Allbirds is a billion-dollar B Corp with a bold carbon neutral strategy, and an obsession with new gen bio materials. But you probably already knew that. The brand has been profiled in the New Yorker and Forbes. TIME magazine called Allbirds “the world’s most comfortable shoes”, and fans include presidents, prime ministers and Hollywood stars.

Meet the visionary duo behind the San Francisco-based startup everyone’s talking about. Hear how co-founders Joey Zwillinger and Tim Brown set out to shake up the way sneakers get made and marketed, and put sustainability at the core of their business.

Special Report: How Climate Change is Impacting The Great Barrier Reef.

Is the Great Barrier Reef dead? Headlines to that effect zoomed around the world after two consecutive bleaching events in 2016 and 2017. But Australia’s most famous World Heritage wonder is still very much with us - a vast eco-system, roughly the size of Germany, it teams with life. It is however under threat from climate change and other factors - what’s being done to build resilience on the reef?

We are discarding clothing and other unwanted items at a record rate. So what happens to all our stuff when we’re done with it?

Meet ADAM MINTER - the recycling obsessive who grew up on a junkyard and now works for Bloomberg. The author of Junkyard Planet and Secondhand - Travels in the New Global Garage Sale travelled all over the world talking to the people who deal in trash.

In this fascinating interview, Clare picks his brains about everything from how metals get recycled to the politics of exporting our trash.

Biophilic design is a buzz phrase with good reason. What if our buildings weren't just a little bit more energy efficient or decorated with a few extra plants? What if they gave back to the environment instead of taking away from it?

Meet visionary US-based Canadian architect Jason McLennan, founder of the Living Building Challenge and the Living Future Institute, on a mission to “create a world that is socially rich, culturally just and ecologically restorative”.

How might we truly live in harmony with nature? And, as Jason puts it, “create places that are not only lovely but express the love we have for people, for animals and for the environment.” This Episode is all about how we can rethink our built environment so that it’s regenerative, and provides havens for other species too.

If we can picture the zombie apocalypse, surely we can imagine a new economic system? Political economist and co-author of A History of the World in 7 Cheap Things, Raj Patel talks colonialism, oppression and the exploitation of nature, labour and energy - and how the patriarchy and capitalism drive it all. What’s the alternative, and how is fashion involved?

Are you what you eat? EPISODE 101 IS ALL ABOUT FASHION & FOOD. Have you ever thought about the water footprint of beef or olive oil? Or how far your food has travelled before it reaches your dinner plate? And what has all this god to do with fashion?

Meet Gung-Ho designer Sophie Dunster, food writer and photographer Sara Kiyo Popowa, and chefs Lauren Lovatt and Abi Aspen Glencross. Whether they’re vegan or just very excited about colourful vegetables; sure that what we eat can affect our mental health or just really keen on yummy food that doesn’t cost the Earth - these four female foodies are combining fashion with activism to put change on the menu. Bon appetit!

Welcome to our 100th Episode! This week's guest is Sinéad Burke, the Irish fashion journalist, activist and inclusivity advocate. Maybe you've watched her TED talk, Why Design Should Include Everyone, or heard about reminding the World Economic Forum at Davos this year, to ask: "Who is not in the room?" Probs you saw her on the cover of the Duchess of Sussex edited September issue of British Vogue.

This interview was recorded during London Fashion Week, so of course we talk clothes. These days, Sinéad sometimes gets about in custom-made Gucci, but that wasn’t always the case...What happens when clothes don’t fit you? When the world is not designed for you? Why doesn’t the fashion industry embrace the opportunity to cater to more shapes and sizes and abilities, why does it so often exclude, and how can we change that?

Should the government step in? Why do we need to "fix" fashion? Try because textile production consumes vast amounts of water. Because fashion contributes more to climate change than international aviation and shipping combined. And if current consumption levels continue, the industry could account for 25% of the world's carbon budget. Because our wardrobes are full of clothes we don't wear, yet we keep buying more and more garments, most of which are made from polyester and shed tiny plastic microfibres every time we wash them.

Because we buy fashion to throw it away.

This episode’s guest is Mary Creagh, at the time she was chair of the UK Parliament’s Environmental Audit Committee (EAC) and the Labour MP for Wakefield - the woman responsible for raising these issues with the British parliament in 2019.

How are you doing with all this climate news? Is it getting you down? This Episode to the rescue! It's all about climate hope and how we can feel more courageous and positive about our activism.

Meet climate activist, Anna Rose. She started forming environmental groups when she was a school kid. By the time she was at university, she, and her friend Amanda McKenzie, cofounded the Australian Youth Climate Coalition, which today has more than 150,000 members (Clare tells this story in Rise & Resist). Anna has been involved in leadership for Earth Hour, is on a bunch of important academic advisory boards and today works with an organisation called Farmers for Climate Action. But the reason you need to listen to her is that Anna has a long view on how to stay motivated with our activism . She talks about "hope as a strategic decision" and reminds us that we all have difference capacities that "it's only called impossible until it's done."

