Americans possess five times more clothing today than they did 40 years ago. Most of these garments arrive in landfills after a few wears. Juan Hinestroza, the Rebecca Q. Morgan ’60 Professor of Fiber Science & Apparel Design at the Cornell University College of Human Ecology, joins host Nicholas Phillips to discuss the environmental effects and how polyester upcycling can minimize the impact.
In a world of fast fashion and blink-and-miss-it trends, textile waste is growing exponentially—to the detriment of the environment and our ability to live within it. Researchers at Cornell University, including Juan Hinestroza, the Rebecca Q. Morgan ’60 Professor of Fiber Science & Apparel Design at the College of Human Ecology, are working to prevent clothes from reaching landfills by upcycling polyester for new products.
Hinestroza explores the problem and this innovative solution with host Nicholas Phillips in this episode of the Cornell Keynotes podcast from eCornell.
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Nicholas Phillips: Welcome to Keynotes from Cornell University. I'm Nicholas Phillips. On today's episode, I'm joined by Juan Hinestroza, the Rebecca Q. Morgan Professor of Fiber Science and Apparel Design at the College of Human Ecology. On this episode, Juan and I are discussing why pollution from the fashion industry is such a major concern, even prompting interest from the UN.
Nicholas Phillips: Additionally, we'll discuss what Cornell is doing to repurpose polyester and other old textiles. Juan, thank you so much for joining us.
Juan Hinestroza: I'm very happy to be here too. So I'm so happy to see so many people connected as well. Thank you.
Nicholas Phillips: We're really looking forward to having you in the studio. So I really kind of want to start, from the beginning. So you got your PhD from Tulane, shout out Tulane. My mom also went there.
Nicholas Phillips: You worked at Dow Chemical and everything like that. So, how did you get from being a chemical engineer to thinking about the environmental impact of, textile waste and polyester?
Juan Hinestroza: Well, it's a long story. Like everything in life is serendipity. So I work for a very large chemical company.
Juan Hinestroza: I decided to get my Ph. D. and my goal was to go back to the company. But in the process, I discovered I like learning and teaching. And my first job happens to be in the College of Textiles of North Carolina State. And that's when I became familiar with textiles. And then after three years, I moved to Cornell. And I just enjoyed making new materials, making new textiles.
Juan Hinestroza: But in one of those trips I took overseas, I was able to see a little kid running with a Cornell T-shirt. It's a beautiful country called Bhutan. And I saw this kid, I said, maybe this kid went to Cornell or his parents or his family. And it turned out that actually it was a landfill of used textiles.
Juan Hinestroza: And then I started working trying to ask him myself, how these clothes actually end up here. And then looking deeper I went to other countries and I saw pollution. I saw all the waste. And then I decided that I would like to focus my research on trying to solve this. This big problem is a humongous problem that textile waste generates.
Juan Hinestroza: And because we don't see it here in the US sometimes we think it is not a big issue, but it is, we are exporting a lot of waste. We are filling our landfills with textiles. We are a textile industry to give you an idea. Textile industry apparel and footwear generate more carbon footprint than all the airlines.
Juan Hinestroza: And all the maritime shipping combined, which is a humongous number, yeah? And we don't see those effects. We don't get an idea. So, if you have a hammer, you want to use your tools to, everything looks like a nail so in my case, we are chemists and we want to use chemistry to solve the problem. And luckily I have fantastic students that work on that area.
Nicholas Phillips: And what was that like for you to see? One that child with the Cornell shirt on, and then to see kind of the waste. Cause like you said, we don't really have it here.
Juan Hinestroza: Yeah, it was very shocking. I was in a, in the North of India in a small town called Tirapur.
Juan Hinestroza: That's might be 12 years ago. And then I was shocked to see that the river that have many colors depending on the day. And then when I came back, I got an interview from, a magazine, I don't recall if it's Scientific American or one of those magazines and they asked me what I wanted to say, I said, well, I want to tell you that sometimes in that town, I can see what color is in fashion in New York or Paris just by looking at the color of the river, yeah?
