the world's top 20 most air-polluted cities were in China. And China's groundwater pollution is something that you'd probably want to kind of throw up over, you know, just in terms of how bad it is. Now, despite the fact that the government— China government has done huge amounts in terms of circularity and pushing better water practices, still 37% of the groundwater is classified as being unfit for human touch. And there are supposedly 450 cancer villages in China where cancer could be attributed to water pollution. So there's nothing to feel good about, really.

Is the more you dig into the world of fashion, the more you realize how unsustainable it is?

I think so. I mean, it was, you know, I've been doing this for a long time, and I was just only recently really trying to think. If I was in an elevator and I was trying to impress on someone the severity of the fashion industry, I would probably try it like this now, you know, that the fashion industry sources from all the major industries in the world. We have cotton and agriculture, we have the oil industry, and for petroleum and synthetics, the chemicals industry, pharmaceutical industry. You've got the forestry industry and of course metals and mining. And then you've got all the furs and the exotic skins from, you know, the animal industry. So when you think of it like that, what you realize is that the clothes that we wear are heavily reliant on every single big polluting industry. That's out there. So to try and fix it ain't easy because we've got very deeply entrenched, very fragmented, archaic in some instances, supply chains extracting from the earth way too much. So the real problem that we have today though is that the consumption has hit the roof. So, you know, consumers are buying double what they were from the year 2000, and in that time are using their products for 37% less of the time and therefore ditching it basically. So therefore we have the real elephant in the room which is that we have an industry that's heavy on taking from the planet. We have consumers buying more and more stuff, they're using it for less and less time, and then they're chucking it all away, which is actually obviously a crisis for the environment but also for the economy.

Yeah, it's not a very efficient way of working, is it? You know, just to clothe ourselves. And the thing about clothing, I guess, it's ubiquitous. It's, you know, it's like food and drink. We're all using it every single day of our lives. But it's such an inefficient practice. As you said, fixing it ain't easy. What can be done and what are you doing now to address it today?

There are two approaches basically, and the one that I've probably been fixated on for too long incorrectly is the linear system, which basically obviously is take, make, use, and dispose. And if all we want to do is make the linear system a little bit less polluting, we're going to get nowhere. So for this, I would say if you just want to extract and make it a little less polluting, and you want a little less chemicals, and you want a little less water, and you saved a little bit of electricity, well, good for you, but it ain't going to do nothing because we have a linear system that's basically defunct when you consider that 53 million tons of fibers go into the linear system every year into fashion, and 73% of those fibers are either landfilled or incinerated within a year.

Yeah, so this toxic snowball has got way too much power behind it.

Well, I think, I mean, this is the thing for sustainability people or just people in the industry. I really think if you want to focus all your time on the linear system and making it less bad, well, we're not going to win. The kind of radical way to really solve this is to think about something that's completely good. So completely changing the mindset, and that's very, very, very difficult. But the ultimate solution is to focus on the circular economy, which means that you can take things out of the planet, make them, use them, and when they are no longer needed, those materials go back into the system in some form, whether that's recycling fibers or capturing energy or capturing chemicals in the water or any waste materials that come through fashion, we've got to capture them and put them into use again. And a very easy way to explain the circular economy, which I've explained to my kids and they get it, is this: when a tree falls down in nature, the whole tree biodegrades, and all the things that were in that tree go into other systems, whether they become, you know, nutrients for the soil, or grass grows out of them, or a bug eats them, or whatever. But the tree is fully, fully utilized in its new life in multiple parts of the forest floor. And that is what the circular economy is. So when you're thinking about— I often think, you know, if I was wearing a t-shirt or let's say a dress, you know, when that dress, if it were a tree, if it were to fall down, ultimately we should be able to extract all of those resources that were in that dress and put them back to work. But to do that, you need a whole new way of working in the fashion industry and you need a whole new system because ultimately you need to be able to collect resources, I'm not going to use the word waste because I don't think it is waste, and I'm talking primarily, if we wanted to oversimplify it, collect post-consumer clothing waste, which is probably the most horrific part of the supply chain really, in terms of its wastefulness. We need to be able to collect them, sort them, and recycle them, capture the fibers, and put the fibers back to work. Sounds great, but it's not easy.

So talk to me about Redress. What are you guys doing?

