Systems Hack

How can we identify which solutions, products and services are sustainable and which aren’t?

According to A New Textiles Economy: Redesigning Fashion's Future, not only the envrionmental impacts caused by the fashion industry, but also the economic value loss are both significantly high. This is because the current economic model of 'make-use-waste' focuses on the supply side, without taking into account economic inefficiencies and negative externalities that end up at the cost of our environment. 

To dig deeper on what it is like to transition from a linear to a circular economy in the context of the fashion industry, the Lookout Station and the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s Make Fashion Circular​ have joined forces to offer a session, Systems Hack: Decoding Fashion and Its Environmental Impacts at the News Impact Summit, organised by the European Journalism Centre. 

The session offered the participants master some of the systems thinking tools that can be applied in day-to-day journalistic research through a hands-on 'systems hack' using the Iceberg Model. The practical workshop focused on investigating one of the cold, hard reality that is "every second, one rubbish truck of textiles is landfilled or burned'. About 70 journalists and journalism school students have explored how products are made and where things go wrong, in order to uncover the real causes of the climate problem.

The sessions were convened by the Lookout Station and co-organised by the Ellen McArthur Foundation at the European Journalism Centre's News Impact Summit on 7 October 2019 in Birmingham, UK, powered by the Google News Initiative. 

Photo Credit: The European Journalism Centre