Juan Hinestroza: And it's because those colors this clothes are actually dying. Those locations, we only see them in the supermarket, we see them in the store, but seldom we ask ourselves how these clothes are actually made and how many people touch these clothes before you actually use them and how much pollution you are creating.
Juan Hinestroza: Not only dyes, only the position of the fiber, the making of the fabric, the transportation from those locations to your store. So it's a massive global problem. And I, think, in this university, we like to tackle big problems. And it's not something that we're going to solve only with chemistry, but it will require psychology, it will require business people, it will require people in law, as well as the material chemists as we are.
Nicholas Phillips: What is polyester? At it's kind of most basic level.
Juan Hinestroza: So polyester is the most commonly used polymer in textiles. It's more than cotton. But curiously, polyester only became popular in 1949. So this isn't only 1949. It's about 70 years old, and it's an amazing fiber. It's not only make for textiles.
Juan Hinestroza: You can make packages, you can make medical devices, you can make all kind of, products, but textiles is the biggest market. And also plastic bottles. Yeah, plastic bottles. But textiles is much bigger than that. Poly means many. And ester means it's a chemical group. So it's a polymer made of many ester groups.
Juan Hinestroza: And to make polyester, you need to use a hydrocarbon. Usually you come in from oil. So you need to break the oil and to get these different components of the polyester and go through a chemical reaction called polymerization. And in that polymerization you make the polyester. And that can become a fiber, can become a pellet, it can be transformed into something else.
Juan Hinestroza: Like your screen for example, your tablet has polyester. Many things that made of polyester, many packages and it happens that it's very good to make fibers, and it's also, you can pigmented many colors, and so, and it's also quite cheap. So, that is the reason why it's used so massively in textiles, and, but the production is just massive. The amount of polyester, it's about equivalent of 18 billion garments per year. And you think about the population of the world is about eight billion. So you're making garments for about a little bit more than two people all the world. Yeah. And but these markets are concentrated mostly in in North America in, Europe.
Juan Hinestroza: And then the question is what happens after you use your clothes? Because that's another issue. We don't use our clothes more than the average is about two to three times. Yeah. So we have these massive closets full of clothes that we don't use. And then what happens to them? Usually what happens is more than 95, almost 95 percent of them end up in landfills.
Juan Hinestroza: And when it end up in landfills, you can generate a massive amount of pollution. You are using the space for the garbage. When the polyester that doesn't degrade easily, it takes hundreds of years to degrade. And then polyester is not by itself. You have to use other chemicals to produce the clothes, like a finish, like a wrinkle resistant, like a water resistant or resistant.
Juan Hinestroza: You need to use dyes. So all these little compounds leach away from the polyester and contaminate, contaminate the water, contaminate the rivers. And also, very simple acts, like for example, washing your clothes, you wash your clothes, you generate huge amounts of microfibers. And these microfibers end up in our water systems.
Juan Hinestroza: Yeah, so there is no water in this planet that doesn't have microplastics. Not even in the, not even in the Antarctic. So I saw the papers that people are finding microplastics almost everywhere.
Nicholas Phillips: One thing that, I'm kind of thinking about that you mentioned was, polyester is a relatively new fiber. I think you mentioned like maybe the 1970s or so. Was there one thing that really sparked this boom of us utilizing polyester so much?
Juan Hinestroza: One of them was to try to find replacements for natural fibers from cotton, from wool. But at the same time, it was quite inexpensive, quite easy to produce, became very uniform.
Juan Hinestroza: So chemically, you can make the same material all the time. You are not so dependent on seasons, on fertilizers, on rain. And it became quite popular. Especially in big amounts. Yeah. So everything has been increasing, but in the last 20 to about the last 30 years, the increase in production of polyester fibers has been exponentially growing and it keeps growing.
