Olivia: Jackson, I have a statistic for you that might ruin your day. Every single second, the equivalent of one full rubbish truck of discarded clothes is either burned or sent to a landfill. Jackson: Wait, every second? Not every hour, not every day? That sounds completely insane. That can't be real. Olivia: It is very real. And here’s the part that truly breaks your brain: the vast majority of those clothes aren't even worn out. Many could have been saved with something as simple as a needle and thread. Jackson: Wow. That puts my closet full of "I have nothing to wear" into a very different perspective. What's driving this level of waste? It feels like we're treating clothes like disposable coffee cups. Olivia: That’s exactly the point. And it’s the central argument in a book that completely rewired how I think about my wardrobe. It’s called Loved Clothes Last by Orsola de Castro. Jackson: Orsola de Castro. I think I've heard that name. Olivia: You probably have. She’s not just an author; she’s a force of nature in the fashion world. She started one of the very first pioneering upcycling labels back in the 90s, turning waste into high fashion. But more importantly, she’s the co-founder of Fashion Revolution. Jackson: Ah, the #WhoMadeMyClothes people. Okay, so this book has some serious activist credentials behind it. Olivia: Exactly. It’s not just a friendly guide to sewing on a button. De Castro argues that in a world built on disposability, the simple act of caring for your clothes is a revolutionary act. Jackson: A revolutionary act? That sounds a bit dramatic for fixing a sock. But I'm intrigued. Where do we even start with that?

Olivia: We start with a shift in mindset. De Castro says mending isn't just a chore; it's a state of mind. It’s a direct challenge to a system that’s been carefully designed to make us throw things away. Jackson: What do you mean, designed? Are you saying my t-shirt was built to fall apart? Olivia: In a way, yes. She traces it back to a concept called 'planned obsolescence'. It didn't start with fashion, but with cars. In the 1920s, General Motors, under Alfred P. Sloan, Jr., realized they could sell more cars if they made yearly model changes and designed parts to wear out faster. They made durability a bad word for business. Jackson: So it’s the same reason I have to buy a new phone every two years because the battery suddenly dies. They just applied that logic to our closets. Olivia: Precisely. And it has created this absurd situation. De Castro tells this incredible story from her time sorting through second-hand clothing warehouses. She describes seeing mountains of perfectly good clothes, discarded for the most trivial reasons. The most common culprit? A broken zip. Jackson: A broken zipper. That’s it? Olivia: That’s it. Thousands of garments, perfectly wearable, treated as trash because of a tiny, fixable metal track. It’s cheaper for companies to discard them than to pay someone for five minutes of work to repair them. And that logic has trickled down to us. Jackson: Okay, but let’s be real, Olivia. A new fast-fashion shirt can cost ten dollars. A tailor might charge fifteen to fix a zipper. Isn't it just a logical, economic choice to throw it away and buy a new one? Olivia: That’s the trap! We're trained to only see the price tag, not the true cost. De Castro challenges this by introducing these beautiful, ancient philosophies that see repair as an art form. For example, there's the Japanese art of Kintsugi. Jackson: Kintsugi... I think I've seen that. It's where they repair broken pottery with gold, right? Olivia: Exactly. Instead of hiding the crack, they highlight it with gold lacquer, making the piece more beautiful and valuable because it was broken and repaired. The scar becomes part of its history, a mark of resilience. Jackson: I like that. So a patch on my jeans isn't a sign of poverty, it's a gold seam of honor. Olivia: You're getting it! And there's another Japanese concept she talks about: Boro fabric. For centuries, peasants couldn't afford new textiles, so they would meticulously patch and stitch together scraps of old indigo-dyed fabric. Over generations, these garments became these stunning, intricate patchworks. They weren't just clothes; they were family histories, stitched together. Jackson: Wow. So mending isn't about restoring something to its original, 'perfect' state. It's about adding a new layer to its story. Olivia: That's the revolutionary mindset. De Castro quotes the artist Celia Pym, who says, "I DON’T EVER SEE THE POINT TO INVISIBLE MENDING." Make the mend visible. Celebrate it. It’s a declaration that you value the object, that you’re resisting the throwaway culture. It says, "This item has a purpose in my life, and I’m choosing to keep it." Jackson: That’s a powerful reframe. It changes mending from a tedious chore into an act of defiance. Okay, so I'm looking at my old clothes with new eyes. But what about when I actually do need to buy something? I always try to choose natural fibers, like cotton. That’s the responsible choice, right?

