Climate and Your Closet: Getting Dressed without Overheating the Planet

How do our wardrobes affect the health of our world? How can we create a climate-friendly, worker-friendly clothing industry?

Join Rachel Ceruti, community director of FabScrap, and Sammy Cousino, a community organizer with ReMake, to understand clothing’s contribution to the climate crisis and learn how we can refashion fashion.

 

Apparel accounts for about 10% of global carbon emissions—more than international flights and maritime shipping combined. Inexpensive clothing, marketed as nearly disposable, has warped our understanding of the true cost of textiles -- for our planet and the people who make them.

 

Clothing is a source of human comfort, protection, and expression. But making much of our clothing involves greenhouse gas emissions, pesticides, petrochemical production, soil degradation, landfill waste, microplastics, waterway pollution, animal cruelty, and toxic chemicals. To add insult to injury, the workers who make our clothes often don’t earn enough to live on, yet they are disproportionately affected by industrial pollution and climate change.

 

There are better ways to make, care for, and adapt the clothes we need and want. Join us on May 14 to learn what we can do to remake this essential industry.

Rachel Ceruti recently merged her community-based circular fashion business, Reclypt, with FABSCRAP, now acting as Community Director. Rachel is an award-winning leader with a global perspective, leveraging her experience in the Peace Corps and sustainable finance, to become a key player in the circular fashion space in New York City. Fueled by her passion for waste reduction and exceptional community building skills, she has a proven track record of engaging diverse peoples in the mission of waste reduction through community action, volunteerism, and education. 

 

Sammy Cousino is a NYC Community Organizer for the nonprofit Remake, which unites changemakers in the fight for human rights and climate justice in the clothing industry. She is currently pursuing her Master’s in Sustainability Management and brings a policy-informed, people-centered approach to systems change.

350Brooklyn is a volunteer-driven group that mobilizes people to take effective local action to address the climate crisis. We are committed to pursuing solutions that both reduce climate pollution and ensure that low-income New Yorkers and environmental justice communities participate fully in the benefits the shift to renewable energy will bring.