Juan Hinestroza: So that is a huge problem because it's not only the production that, that is causing all these consumption of energy emissions. But what happens to that? Yeah, that doesn't disappear magically. It's not like I click here and it's gone. That ends up in clothes. That's the area that I work on.
Juan Hinestroza: And then what happens to those clothes when people don't want to use them? So usually we donate them. Usually we throw them in the garbage and they go to a secondary markets of used clothes and they end up in Accra, in Ghana or in Bhutan or in Nepal. And so, these are the part of the industry that we don't have too much information but it's a global problem, and at Cornell we are trying to address this global challenge.
Nicholas Phillips: Very true. And now that we're thinking about waste and everything in your experience, I believe it was in India. Are there certain countries that are being affected more by some of this polyester waste and textile waste?
Juan Hinestroza: Many countries some countries get paid to take garbage. Yeah, so we have countries like the Ivory Coast, so it's a famous one for getting garbage. And there are other countries that sometimes they are illegally accepting garbage. And then you see the consequences when they burn the garbage.
Juan Hinestroza: You probably saw the news what happened in Chile a few years ago where people dumped tons of clothes in the desert in Chile. I have seen them in Malaysia. I've seen them in India, in Sri Lanka, in Nepal, in Bhutan, in Cambodia. It's in Indonesia. So, almost everywhere I've been, you can, you have the problem.
Juan Hinestroza: And if you look closely in the U.S. too. You have some landfills you have some situations in which the clothes are actually disposed. You may think that you put them outside your house in the bin and the truck will come and pick it up and they disappear, yeah? But I think the question to ask is what happens to the truck and what happens to the material?
Juan Hinestroza: So, less than 2 percent of all clothes that are made are actually reused or recycled. Less than 2%, it's a very small amount. And there's a bigger challenge is because most clothes have different compositions. We have polyester cotton, as you mentioned, we have polyester nylon, we have all this athletic wear that is flexible, has elastin or lycra.
Juan Hinestroza: So this is quite a challenge to all these components. And I think that's what, that was the challenge that we in our lab decided to address is how to able to use chemistry to, to address this massive soup of things that we don't know what's inside.
Nicholas Phillips: And you talk a little bit about your work with the UN and some of really the amazing work that's being done here at Cornell to help, offset some of that waste. One thing that I'm thinking about is when did people start realizing that waste from polyester and other textiles being thrown away had a major impact on the environment?
Juan Hinestroza: Well, there are many publications that came when people start finding microfibers inside fish, inside brains, inside water reservoirs.
Juan Hinestroza: But I also have to say that the young people. The younger generations started asking questions. How this is made? How many people touch my clothes before I use them? These questions were not asked by my generation, yeah? So we just buy. Buy and throw away. But now the younger generation is more concerned about that.
Juan Hinestroza: It's also more connected. They can connect to young people in Bangladesh, in Nepal, in Cambodia. And also learn that these things are happening. And that you are part of the cycle, even if you don't want to admit it, you are. And so I have to give credit to the younger generations and also the, I think with the advent of the internet, many things became more visible.
Nicholas Phillips: And are you seeing, just generally companies out there that are understanding that, we make polyester waste and textile waste. Let's see if we can come up with a more sustainable way to produce our clothes.
Juan Hinestroza: Some, there are some efforts. There is a lot of as I say, discrepancy between the statements and the actual action, and especially the verification process, yeah. So, and there is not entity with enough teeth to say, okay, you are not telling us the truth.
Juan Hinestroza: You go to a factory in certain places and the factory looks so clean and beautiful. And then you do the math and you can see that the, that factory cannot produce the amount of clothes that they claim to produce. So suddenly, by magic, something happens at night and the clothes appear.
Juan Hinestroza: And I've seen many of these situations in many parts of the world. So I became incredibly skeptical on this type of statement. So, we see people that claim that clothes from bottles pick up from the ocean or all kinds of interesting claims that I really wish they were will be, they would be true. Yeah. At least will be wish they, they will be verifiable. But I cannot make that statement myself.
