Weaving Voices

Episode 2

Mulberry Trees, Silk Moths & Modern Sustainability Measurements

[00:00:00] Rebecca Burgess: The number of garments that people throw out in my home state of California has reached epic proportions. We're now filling the landfill with 1.2 million tons of textile waste per year, according to state agency, Cal Recycle. And we in California we're not alone. This issue of textile waste is a global phenomena with concentrated consumption in the global north and an ever expanding dumping ground in the global south. While we're consuming and throwing away textiles at epic proportions sustainability programs at the world's largest fashion companies are also expanding.

[00:00:43] Rebecca Burgess: For example, the world's largest fast fashion company Shein recently hired its first sustainability officer. How sustainability is measured for the world's largest companies is currently not commensurate with what Earth's systems require to regenerate. [00:01:00] We know that the textile industry has created its own systems of measurement and they use these systems to declare success and to also declare failure.

[00:01:12] Rebecca Burgess: To avoid materials, practices and approaches they deem quote unquote unsustainable, and yet in the process of the industry, making its own decisions on which fibers are and are not sustainable. We have seen that time honored materials, such as silk have received the label of the most polluting fiber on our planet today.

[00:01:35] Rebecca Burgess: But why?

[00:01:39] Rebecca Burgess: This is weaving voices, a podcast that stitches textile tradition, economic philosophy, and climate science into a quilt of understanding, designed to transform our thinking and actions, both as citizens and material, culture makers, and users. I'm [00:02:00] Rebecca Burgess, the host of this Whetstone Radio Collective series,

[00:02:05] Rebecca Burgess: which aims to explore the nexus of modern day economic design and the history of textiles and our contemporary relationship to them. In this episode, we talk about all things silk. Brazilian agronomist, Joao Berdu and London based analyst, Veronica Kassatly help unpack how silk production helps rural communities, how it empowers women,

[00:02:30] Rebecca Burgess: and how it's light on the earth, but how big businesses have tried to push it down in favor of more polluting, yet cheaper materials like plastic.

[00:02:43] Rebecca Burgess: We begin in Brazil with Joao Berdu who's been working with silk growers since 1992. He's currently working to develop a supply chain for Brazil's silk growers after being inspired by what he saw in Italy, where he observed numbers of [00:03:00] decentralized small companies working together and adding value to silk and making glorious textiles. At current, Brazil is actually exporting 95% of its silk as just a raw commodity. Joao hails from the Valda Cita and Brazil.

[00:03:17] Rebecca Burgess: This translates from the Portuguese into English as silk valley. It's the largest cocoon producing region in the Western world. He says from Uzbekistan to the west, there is no region or country that produces a similar amount or quality of silk than Brazil. The work that Berdu is focused upon is similar to the work our Fibershed community has been doing in north central California, which is we have a goal of placing manufacturing centers within the communities that produce the raw materials.

[00:03:50] Rebecca Burgess: Berdu, like many of us who work in agriculture are pining to see the reinvestment in quality manufacturing and value addition that can uplift our rural [00:04:00] economies. 

[00:04:02] Joao Berdu: We export it as raw silk to Japan and to Vietnam and to France, it is possible to add value on it, but it's not easy because you must have the value that will be perceived by the end user.

[00:04:18] Joao Berdu: And most part of the silk attends the end user that are interested in luxury. But the high contribution that silk gives to sustainability, I believe will make it possible for us to have it. And to use these and to inform the end users how good they are doing for an environment when they use silk. 

[00:04:42] Rebecca Burgess: To get a feel for the amount of work that goes into silk production.

[00:04:46] Rebecca Burgess: We first start at the beginning with the basics. Silk is a natural protein fiber that some caterpillars produce in order to protect themselves inside a cocoon during the period that they [00:05:00] transform from caterpillar to moth. 

[00:05:03] Joao Berdu: As silk cocoon is made of one single and very long filament expelled during four days by the silkworm.

[00:05:12] Joao Berdu: In the case of Brazilian variety, this filament is 1.2 kilometers long, 1.2 kilometers or about three quarters of a mile long. And it'll be completely reeled with only one or two breaks from the beginning to the end. Eight cocoons are reeled together to produce the most common, raw silk yarn. And this yarn made with the filament of eight cocoons has one 10th of the diameter of a human hair.

[00:05:46] Joao Berdu: So it's very, very thin. 

[00:05:49] Rebecca Burgess: With the ability to insulate from heat and from cold and the strength that this filament has, it's clear nature has produced this to create all of these amazing properties for the [00:06:00] survival of the moth and the caterpillar. When humans are privileged enough to wear this material, all of these insulating properties and natural strength translate to the textile. Silk is insulating and will act as a natural barrier, protecting the wearer from the variation of temperature, but also providing a textile that is durable and will last.

