I'm Doug Stevens, and in this finale of Retail Reborn, the Business of Fashion's new podcast series on redesigning the retail industry presented by Brookfield Properties.

We plot how the retail industry will need to evolve due to the reckoning we face as a global society powered by an unsustainable extraction economy operating outside of planetary limits.

The ultimate question being, can fashion transform from being among the worst polluters

to becoming a force for positive global change?

If you've been following this series, you'll recall that in episode two of Retail Reborn,

we delved into the future of supply chains and their sustainability.

In that episode, our guest, Dio Kurosawa, co-founder of the Bearscouts, an advisory firm in the sustainability space,

mentioned a denim factory in Vietnam that was taking a highly unconventional approach to managing waste.

In manufacturing, there's a lot of waste. And waste doesn't come from just, you know,

people think of waste as, you know, the offcuts from patterns or from materials. There's loads of sludge, loads of muck, you know, crap, you know,

all the runoff. Side tax is actually taking all this sludge and muck and creating bricks,

using those bricks then to create houses for factory workers.

Suffice to say, we were intrigued.

And it was that peaked sense of curiosity that led us to Sytex founder Sanjeev Ball.

It turns out that using clean waste to build houses for its factory workers

is just one way that Bal and his team at Sytex are re-envisioning the role of manufacturing as a force for good,

a vision that began decades ago with a key realization.

And unfortunately, one of the biggest realizations that I encountered was the migratory nature of a business.

So the business moved from west to the east, and it moved not for productivity, it moved

for production.

And it was all about going from one place to another to find the cheapest, cheaper, cheaper,

cheaper cost.

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