Nicholas Phillips: Yeah. I feel like I always see commercials from clothing companies like, yeah, we took bottles outta the ocean and made sweaters or something out of it.
Juan Hinestroza: Yeah, that is very easy to say. Yeah. So but if you talk to them directly, it's how many bottles are you collecting?
Juan Hinestroza: And I've seen many of these other claims that making organic polymers that cannot be produced from cellulose, for example. So I'm as a chemist, I know that's not a chemical reaction that is possible. But they claim that this material is actually made from a tree when it's chemically, it's impossible to do that.
Juan Hinestroza: But yeah. Because of the organizations that are in charge of verifying or the statements don't have the power or the resources to do that. I think universities can play a big role in that because we are not, we don't have, we are pursuing the truth. Yeah, that's our goal. And then so we have advanced equipment. We have incredibly talented students that can make these verifications certain or not certain.
Nicholas Phillips: And just real quickly, you know, this Keynote spun out of a article in the Chronicle that I saw and, in that article it mentioned that Americans in general throw out about 70 percent of textiles and about 85 percent end up in landfill.
Nicholas Phillips: So before we get into, kind of the process of upcycling polyester and other textiles I want to know how can people get rid of clothes properly?
Juan Hinestroza: That is a very difficult question to answer. There is no way to get rid of clothes properly. I think the best way is to consume less. But that's not going to happen.
Juan Hinestroza: Yeah, because the business models are based on selling more and more. Companies will have to be more creative on the business models. So what we decided to do is that actually it says this material is going to go to the garbage anyway. So why don't we just find something useful with this material?
Juan Hinestroza: Why don't we extract some value from that. Some something that would be good. That's the approach that we took in the lab. But even washing your clothes has some penalties. Yeah. Cause you are producing microfibers, microplastics. It's a big challenge, and I think I think it's it's not a pretty one, but we have to address that.
Juan Hinestroza: And then there will be a lot of unhappy people and a lot of happy people, too. But it also has so many faces, yeah. It has the business face, the psychological face. When you buy something, you feel a certain way, the way you dress. But we are generating a lot of waste, and then it's just unsustainable, the amount of clothes that we consume and we produce.
Nicholas Phillips: Are there companies out there that are, doing it right? That are saying, this is really an issue. Let's see if we can, get more sustainable fibers and more sustainable.
Juan Hinestroza: Some of them are making an effort but of, again, all goes to the control of the supply chain. So, most brands don't have their own production facilities, so they contract to other company and that company subcontract to other company and subcontract to other company. So there are so many tentacles that you cannot control.
Juan Hinestroza: And because the business is so price sensitive, then there's an incentive to some people to behave in ways that are not proper. So it's very difficult to make these verifications. Yeah. It's an, it's another industry, the industry of certification as well. It's a complex problem. We, in our lab, we decided to tackle that from a chemistry perspective.
Juan Hinestroza: But it's much more than that. It requires the business people, the psychology as well, behavioral analysis. And even the designers. Yes. And the designers have to think on what's gonna happen to this clothes after I finish. Yeah, this is maybe an artistic expression, but there are some consequences of that expression.
Juan Hinestroza: Yeah. And so it's not just what happens after the show. Yes. We have so many fashion shows. What happened after that? And I think the new generation is more sensitive to all these issues. And I'm grateful they are asking those questions.
Nicholas Phillips: What are some fabrics that, you consider to be more sustainable? So something that's not polyester.
Juan Hinestroza: Okay, so I think there are very few things that are totally sustainable. Yeah, so, but it depends on how deep you look. But, humanity has lived with natural fibers for thousands of years without the use of the synthetic materials. So we have used flax, we have used cotton, we have used silk, we have used wool.
Juan Hinestroza: And now if you go closely into those times there were less population too. But if you look into closely how much water is necessary for natural fibers to grow, then you start having some questions about how much food you need to provide to the sheep, or how much methane. How much labor intensive is this?