Olivia: Ah, the great cotton myth. That’s what the industry has spent millions to make us believe. De Castro dedicates a huge part of the book to unraveling the secret life of our fabrics, and the story of cotton is one of the most shocking. Jackson: What’s wrong with cotton? It grows on a plant. It’s soft. It’s breathable. It seems so innocent. Olivia: That innocence is an illusion. Let's start with water. Do you have any idea how much water it takes to produce one single cotton t-shirt? Jackson: I don't know, maybe a few gallons? Olivia: Try 2,700 liters. That's enough drinking water for one person for almost three years. Jackson: For one t-shirt? That is staggering. Where is all that water coming from? Olivia: Often, it's stolen from communities and ecosystems that desperately need it. De Castro tells the story of the Aral Sea, which used to be the fourth-largest lake in the world. Soviet-era irrigation projects diverted the rivers that fed it, all to create massive cotton plantations in the desert of Uzbekistan. Jackson: And what happened to the sea? Olivia: It’s almost completely gone. It's now a toxic, salt-crusted desert. The UN calls it one of the greatest man-made environmental disasters of all time. Fishing communities collapsed, and the air is filled with poisonous dust from the exposed seabed. All for cotton. Jackson: I had no idea. My simple, 'natural' t-shirt is connected to an environmental disaster on that scale. That’s horrifying. Olivia: And it’s not just the water. Conventional cotton is one of the most pesticide-intensive crops in the world. It accounts for a huge percentage of global insecticide use. These chemicals poison farmworkers, contaminate soil, and kill wildlife. Jackson: This is getting darker and darker. Olivia: It does. The book also dives into the world of Genetically Modified cotton, particularly in India. It tells the story of how farmers were pushed into buying GM seeds from corporations like Monsanto. These seeds are designed so you can't save them from your harvest; you have to buy new ones every single year, along with the company's specific pesticides. Jackson: So they're trapped. Olivia: Completely. They get caught in a vicious cycle of debt just to keep farming. It's a system of modern-day agricultural colonialism, and it’s woven into the fabric of so much of the cheap cotton we buy. Jackson: Okay, so conventional cotton is a nightmare. What's the alternative? Polyester? I feel like that's just plastic. Olivia: It is plastic. It’s derived from crude oil. And while it doesn't have the same water and pesticide footprint as cotton, it has its own insidious problem: microfibers. Every time you wash a polyester fleece or a pair of nylon leggings, they shed thousands of microscopic plastic fibers. Jackson: And those go down the drain? Olivia: Straight into our rivers and oceans. Scientists have found these microfibers everywhere, from the deepest parts of the Mariana Trench to the snow on Mount Everest. They’re in the fish we eat and the water we drink. We are literally consuming our own clothes. Jackson: This is overwhelming. It feels like a 'damned if you do, damned if you don't' situation. Cotton is an environmental and social disaster, and synthetics are polluting the planet with invisible plastic. How can an ordinary person possibly navigate this? How do we know what to choose?

Olivia: That feeling of being overwhelmed is exactly what the current system relies on. And it brings us to the most critical part of the book's argument: transparency. Jackson: How does transparency help? Does a label telling me my shirt is 50% 'disaster cotton' and 50% 'plastic pollution' make it any better? Olivia: It’s not about the label on the garment; it’s about the visibility of the entire system. For decades, the fashion industry has operated like a black box. Brands place an order, and the clothes magically appear. They built a system of secrecy and plausible deniability. Jackson: So they genuinely didn't know where their stuff was being made? Olivia: Often, they didn't. Or they chose not to look too closely. The supply chains are so complex, with so many subcontractors and middlemen, that it's easy to hide exploitation. And this culture of secrecy had the most devastating consequences imaginable. This is where de Castro tells the story of the Rana Plaza factory collapse in Bangladesh in 2013. Jackson: I remember that. It was horrific. Olivia: It was a preventable tragedy. The building had eight floors, three of which were built illegally. The day before the collapse, huge cracks appeared in the walls. The shops and a bank on the lower floors were immediately shut down, but the garment factory managers on the upper floors forced the workers—mostly young women—to go back to work, threatening to withhold their pay. Jackson: That is pure evil. Olivia: The next morning, the building collapsed. Over 1,100 people were killed, and thousands more were injured. In the immediate aftermath, no one knew which brands were producing clothes there. Activists had to sift through the rubble, looking for clothing labels to identify the companies that were sourcing from this death trap. Jackson: So the brands themselves didn't even know they were connected to it until their labels were found in the wreckage? Olivia: Many of them didn't. The lack of transparency was so profound that it took a catastrophe of that scale to expose it. And that event was the catalyst. It’s why Orsola de Castro and her co-founder Carry Somers started Fashion Revolution. They launched it on the first anniversary of the collapse, with a very simple, very powerful question that people could ask brands on social media. Jackson: #WhoMadeMyClothes. Olivia: Exactly. It was brilliant because it wasn't an accusation; it was a genuine question. It forced brands to look into their own supply chains and admit what they didn't know. It started a global conversation and put pressure on the industry to become more transparent. De Castro is clear: transparency isn't the final solution, but it is the absolute, non-negotiable first step. As the motto goes, "If we can’t see it, we can’t fix it." Jackson: It makes so much sense. We can't choose better if we don't have the information. We can't hold companies accountable for things they can pretend they don't know about. It shines a light into all those dark corners we just talked about.

Olivia: And that really brings all the ideas in the book together. The system is designed to make us feel like powerless consumers, trapped in a cycle of buying and discarding. It wants us to believe our only choice is which new product to buy. Jackson: But what de Castro is saying is that our real power lies elsewhere. It’s not just in what we buy, but in what we don't buy. In what we choose to keep, to repair, to value. Olivia: Exactly. Our power is in our care. By mending a seam, by asking a brand #WhoMadeMyClothes, by sharing a pair of trousers with a friend, we are disrupting that system. We are shifting the focus from mindless consumption to mindful ownership. It’s about moving from a culture of 'ready-to-wear' to what she calls 'ready-to-care'. Jackson: I love that phrase, 'ready-to-care'. It feels active and hopeful, not restrictive. So it’s not about feeling guilty about every piece of clothing we own. It’s about building a relationship with our wardrobe. Olivia: It is. And it’s about recognizing the stories woven into them. De Castro ends with this beautiful personal story about a pair of orange corduroy trousers she bought in the 90s. They saw her through her pregnancy, then she passed them to her best friend for hers, then to another friend, and finally, years later, to her own daughter. The trousers are worn, patched, and stained, but they're full of life and memory. Jackson: That’s what’s missing from that truckload of clothes being dumped every second. The stories. The love. Olivia: That's the heart of it. So, if there's one thing to take away from this, maybe it's this: the next time you're about to throw a piece of clothing away, just stop for a moment and ask one question. Jackson: What's its story? Olivia: And maybe, just maybe... what could its next chapter be? Jackson: A powerful thought to end on. It’s not about perfection; it’s about participation. Olivia: This is Aibrary, signing off.