If you listen to this podcast regularly, you know I just love talking about my garden.

It's a relatively new hobby for me, but it's already taught me so much.

Take, for instance, all those fallen leaves carpeting my flower beds as winter approaches.

For a long time, I thought these leaves were supposed to be bagged, thrown away, tossed around with a leaf

blower. But now I know that's needlessly wasteful. Now I know these dried leaves are a gift.

They function as mulch. They keep the weeds away, and they improve the health of the soil.

We have the wrong idea about what waste truly is. What if it's time to rethink

garbage? I'm Madhapacanola. This is TED Business from the TED Audio Collective. Our guest

today is Coach Topia co-founder June Silverstein. She's here to remind us that the fashion industry is built on waste.

But she also says it doesn't have to be that way if we start looking at what we throw away in a new light.

Then after the talk, I'll present to you the hill I'm willing to die on.

But first, a quick break. And now June Silverstein takes the

TED stage. In nature, there is no waste. What's left behind by one organism becomes fuel for another.

It was human beings that invented the idea of waste,

of using things once, then throwing them out.

In many ways, waste has driven human progress.

Disposable diapers helped women get out of laundry rooms and into the workforce.

Disposable plastic syringes enabled mass vaccination,

saving hundreds of millions of lives.

And even the most dramatic example of human progress, space travel, has been powered by single-use

rocket boosters.

But this most significant of human inventions, waste, is today so successful that it threatens

...