Juan Hinestroza: Yeah. So how much will you be willing to pay for a product that's come from these things? Yeah. So there's a big problem also because we like cheap things. If we want to, we can either find the customers willing to pay extra for these perceived benefits of to the environment, which many companies are exploiting right now. They're charging more, making all these claims, or you can have policies that will say, well, we're gonna charge you some amount of money that from your product, but you have to verify that you follow these rules. And then we can use some of this money to support research to solve this problem in the long term. Yes. The scale of the problem is massive. So it requires massive investments as well.
Nicholas Phillips: You mentioned that, us as consumers, we love cheap things. Yes, and we buy a lot of clothes as Americans generally but i'm wondering what impact does this idea of fast fashion have on textile waste?
Nicholas Phillips: I feel like I'm 35 almost but I feel like when I was growing up. It wasn't really a major concept, but it really kind of only popped up more recently.
Juan Hinestroza: Yeah, so it's about the last 30 years we see this explosion of fast fashion, which means that you can get access to designer clothes with very cheap prices in a very fast time.
Juan Hinestroza: Yeah. And to do that, we have good companies that have been doing that for almost 30, 40 years and they have to have suppliers that can respond that fast and that they ship directly from the supply company to the store and that generates a huge amount of waste as well. But now lately we have this micro fast fashion that you can easily buy on the internet.
Juan Hinestroza: And then things appear in your home. So you need a store. You don't need a, you don't need a, be in a fancy shopping mall. You just order and then things come the next day and that you don't like it. Then what you do, you just click here and then return. Yeah. So then the question is what happens to those things that you return?
Juan Hinestroza: Oh, I just returned because it doesn't fit or I, didn't have the time to measure then. I just don't like it anymore. So, but you don't think of these consequences. Yeah. So, because it's so there's a psychological imbalance, I would say. And then we see people with our friends in the social networks with brand new clothes and say, oh, I like this jacket. So I want to have it too. This is the link. So there's a, it's a very complex problem, but it's been, it's just basically exploded in the last 10 years.
Nicholas Phillips: And, with the UN involved, I'm wondering, you do you think there will ever be kind of a reckoning, obviously with fast fashion contributing to, textile waste? Do you think there will ever be kind of a reckoning of like, okay, this is a major problem. We need all the companies to get together and say, okay, maybe not put an end to fast fashion, but, let's rethink how we market to the general public.
Juan Hinestroza: I hope that happens. Maybe the UN is not a proper channel. They are doing what they can because they don't have a way to enforce these regulations. So many of these regulations are depend on the state, depend on the country.
Nicholas Phillips: Speaking of labs, I know you're doing, amazing work here at Cornell, you and your students and the whole team over there. Why is polyester kind of the perfect material to upcycle and reuse?
Juan Hinestroza: The reason we chose polyester the largest production of textile materials, yeah, it's more than cotton and also because there's a very good chemistry on how to break polyester into different components, but the main challenge is when you throw away clothes, you have a lot of impurities coming from soil.
Juan Hinestroza: You also have different colors, yellow, green, blue. You also have different finishes of flame retardant, wrinkle resistance. So we have to develop chemistries that is able to avoid this noise, this clutter, and then look only for the molecules that you need. It's such selectivity. So, only in the last maybe 15 years, that has been possible.
Juan Hinestroza: So, so there's a new set of molecules called metal organic frameworks that are incredibly selective. And we found out is that no matter how much dirt or how many other compounds are present in the reactor. This particular compound is able to find only the one you need with incredible accuracy.
Juan Hinestroza: And that level of selectivity is something that we decided to use to recover the molecules that you need. So we are using that to recover linkers to making anti flammable flame retardant materials for buildings, for example. We are recovering them to make water resistant materials for jackets and sportswear, also antibacterial compounds to eliminate surgical infection that happens in hospitals and that, the raw material is basically garbage, is thrown away clothes so we like all clothes.