So Redress is an NGO working to reduce waste in the fashion industry by promoting the circular economy. And we approach waste in two major areas. First, we want to stop waste from being created, and so that is basically educational work directed at mainly designers and consumers, specifically looking at the designers. Like, they are a major stakeholder of ours because 80% of the environmental impact of a product is laid down by designers. And from my experience being in this for 13 years at educational level, not enough designers know anything about Really, they don't know enough about sustainable design. And then if you start talking about circular design, the eyes just start filling up with, you know, bored water, you know, off to sleep they go. So what we have to do in, in terms of Redress's mission, stop the waste from being created, is a massive educational campaign. So essentially we run the world's largest educational sustainable fashion design competition. We have 120-ish university partners. We've educated thousands and thousands— I forget the numbers— of designers around the world through in-person lectures and through our educational platform online. Which is very vibrant and, you know, it's attracting viewers from around the world. It's in multiple languages. All of our work's in English, Chinese, we have some in Russian, French, Spanish, we've had some Arabic as well. So we're really trying to get this education to designers. And our second part of Redress really is to rescue materials that would otherwise go to landfill or incineration and put them back to work in the circular economy. So what that ultimately looks like is a collection system for post-consumer clothes, clothing waste, mainly collected through Zara's Take Back program, where we collect post-consumer clothes, we sort, and we redistribute out into the circular economy, which basically means we find the best reuse for these materials to keep them in use. And we also work with brands to take their end-of-roll deadstock fabrics or finished garment waste, and we have a whole sorting infrastructure to ensure that we can capture those materials.

Amazing. Amazing.

Hard work.

Yeah, a lot going on.

I mean, really, quite honestly, I'm just passionate about textile waste reduction because if we can reduce textile waste and we can reduce the demand for virgin materials, we can reduce CO2 and we can reduce the amount of water pollution out there and we can ultimately protect people's health, which is kind of really what it's all about. Absolutely.

Do you think in doing this, and this will then help the next stage, which is the consumer values that we have at the moment, which is so misshaped, you know, we, we think about clothes in the wrong way. As you say, we throw away 37%, did you say?

73% of fibers get landfilled within or incinerated within a year. Yeah, I mean, it's catastrophic. Consumers' relationship with products, and that could be consumer electronics or it could be your toaster, I mean, that's a consumer electronic, or it could be your, you know, your trainers, it has gone a little bit nuts. And I think the party's over, the party of consumption is over. I think, you know, we, through fast fashion, through globalization, through social media, through this explosion of I want, I want, I want, the party kind of was at its peak. And I do think, if I was trying to look for some good news, that there's like the hangover stage now where people are starting to realize that actually consumption doesn't really make them happy. And when we start to get that point of consciousness, which is not just like tree huggers talking, that's like, you know, your everyday people are starting to realize that more doesn't equal better. We're seeing, I think, the change in values around why people want to shop. And of course, there are many people out there now who start to understand the ethics of their consumption, but there's still very, very few compared with, you know, the total consumer market.

You're talking earlier on about all the education that you're doing with designers, which, um, is so fascinating because on an individual level, I imagine these designers are so excited. But, um, you can correct me if I'm wrong, but I imagine they probably go back to their brands and their brands probably throw some of their circular designs in the bin and say, no, can you do what we asked you to do?

Funnily enough, I wouldn't really agree. For me, the beauty of the fashion industry, um, is the heart and soul of what it represents. And I have to say completely opposite to what you may assume, is that once you can actually involve someone intellectually and actually on an emotional level around sustainable and ethical fashion, it sticks with them. So that's on a personal level, although your question of course was what happens when they go back into the, you know, the big bad world. I think that brands are wanting to find better solutions. I personally— I mean, someone contact me if I'm wrong— I think that most people want to do the right thing. And when we have the things like Burberry happen, where real serious backlash around incineration, I have to say that I think a lot of, you know, industry leaders are on the edge of their seats clinging on for dear bloody life, hoping that their incineration and their bad practices won't come out as well. So I think that these young designers who are idealistic, yes, but very, very talented, very innovative with their approach to sustainable design, are a massive asset to any company.

I would completely agree with you. What would you say to brands who are still driven by profit over values?

