Noteworthy. (2017). Solutions 8(1): 8-11.
Idea Lab Noteworthy
Dave Russell / Renewal Workshop
Jeff Denby and Nicole Bassett, Renewal Workshops’ co-founders, at the company’s factory.
Holding Stitches: A New Company Repairs Discarded Clothing for the Good of the Earth Textiles have the worst recycle rate. Only 20 percent of donated clothes are sold through charity stores, with the rest either shipped overseas or placed in landfills. Consumers are not the only ones stuffing landfills, either. Manufacturers toss out around 10 to 12 percent of clothes due to minor damage, reports The Guardian. As a result, every year, about 13 million tons of textiles are dumped
into landfills in the US, according to the latest data from the Environmental Protection Agency. That’s equal to about 150 million cubic yards of landfill space. Clothing items then take anywhere from three months to 80 years to decompose, all the while releasing methane as well as dyes and chemicals. A new eco-friendly company based in Oregon, called Renewal Workshop, offers a solution. Founded in June, Renewal Workshop aims to correct light damage to clothing and sell items back to consumers through a dedicated website. They also plan to sell some of the repaired items back to manufacturers.
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“[Our company] is one that will help bring about a circular economy for the apparel industry. It is redefining our relationship to products, how we make them, how we use them and what their overall journey looks like so they don’t end up in a landfill,” says Renewal Workshop co-founder Nicole Bassett. As a principle, they only work with sustainability-focused companies, such as PrAna, Ibex, Toad & Co., and Indigenous. Here’s the process: once the team receives the damaged items from these companies, they sort them and start repairs. The renewed clothes bear both the brand logo and a “RW” tag.
Idea Lab Noteworthy “All those products that can’t be repaired, we reuse the material to create something else,” explains Bassett. “And then only when that piece of apparel is truly finished does it need to find its final resting place — and we believe that should either be composting or recycling.”
Once Persecuted, Alligator Gar Now May Drive the Fight against Invasive Asian Carp by Devin Windelspecht
Once derided as a “trash fish,” a nuisance that was driven to extinction in parts of the country in order to make room for angler-favored “sportfish,” the huge, toothy alligator gar may
at last be returning to the northern waters that it was once eradicated from decades ago. A new drive to reintroduce the once-maligned species is part of a last-ditch effort to halt the spread of one of the fastest growing invasive fish species to threaten US rivers: the Asian carp. “Asian carp” refers to a group of four closely related species—silver, bighead, grass, and black—that were first brought to the US in the 1970s for the purpose of filtering pond water but by the early 1980s quickly began to infiltrate the American freshwater river system. According to the National Wildlife Federation, the huge fish, which can grow up to 100 pounds, makes up around 97 percent of the biomass of some sections of the Mississippi and Illinois Rivers and can today be found in the waters of 27 US states.
Asian carp aren’t a harmless introduction, and in fact have proven to be a major disruption to local river ecosystems. With no natural predators that can compete with their massive size and reproductive capability—a single female carp can lay as many as half a million eggs at one time—the Asian carp have over the years started to outcompete many other native species by gorging themselves on a singular food source that many freshwater fish rely on: plankton. This is where alligator gar comes in. The gar, whose range used to span as far north as Illinois but today inhabits only the warm coastal waters around the Gulf of Mexico, is one of the few native species that can compete with Asian carp in terms of size: the gar can grow as large as 300 pounds, making it the second largest native fish in the
Charlene N. Simmons
An alligator gar at the River Giants exhibit at the Tennessee Aquarium in Chattanooga. www.thesolutionsjournal.org | January-February 2017 | Solutions | 9
Idea Lab Noteworthy
Malawi, estimated daily per capita expenditure (2012–2015)
United States. As a predator, the alligator gar can also target the carp when they’re most vulnerable: after they’ve hatched from their eggs but before they grow old enough to spawn, without being forced to challenge adult carp for plankton as a food source. It’s not just local environmental groups fighting to bring the alligator gar back into northern waters. Statelevel lawmakers have begun to take up the cause, with Illinois lawmakers passing a resolution in May 2016 urging state natural resource officials to speed up the gar’s reintroduction program, as well as adopting regulations to protect all four gar species native to the state from the same kind of persecution that decades ago drove them from their natural habitats. This move comes none too soon. Today, only a thin electric barrier separates the carp-infested waters of the Mississippi and its tributaries from the Great Lakes. These barriers have been shown to be permeable in the past. With Asian carp moving further north with each passing year, the reintroduction of the gar into its natural habitat may prove to be one of the few checks possible to keep this massive invasive fish at bay.