Juan Hinestroza: We like your dirty clothes because that's a bigger challenge. So that's that we take these clothes and we cut them and then we do the chemistry. I have a amazing student called Yelin and then she found this way to actually capture these compounds. And we have great collaborators in chemistry and in material sciences that can help us with that.
Nicholas Phillips: Oh, I should have went with that as a title. We love your dirty clothes.
Juan Hinestroza: We do. We do.
Nicholas Phillips: I'm wondering if you'd kind of delve a little bit deeper into this concept. So, I was thinking of just, kind of any clothes, but you mentioned that even color makes a difference when recycling.
Juan Hinestroza: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. In our particular process, we are robust enough to overcome different colors and different fixtures because of the chemistry that we use. I love metal running framework chemistry. I saw particular chemistry because of that. But yeah, so the other issue is when you have clothes, they're usually not made of one single material. There are very few things that are made only of cotton, only wool. Most of the things are blends. Yeah. So you want something that will be comfortable and wrinkle resistant. Most likely you have cotton and polyester or nylon. Yeah. So how are you going to separate these two components?
Juan Hinestroza: That is a big challenge too. So we have created some mechanisms to try to separate them. You have to have mechanical extraction. You need to have chemical extraction all that add to the cost of recovering the material. Yes. So if you can pay $20 per pound of a material that has been used and you have recovered, or you can pay $0.50 for something new. So then the incentives are quite difficult to beat, so that's when you need policy, that's when you need consumer awareness, and you need truth in advertisement. That's part of the other issues that we have to fight. I teach a class and I tell my students, go outside and find this, all these outrageous claims.
Juan Hinestroza: And then it's very easy for them to find them, on many places and say, how do you prove that actually is correct? Yeah. So sometimes, and that's a, it's a teaching moment for them. It says, wow, I believe these people. I used to believe this company. They have a spokesperson that tells me that this is true, but sometimes you're gonna need to have some science background and I think, I think that's what universities as complex as Cornell are particularly well suited to tackle these problems.
Nicholas Phillips: When it comes to your students, do they get kind of a, is there a surprise there or a shock factor when they realize that some of the companies they thought were sustainable may not be as much?
Juan Hinestroza: Yeah, sometimes there is a shock factor because they, I can tell you an example of a student last semester and she had an item that it was claimed to be silk. Yeah. And then when we look at the chemistry of the material, this is an item that sells for hundreds of dollars. It actually was polyester.
Juan Hinestroza: And it was polyester coated with the material that's shiny as silk. And she was shocked as well. Yeah. So, but I have seen many of these. For them, it's an aha moment. Yeah. So. When people claim to have rubber from the Amazon or coconuts from, I dunno, from some place in Africa, that becomes part of their shoes then you have to verify all these claims because they sound, if they sound too good to be true, sometimes they're, they are too good to to be true. We have the tools to do that. We have the students who are curious enough to go into the detail and willing to accept that sometimes they're being duped.
Nicholas Phillips: And I kind of love this idea of using, natural fibrous materials to kind of offset the pollution from textile manufacturing and all that. And reading in that article in the Chronicle, I think you mentioned, I'm probably butchering it, was it fique?
Juan Hinestroza: Yeah. So that was a project before I, I worked with polyester. So I was working with some of my colleagues in Brazil, in the Federal University of the Amazon, and also with my colleagues in Colombia.
Juan Hinestroza: And they were working with these fibers that have these very unique cavities. And this, and we decided to, to use these cavities for these fibers called fique fibers and sisal fibers and then we put a, another nanoparticles in those, those fibers and we find out that you can take contaminated water from dyes.
Juan Hinestroza: And then decompose the color. So make it, it was blue originally because we work with blue jean factories. And then it became transparent. We broke the molecules into different components. And then, so we polished that and then we came back to Ithaca. I have another student brilliant student that decided, well, we don't have fique fibers in in Ithaca.
Juan Hinestroza: So we need to find out another way to do this, and then she find out using some of the Cornell orchard apples and some of the grapes from the Finger Lakes area, and we found that we could make the same chemistry with the grapes and the apples, peels, and we could decompose the colors too. So it shows that students have the motivation to find solutions to these problems, and there is a lot of things to be discovered.
