The stacked black sacks reach almost to the ceiling, and next to them are silver garbage cans from which colorful fabric scraps spill out. Jessica schreiber stands in the middle of it all and looks pleased, because all these scraps of material will not end up in the garbage bin.
For about three years, the 30-year-old has been fighting fashion mull in new york with her company "fabscrap" – and on wednesday (6.2.) the beginning of the spring version of the fashion week in the metropolis of millions is for them every time the main working time.
According to the authorities, around 180 million kilograms of clothing and fabric scraps are thrown away every year in new york alone. And even though many brands such as H&M, adidas, nike or eileen fisher have committed themselves to environmentally friendly goals, there is still a long way to go before they can be implemented worldwide, as the expert panel global fashion agenda recently summed up.
Schreiber did not want to wait. For five years the young woman had worked at the new york garbage disposal, where she took care of the recycling of clothing. "Many brands have come to me and asked me: "what do we do with our fabric scraps, that is, what has not been made into clothing??"", says schreiber. "I couldn’t give you a good answer, so we sat down together and came up with the idea for "fabscrap"."
In the meantime, schreiber employs three people and more than 1200 volunteers. Together they collect almost 6,000 kilograms of fabric scraps a month – from around 220 different manufacturers, including everything from designer labels like marc jacobs to small fashion companies. The manufacturers get coarse, black bags, in which they throw the fabric scraps and pay writers a fee for collecting them.
Volunteers then sort at the company’s headquarters in brooklyn: fabric scraps less than 90 centimeters long are collected, shredded and turned into insulation material. All the others are sold on and reused – by fashion students or craftsmen, for example. The volunteers were allowed to choose their favorite pieces and take them home for free.
We get muslin, spandex and even very expensive lace from a haute couture designer whose name i am not allowed to reveal. There are scraps of fabric of a very high quality."She wants to fight gauze in the fashion industry, says schreiber – but she’s also a self-proclaimed "gauze nerd. Your next destination: the west coast of the USA. "I have the feeling that there are many other mull-stretchers there."