Here's a bit of environmentalism for your day as you dunk your takeout lunch container into the trash. You probably don't even recycle, you dirty piece of human garbage, which is exactly what this short documentary is about. i-D premiered The Plastic Age yesterday and you can view in its entirety here, as it tracks all of garbage that ends up on the beaches and in the oceans around the world. As previous ages were defined by the materials they predominately used—stone, bronze, iron and the like—researchers are beginning to call our era the Plastic Age.
Millions upon millions of pounds of this shit end up getting into the ecosystem through various means. I mean, have you seen pics of the garbage island in the middle of the Pacific? It's terrible and not enough people are doing anything about it. But wait, some people actually are! Pharrell, along with Bionic Yarn and G-Star, has turned this discarded plastic into a new repurposed fabric that's being used for clothing, specifically jeans. It's basically the Flyknit of denim, replacing about 30% of the fabric with this Bionic Yarn. Obviously, this helps get that trash out of the ocean and ecosystem and into a useful application. Now, you can literally be dressed in garbage and, while it is G-Star we're talking about here, you won't necessarily look like garbage.
Okay, this is good for everyone even if it feels a little heavy-handed with the corporate partnership, but take a second to look past all that and understand the situation at hand. We have this superiority complex about "the finest materials" going into our clothes, like only the best wool and cashmere will do. But when you consider the larger picture, a first step like this could be HUGE.