I think the good news for the bottom line is the value in waste. And according to the Ellen MacArthur New Textiles Economy report, $100 billion USD is being lost every year from the linear system just through the lack of recycling. And when you start to put a value on materials that are lost, it suddenly starts to make more business sense. So I believe that there's a lot of value in waste materials, and I think from a bottom-line perspective, it makes sense to rescue and repurpose and put these materials back into the system. Obviously, we need more successful case studies to prove that that is actually the case. I think the other big thing that we see around kind of corporate values is the push to define purpose-driven business. All the big— I mean, many big multinational businesses like to position themselves as purpose-driven, and I think that fits the, fits today's kind of cultural— I want to call it a cultural economy. I don't think there is such a thing, but if you look at how people are driven for sustainability, ethics, value, capitalism, a purpose-driven business can be successful economically and can, can also feed in and nurture all of our hopes around the future of the planet. And particularly also, if you just look at HR, like something really, really simple, you know, companies without a clear value proposition or a sort of a value system may well find it harder to retain staff in the future because younger people care who they work for. Yeah, so literally HR, it's going to affect your bottom line. I mean, I couldn't tell you the stats off the top of my head, but staff turnover equals expensive. So, you know, have some good values and retain your staff. And it shouldn't just be greenwashing, it must be a genuine value that is throughout the company. However, off the back of that, much less known than greenwashing is actually something called green hushing. So there was a huge backlash, I'm going to say 10 years ago, and people were, you know, brands were really nervous about actually talking about their sustainability wins for fear of being, you know, bandished. Bandished?

Bandished? Branded?

Yeah. So, you know, 10 years ago or so, brands would come out with claims and they would be quite fearful about being called a greenwasher. So then we went into this era of green hushing. Green hushing means that brands were doing a lot of good stuff but not talking about it because they were too worried to come out and talk about it in case you know, all their other practices would be put in the limelight. And so really, a lot of sustainability experts will say that green hushing was worse than greenwashing. And I have to say, I, I, I know that a lot of brands now, I speak to their marketing people, and, you know, they just want to do the right thing but not talk about it because they think, rightfully so, that their customers expect it. However, they don't often talk about the extent of the good work that they do. And that is greenwashing. And that kind of annoys me actually, because it sort of doesn't cultivate a desire amongst consumers because no one's talking about it. There's loads of amazing things that are going on in the supply chain, but no one really wants to talk about it.

And yeah, talk to me about it.

Well, you know, even on, you know, if you look at the manufacturing level, so much money is being put in cleaning up water, putting in, you know, different infrastructure and technology to clean up the supply chain. Obviously it's not very sexy. I mean, what consumer really wants to hear about that? The point is that these good measures are not being communicated, and that in itself creates a lack of excitement, I think, and a lack of demand from consumers.

That's the thing, there's so many, so many bad stories about how unsustainable the fashion industry is, and they're not stories, they're facts. Impacts, can the apparel industry ever truly call itself sustainable?

No, I don't think so. I mean, they know such a common question is, can fast fashion be sustainable? And can fashion be sustainable? Well, you know, if all fashion is made out of all these materials that we discussed before, you know, metals, mining, oil, agriculture, you know, cattle, blah blah blah blah blah. So you, whenever you use all these materials, clearly there's a negative impact, I think. But for me, what I believe is that fashion can be a force for good. That's a cheesy little saying, but I truly do believe it, that, you know, fashion can be a force for good through capturing waste materials, through driving recycling. You know, already the fashion industry is using a huge amount of post-consumer plastic bottles. Like, we can absorb waste from other streams. I know that it's not easy, etc. There are ways to harvest sustainable raw materials, you know, organic cotton if you want, or, you know, cellulose fibers from trees. You know, there are more sustainable raw materials out there, which have a lower impact. But then the real beauty of the fashion industry is the economic opportunity that it presents for employment, particularly in developing countries. You know, you have artisanal, you have women's groups, you have, you know, just normal people like, you know, working in the supply chain, driving up the economy. So fashion can be a force for good, and it's just that I feel that it's lost its way, and consumers have been a major part to play in that. And I think when consumers can wake up to how beautiful the fashion industry is, they can wake up up to the, the value and the sort of psychological feeling that fashion gives us. And if we can harness that in an ethical way, so too can we transform the industry.

So we've talked about brands, we've talked about consumers. What about governments? What can they do?