Juan Hinestroza: Yeah, so part of being educated in a global university, Cornell is a global university, is that you are exposed to these problems. And at the same time, you find solutions to them, or at least try. And these people that we educate are going to be the next CEOs, the next buyers, the next prime ministers, the next member of Congress. So I'm optimistic that they will be concerned and aware of these situations more than our generation.
Nicholas Phillips: And I guess, is there a sweet spot when it comes to how much use we should get out of our clothes? So I think you mentioned, where your clothes obviously, is there kind of a sweet spot where it's like, wear it as long as you can? Or?
Juan Hinestroza: I don't know, because it depends on each clothes. It depends on which person, depends on the weather. Because we are lucky to have cold weather here, but I live in Singapore. Yeah. So I live in Saudi Arabia. And that those weathers are very difficult for the clothes or in terms of temperature and the in terms of the hardness of the water when you wash them.
Juan Hinestroza: So each one is different, but at least use them. Don't buy things and you never use. And that happens a lot. People are buying things that they don't use or just buy them, dispose them immediately. Remember that nothing appears out of nothing. Yeah, there is not the idea that you can create something out of, without energy, without new materials.
Juan Hinestroza: That's against thermodynamics. That's not going to happen. And the idea that it will disappear also is actually untrue. Yeah, just because you throw it in your garbage, that doesn't mean it's gone. Yeah, it's gone. But it arrives in a different location.
Nicholas Phillips: And, if you could kind of wake up tomorrow and kind of change the whole scene with the, you know, with a wave of the hand, what's kind of one thing you would do to kind of change the whole system?
Juan Hinestroza: I dream of that solution almost every day, but I think this problem did not happen overnight, so it will not be solved overnight.
Juan Hinestroza: This problem happened for a long time of, long period of time, and I think it will take several generations to fix. I'm a great believer that educating our students, make them aware of the situation, and what they can do will solve the problem in the end. It's not gonna be easy. It's not going to be fast, but it also was not, it was not something that was producing in a short amount of time, so it will not be solved that easily.
Nicholas Phillips: So I think what you're saying is it's going to take a little while for us to kind of come to a solution, essentially.
Juan Hinestroza: It is. Because it took a while to actually create the problem. But we humans, we have incredible ability to dream. And to find solutions that were not possible. You think of all the things that were impossible 20 years ago.
Juan Hinestroza: And then we see together today, like, for example this podcast, so it's not possible 20 years ago. I optimistic that science and curious minds, if they are properly educated, they can find a solution.
Nicholas Phillips: Well, Juan thank you so much for coming in with us. My very last question is, if you could kind of reach out to our audience, give them one thing to think about or, one piece of advice regarding, upcycling their clothes or not just putting their clothes in the garbage. What's that one thing you would want our audience to know regarding upcycling their clothes?
Juan Hinestroza: I would say every time you buy something ask questions. Question how many people touch these clothes before you actually are able to buy it, and ask the question what's going to happen to these after I finish using it?
Juan Hinestroza: And then make an effort to find the answers. Sometimes they're hidden. Sometimes for marketing reasons, there's not visible question. Question if the marketing companies making these claims question how you verify that actually is true, and I think it's the truth. Seek the truth. The truth will set you free, but also make sure that you're also part of this.
Juan Hinestroza: This is a problem that you're also part off and admit that responsibility every time you make a purchase. You can keep buying as much as you want. Just think what the consequences are, and then and if you can, contribute to help people who are tackling this problem, help them out.
Nicholas Phillips: Thank you so much. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe so you don't miss new episodes as they are released, wherever you listen to podcasts. To learn more about eCornell's online courses and on campus programs, check out the episode notes for more information. Whether you're a busy professional or an impassioned lifelong learner, there is sure to be something that suits your goals and interests.
Nicholas Phillips: Thank you for listening.