Computer Model Predicts Wealth Distribution through Satellite Images Stanford University experts have developed an inexpensive and accurate way to predict village-level wealth. Their computer model uses publicly available satellite images to identify exactly which neighborhoods or villages are home to the poorest communities in a given country. The findings were published in Science in July 2016.
1.5 2 3 4 8 Average daily per capita consumption expenditure ($) Data from: N. Jean, M. Burke, M. Xie, W.M. Davis, D. Lobell, S. Ermon., “Combining satellite imagery and machine learning to predict poverty”. Science, 2016 For more info, visit sustain.stanford.edu Jean et al.
A “map of poverty” in Malawi.
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Idea Lab Noteworthy Nighttime satellite images give a clear picture of wealth distribution around the world: the less light at night, the poorer the region. However, detailed and accurate local information is needed in order to create policy and distribute aid. This would mean spending millions of dollars to send thousands of survey-takers into these areas. The new program promises the same information through a machine learning technique (the science of designing computer algorithms that learn from data) called convolutional neural network and high-resolution satellite imagery. “Using the final model that has been trained on survey data, we can estimate per capita consumption expenditure for any location where we have daytime satellite imagery,” the team said on the study’s dedicated website. The team tested their model in Nigeria, Tanzania, Uganda, Malawi, and Rwanda—five African countries for which there is reliable information about distribution of poverty. “Without being told what to look for, our machine-learning algorithm learned to pick out of the imagery many things that are easily recognizable to humans—things like roads, urban areas, and farmland,” said Neal Jean, the study’s lead author. The program also learned how to distinguish between metal rooftops and those made of grass or mud. The team then used statistical methods to determine the significance of these items to income. Eventually, the computer model was able to predict average spending by households and average household wealth. The results matched the available data in these five countries. In some cases, it even offered more accurate results than currently available data.
Emergency Cash Funding Can Prevent Homelessness Can a small amount of no-stringsattached cash prevent homelessness? Yes, according to a new study by University of Notre Dame’s James Sullivan and William N. Evans. The study, published in Science in July 2016, suggests that a person who receives USD$1000 right when they’re about to lose their homes are more likely to stay off the streets. This is the first study establishing that emergency financial aid actually reduces homelessness, noted Notre Dame News, the university’s official news outlet. For many years, critics argued that cash distribution would only postpone homelessness. “That appears not to be the case” said Sullivan. The researchers tracked 4,500 people who called the Homelessness Prevention Call Center in Chicago between 2010 and 2012. The program distributes cash to those who are on the verge of homelessness. The people who receive funding usually have similar backgrounds: under normal circumstances they can sustain their
lifestyles but are no longer able to due to losing their jobs, a death in the family, or an unexpected medical bill. However, funding is not always available. So Sullivan and Evans, along with Melanie Wallskog, a grad student from Stanford University, tracked both the people who received the emergency funding (on average USD$1000) and the people who did not, although they qualified for it. The researchers found that the people who ended up receiving the cash were 88 percent less likely to become homeless within three months of their call to the center and 76 percent less likely to become homeless within six months. “There is evidence that it’s a sustained impact up to two years later,” said Sullivan. More than 600,000 people are homeless in the US alone. There are unofficial estimates suggesting that the actual number is anywhere between 1.5 and 3.5 million. The United Nations describes homelessness as “an egregious violation of human rights occurring in all countries, threatening the health and life of the most marginalized.”
Quinn Dombrowski www.thesolutionsjournal.org | January-February 2017 | Solutions | 11