“Often I don’t feel brave, but I have to do things that I know are important,” she says. "I see courage as a muscle we can build up over time."

In this upbeat, inspiring conversation, we discuss where to begin, why courage is important, how to foster it and how we can use it to change the world.

Is it time we tore it all down? Extinction Rebellion (XR) is a grass roots activism movement demanding radical action on the global climate crisis. The group formed in the UK in October 2018 on the premise that trying to be a bit more sustainable, tinkering around the edges of the system but essentially carrying on with business as usual, will not save us from climate breakdown. They are calling on governments to declare a climate and ecological emergency, and to act immediately to halt biodiversity loss and reduce greenhouse gas emissions to net-zero by 2025.

In this Episode, you’ll hear from some of the XR protestors who staged a “funeral” for London Fashion Week in September, then sit down with activists: Clare Farrell, Sara Arnold and Will Skeaping to find out why they think civil disobedience is the way to go, what to do about the scary science, and where fashion fits in with all of this.

Harmful chemicals be gone! Have you heard the one about rivers turning blue outside of denim factories in China? Or being able to tell the colours of the season by looking at the waterways? Horrendous, right? But change is possible. Meet the Greenpeace activist who led the Detox My Fashion Campaign, which led to an industry-wide commitment to phase out harmful chemicals from fashion.

Meet Kirsten Brodde - the former science journalist on a mission to clean up fashion.

It’s time to tackle land use

The New York Times calls him "the poster boy for zero waste living". He's a florist, artist, restaurateur, architect, inventor and revolutionary thinker. Meet the man on a mission to convince us we can grow all the food we need where we live.

In this riveting episode, we discuss everything from how wasteful the floristry industry is to the microbial power of healthy soil to boost serotonin (yep, it can get you high apparently). What steps can we make to reconnect with the natural world? How might eating seasonally change our health, happiness and impact? Could we really grow all the food we need on the roof and walls of our houses and apartment buildings? What's the future of green cities?

Out in the open

It’s overwhelmingly women we’re talking about

Go for bold

C is for collaborate

Denim is ubiquitous. According to British anthropologists Daniel Miller and Sophie Woodward, we wear jeans on average 3.5 days a week. In 2017, the global jeans market was worth USD $57 billion. Almost 2 billion pairs were sold around the world in the same year. That is a lot of jeans…

It’s also a lot of jeans waste.

According to The New Textiles Economy report, less than 1% of used clothing is recycled into new clothing. We’re landfilling and incinerating discarded, unloved clothes at increasing rates, while at the same time decreasing clothing use over time.

Fashion life after shopping

By 2030, we keep going as we are, the fashion industry will manufacture 102 million tons of clothes and shoes. For comparison, that's the weight equivalent of half million blue whales!

Growth is not something we like to question in the fashion industry (or indeed any industry). In our capitalist system, commercial success is measured by growth. But, how can we support infinite growth on a finite planet?

Words and pictures

Twenty-five-old British poet, filmmaker and activist Wilson Oryema describes himself as “a semi-retired model”. He was scouted on his lunch break when he was working a London office job, and walked his first Paris show for Margiela in 2015. He went on to appear in ads for Calvin Klein Underwear and Hugo Boss .

His first book of poetry, titled Wait, explores consumerism, contemporary culture and waste. It sprang from an art show he held in a London gallery, after he interned for his photographer friend Harley Weir.

What’s your favourite Global Goal? Have you even heard of them, otherwise known as the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)? Don’t feel bad if you haven’t because while these 17 goals, created by the United Nations as a roadmap for a sustainable future, are super important - they are not as well-known as they should be. Some countries are doing great work in advancing them. Others, including Australia, have a pretty ordinary record on progress so far. In this interview with Togetherband founder Cameron Saul, we discuss why these goals are for all of us, and how we can work together to make them a reality.

What’s fashion got to do with finding yourself?

This week’s interview was recorded at the Dark + Dangerous Thoughts symposium at Dark Mofo in Hobart. It’s with brilliant writer and transwoman, Professor Jennifer Finney Boylan - author of She’s Not There, A Life in Two Genders.

Jenny is a New York Times columnist, author and activist. She serves on the Board of Trustees of PEN America, the writer’s association. She is a former co-chair of GLAAD’s board of directors and member of the Board of Trustees of the Kinsey Institute for Research on Sex, Gender, and Reproduction. On TV, she advised on and appears in I Am Cait - the story of Caitlin Jenner’s transition. But that’s nothing! Jennifer Boylan’s first big TV moment was on Oprah, and you’re going to hear all about that.

Jeans genius

Think of a jeans brand. I bet it’s Levi’s. There of course hundreds, maybe thousands of denim companies today. Denim has been thoroughly disrupted. But the original was Levi’s…

The company is also well-known for promoting progressive causes. They were one of the earliest private sector institutions to support LGBTQ advocacy, and spoke out against the presidency of Donald Trump by donating $1 million to support immigration and LGBTQ rights. In 2018, CEO Chip Bergh published an Op-ed in Fortune magazine endorsing gun control.