Well, very interestingly, I mean, governments clearly have a role to play in every part of the fashion industry, um, although very difficult to implement. Um, I was just reading around, the, the UK Environmental Audit Committee recently did an investigation into the fast fashion and the impacts of the fashion industry on the environment and people. And their report just came out, Fixing Fashion, came out in February this year, and it was very interesting to see how one of the recommendations that's really struck— stuck with me that the UK government suggested was just putting a levy of 1p per garment sold in the UK, which would raise £35 million, which would overcompensate for the £28 million that the UK government is currently spending on dealing with textile in landfill. And that was really exciting. It's basically an extended producer responsibility It's a tax per garment, and I just thought that was great. Let's slap it on and let's raise some money to deal with all of this waste. And that's taking an end-of-life example. Of course, on the supply chain side, that is much more where we see government legislation and policy being exerted. You know, prime examples of that are really in the China central government, which has been like, like a noose, year on year on year has actually been tightening up the environmental law. And in doing so, has changed policy around manufacturing, about water management, energy management. You know, what's really interesting if you look at the China government is that, you know, you can look at how much money they're spending on cleaning up the environment, which is supposedly as of a couple of years, $1 trillion USD. And if you look at the GDP that's coming through taxation from exports of textile apparel, it's absolutely nothing. So when you have a system where, you know, you're spending more money clearing up your environment than you are on exports, it doesn't make it worth it from a government perspective. So in that situation, that's why we're seeing tighter legislation on manufacturing in China, and it's happening in other developing countries as well.

Christina, what's next for you over the next few years?

Well, the next big thing for me is really, really hard work. But a couple of years ago, Redress, which is the NGO, we decided to start our own social impact business, and it's an upcycled fashion brand. So it's a separate legal entity. Very purpose-driven business, social impact, meaning that we're using the business, um, to deliver our impact. And so we have a womenswear brand, it's called The R Collective. It's rescuing luxury brands' end-of-roll and manufacturers' and mills' waste that would potentially otherwise go into incineration or waste— potentially, because it's not all guaranteed to be destined to landfill— and we're upcycling it in collaboration with emerging designers from around the world into an affordable luxury brand, which is really there to serve a very, very specific part of the market, which is for, you know, women who are fashion aware, design driven, but want it to be sustainable. And we retail with Lane Crawford mainly as our wholesaler, and also we have been with Barney's in New York, primarily direct-to-consumer brand. And ultimately, 25% of profits will go back to Redress, the nonprofit. The vision when I go to my grave, if I ever achieve it, will be that these two two vehicles of a nonprofit and a for-profit can really work to achieve the same mission, which is to reduce waste and to prove that fashion can be a force for good. And that's what I'm working on.

Can I ask then, what are the challenges with that?

Well, the challenges of the R Collective are really the challenges of any startup business, which is, you know, we're building a brand. So with that comes just enormous amounts of work around brand value to the customer, improving our distribution, setting up our supply chains, and everything that we do is new and it's difficult. You know, we're not going to trade fairs and buying fabric, we're knocking on the doors of brands and retailers, as brands and manufacturers that we know, saying, you know, "What's your waste? Give us your waste." And so, you know, we have varied material inputs coming in, varied end-of-roll size, scale of our production is very small because of the limitations around the fabric. We're having to educate customers around what upcycling is, particularly in Asia where, you know, people don't really understand what upcycling is. And we're developing a community of women that love our clothes. So what are my challenges? Absolutely, I've got them all. And you know what the other real challenge is? Ultimately, the whole purpose of The R Collective is to make money for Redress. You know, we have the fashion industry that's a $1.3 trillion USD annual market. And according to Business of Fashion, 1% of the women's total apparel market is sustainable fashion. So there is a market for sustainable fashion for sure, and I only believe it will get bigger. The challenge is though that as a startup, we are also foundationally and 100% out to make money for Redress. So 25% of profits that we make go to Redress, and when you're building a brand and, you know, access to capital is king, It's quite, it's quite hard work. Yeah.

And you're doing this all on your own or you have other partners?

No. Well, I'm the co-founder and CEO of The R Collective and I've got the most incredible team. Each of us have come from very different backgrounds, i.e., you know, I've got sourcing production, I've got a CEO, COO who's been doing manufacturing for, you know, 20 years, creative director who's been styling, art directing for 20 years. We're all quite seasoned. Top professionals and angry ladies. And then, yeah, we have a junior team as well.

Okay.

But really what I love about our team is that we're approaching— we have the same goal, 100%. We're going to prove it. We know we can do it. And we each have come from the conventional part of the industry. Well, less me. I'm the dentist.

Exactly. Yeah. The journalist dentist that's turned NGO starter and now fashion brand. Exactly.

So the rest of the team, they have come from the— I'm going to say conventional industry. So they have so much knowledge of how the normal industry does business, and we're out to prove that we can do it in a different way.

Well, I wish you all the luck in the world.

Thank you.

Thank you so much for joining us today.

Pleasure. Everybody get up!