Hi, I'm Imran Ahmed founder and CEO of the Business of Fashion, and this week we're going back to Voices 2018 on the BOF podcast.

Fashion is contributing to a global plastic pollution crisis. Each year, our industry creates fabrics, zips, buttons, shoes, and bags, all of which are

made with some plastic, and which will one day end up in landfill or at the bottom of the ocean,

where they take centuries to decompose. But there is also a growing problem with plastic that we

can't see, microplastics which are in the fabrics we use to create clothes and which could enter

our water bodies.

At Voices 2018, Rachel educated us on how fashion can help solve this worsening plastic

problem.

So here's Rachel Lincoln Sarnoff at Voices 2018.

The average American spends $60 a month on clothes and sends six pounds of textile waste to the landfill.

Multiply that by the 160 million American women like me, and you get nearly $10 billion

and a billion pounds of landfill waste just from buying and discarding clothes.

When I first learned this fact about 10 years ago, I began raising awareness through projects like Eco Stiletto and Mommy Greenest.

But it wasn't until I began working on the ocean plastic pollution problem

that I started to see the connection to fashion.

And what all of us in this room can do to help solve it.

Because unless you've been living under a rock for the last few years, you know that plastic

is a massive problem.

Each year we send 8 million tons of plastic into the ocean, which is the equivalent of

dumping a garbage truck full of our plastic trash every single minute.

And it's why scientists now predict that by 2050, I'm sure you all have heard this.

There will be more plastic in the ocean than fish.

...