Season 5, Episode 8: Seneca Professor, and Fashion Sustainability Expert, Dr. Sabine Weber

About Today's Show

Welcome to episode 8, Season 5 of #SenecaProud Podcast!

Question:  What do you do with the clothes you no longer wear?  If you're like me, you try to donate them when you can, but what if they're tattered?  For me, I probably throw them into the garbage, which of course goes straight to the landfill.  Turns out, textile waste is a big problem, both globally, and in Canada as well.   Here are some statistics, courtesy of Earth.org:

1. 92 Million Tonnes of Textiles Waste is Produced Every Year - which is the equivalent of one garbage truck full of clothes ending up in a landfill site every second.
2. The number of times a garment is worn is now between 7 to 10 times before it is discarded.
3. To produce 1 kg of cotton requires 20,000 litres of water, and producing a single t-shirt requires 2,700 litres of water.

Clearly this is a serious problem, and our guest in today's show is not only a Seneca Professor, she is also one of Canada's formost experts on the topic, Dr. Sabine Weber.  In this show we talk about her Dumpster Study, funded by Seneca's Applied Research Fund.  And....

In this episode we also learn:

1. How serious the problem is in Canada
2. The opportunity for entrepreneurs to solve the supply chain challenges, so that garmets can be recycled more easily
3. What we can do to help reduce our textile waste
4. So much more!

About our Guest, Dr. Sabine Weber

Sabine Weber has been teaching at Seneca Polytechnic since 2016, in the school of fashion, where she teaches in all three fashion programs: Fashion Business & Fashion Business Management, Fashion Arts and Fashion Studies.  Prior to coming to Canada, Sabine began her career in Germany and later in Switzerland, where as a fasion buyer she oversaw a purchasing budget of over $250 million per year.  Currently, Sabine’s research topics are sustainable fashion, textile waste, and social innovation. Sabine’s main interest is how social innovation can help to transition the fashion industry towards sustainability. Her particular focus is textile waste and a circular fashion system. And along with her students, she completed what became known as the Dumpster Dive study, which was funded by Seneca’s Applied Research Fund. We touch on that study in our conversation.  Sabine hold both a Master’s Degree, and a PhD from the University of Waterloo.  This description of Sabine only scratches the surface of Sabine’s accomplishments in the area of textile waste and sustainable fashion.  Suffice it to say, Sabine is one of, if not number one, expert on this topic, in Canada.  And she teaches right here at Seneca! Pretty cool. 

Important Links

• Read more on the Dumpster Dive Studey here.
• To read more about the global issue of textiles, click here to visit Earth.org.

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Thanks for listening!  

Pat Perdue