But how sustainable is Levi’s? This week, we hear from Levi’s Vice-President of Sustainability, MICHAEL KOBORI. He started out in human rights, and joined Levi’s in 1995. Over the years, he has seen the conversation move from sweatshops and corporate social responsibility (CSR) to sustainable materials, life cycle assessments and worker wellbeing.

At the end of the loadsa-money ‘80s, the Buddhist concept of right livelihood was hardly the thing inspiring most fashion designers. But that’s when our guest this week, at the height of her fame and fashion success while her Katharine Hamnett brand was stocked in 700 stores in 40 countries, decided to question the whole system.

You’re going to hear all about Katharine’s passion to change fashion, and to fight for the environment, her glitzy early years as a designer, and what motivates her to be change agent today. You get to hear her tell the story of how she ambushed Margaret Thatcher in 1984 with her anti-nuclear missiles T-shirt. That story is gold.

Journalist Bandana Tewari was formerly Vogue India’s fashion features director then the magazine’s Editor-at-Large. She now writes for Business of Fashion, and speaks globally on India’s rich fashion craft tradition. She spent many years in Mumbai at the epicentre of Indian fashion, where she presented Indian first pop culture fashion TV show. Recently, she moved to Bali. Bandana is a special adviser to Global Fashion Agenda, a judge for the H&M Foundation’s Global Change Award, and is an awesome human, we are sure you will agree.

From runway to reality. In 2011, super model Arizona Muse landed a Prada contract and a 14-page story in American Vogue, with Anna Wintour comparing her to Linda Evangelista and Natalia Vodianova. She's since become a familiar face on Vogue covers everywhere but these days Arizona has different priorities. Today she is using her platform for sustainable fashion.

Meet the millennial behind cult New Zealand label Maggie Marilyn. We hear a lot about how the Gens Y and Z are more woke, more into sustainability and of course more worried about climate change and the environment - why wouldn’t they be? These are the generations that are going to inherit the mess that’s been made. They are already inheriting it.

Find out why designer Maggie Hewitt is determined to do fashion differently, how she sold her very first collection to Net-A-Porter and gets most excited about seeing her clothes worn by women she doesn’t know in the street. Yep, even though Megan Markle, Kendall Jenner and Rose McGowan are fans.

The mainstream fashion production process is extremely wasteful. The whole system is built on over-ordering, taking a punt on how much will sell, and writing off over-production. This leads to shocking amounts of pre-consumer textiles and garments being landfilled or incinerated - according to some estimates, 1/3 of all the fashion ever produced it never sold.

Australian made-to-order T-shirt company Citizen Wolf is using big data and algorithmic power to disrupt this. And they plan to take on the world. Can it work? How did founders Zoltan Csaki and Eric Phu build it? This thought-provoking discussion looks into the fashion crystal ball to imagine a leaner, greener, more responsive manufacturing future.

She is author of How to be a Craftivist and the founder of Craftivist Collective. Sarah Corbett believes, “If we want a world that is beautiful, kind and fair, shouldn’t our activism be beautiful, kind and fair?”

This episode is a call to arms for fashion change-makers, a demonstration of the persuasive nature of gentle activism, and the wonderful idea that together we might stitch a rebellion, sweep out the status quo and usher in a fairer world in fashion and beyond.

Happy Earth Day!

As we gear up to Earth Day on April 22, we're thinking about living more lightly on the planet. This year’s theme is Protect Our Species, and one of the quotes that inspired it is from Rachel Carson, who said, “In nature nothing exists alone.”

Natalie Isaacs is proof of that. The super-inspiring Australian movement builder behind 1 Million Women went from being a one-woman powerhouse to harnessing the collective power of other women - heck, the whole of womankind! - to start a lifestyle revolution to fight climate change.

Who’s up for stopping our wasteful ways and reimagining trash as a resource? This week’s guest is proving fashion can be made entirely from recycled materials.

He is Javier Goyaneche, president and founder of Ecoalf, the Spanish clothing company that pioneers high-tech new materials made from waste.

If you’re a sustainability nerd, you’ve no doubt heard of Ecoalf. It was Spain’s first B-corp and Gwyneth Paltrow is a fan - a few years back she did a collab with them for Goop.

Have you heard that phrase from seed to garment? Probably, right? Because most natural textiles are grown in the Earth. But how often does fashion get its fingernails into the actual dirt?

We hope there are some gardeners listening this week, because our guest loves worms. Nina Marenzi has a Masters degree in sustainable agriculture, but today she works in fashion. Her organisation The Sustainable Angle puts on the Future Fabrics Expo in London, which is all about what she calls ‘diversifying the fibre basket’ - or rethinking fashion materials.