[00:06:24] Rebecca Burgess: Berdu notes that the production of silk is 5,000 years old. And it's actually beneficial to humans and silkworms. 

[00:06:33] Joao Berdu: During this period, some silkworms have been protected from hangar diseases, natural enemies, bad weather by farmers, interested in their cocoon. So the agreement was we protect them to be extinct and they give us the cocoon. A good agreement for both species that we believe.

[00:06:52] Rebecca Burgess: It's an incredible exchange of efforts between human and moth and in the process of producing a textile, there's [00:07:00] what we call a co-product or food source.

[00:07:04] Joao Berdu: The pupa in Thailand, in Vietnam, and in China, it is eaten by, by people. It has lots of protein and fat, and it is, uh, natural because it has no pesticides side, no antibiotics, nothing.

[00:07:19] Joao Berdu: So it is, uh, completely natural in Japan. It is used for fishing and in Brazil, we use them in, uh, cattle fitting and the sericin and the fibroin that are the proteins that silk are made of can be used also in medicine. 

[00:07:39] Rebecca Burgess: Berdu offered us insight into what the silkworm eats and what kind of farming he supports as an agronomist in his own watershed.

[00:07:47] Rebecca Burgess: He paints a picture of what farming looks like. There are these 2,900 small farm households, all producing cocoons. The size of these individual farms in Brazil is [00:08:00] very small. It's about two hectares or about the area of two soccer fields. And these farms are usually run by about two people. Berdu says the one thing you need is fresh small Mulberry leaves free of pesticides. 

[00:08:16] Rebecca Burgess: If there is even a small quantity of pesticide, the silkworm will die. The practice needs to be very clean for the worm and for the environment. Berdu says with silk production, you create one job with one hectare. With soybean production, you need 300 hectares to create one job.

[00:08:37] Rebecca Burgess: And in soy, you also need a lot of investment to produce the beans, such as large scale machines to prepare the soil, spread pesticide and herbicide, and to harvest the soybeans. Silk production proves very beneficial for rural communities. It creates more jobs and a stronger community than other crops that it compares to.[00:09:00] 

[00:09:00] Rebecca Burgess: We know that when there's more people involved in these smaller production farms, you generally see better attended rural schools and an increased ability for the community to provide social services. You keep enough of an economy going to create generally a good life for those in the region. While Brazilian silk follows the multi millennia old traditions brought to the Val Desta via Japanese immigration to the region.

[00:09:26] Rebecca Burgess: The fibers production by humans predates industrialized, fossil fuel based agriculture. And yet the fiber itself has somehow been deemed unsustainable by a privately funded us based textile sustainability tool known as the Higg Material Sustainability Index also known as the Higg MSI. This is the most common tool used by the global fashion industry to make sustainability assessments and thus to guide the raw material, purchasing decisions for hundreds and thousands [00:10:00] of companies.

[00:10:01] Rebecca Burgess: The tool ranks silk as the most carbon dioxide emitting and polluting fiber. While materials like polyester, which come from fossilized, carbon are ranked as the most sustainable fibers. I wanted to know Berdu's take on how this has impacted the industry and how it has affected the growers. 

[00:10:22] Joao Berdu: We see that with silk people and the silk community, we see that silk is being targeted because they are using new metric base on a cradle to gate concept.

[00:10:34] Joao Berdu: And that they are using these cradle to gate concept, to spread the information that polyester environmental impact is 30 times smaller than silk environmental impact. And to make these statement, they have considerate non-scientific and non-representative data about silk lifecycle assessment and the impact of polyester.

[00:10:56] Joao Berdu: They have considered only up to the fabric, [00:11:00] production and effects of garment scare, microplastic water pollution and millions of tons of polyester garment disposal every year are conveniently out of these socalled scientific and transparent index to evaluate sustainability. And this is what we see.

[00:11:25] Rebecca Burgess: Now is a good time to introduce my second guest, Veronica Kassatly, who holds a bachelor's and master's in economics from the London school of economics. Her first job was with the overseas development Institute in St. Lucia working on agricultural economics. She since has made her way into sustainable fashion assessments and analysis.

[00:11:48] Rebecca Burgess: Now back to the afer mentioned Higg MSI; the current textile industry standards for sustainability decouple environmental impact from socioeconomic impact. But they would [00:12:00] leave you to believe that perhaps without saying as much that maybe all of these things are still being considered. You don't get the sense that they're leaving anything out.

[00:12:09] Rebecca Burgess: They sound very robust about their claims. 

[00:12:13] Veronica Kassatly: Even to the point where they say that they're adhering to sustainable development goals. They say that the Higg measures social impact. And so it just doesn't you know, if you go to the Higg MSI, there are five indicators. The Higg material index, the Higg material, sustainability index is what a lot of major brands use

[00:12:32] Veronica Kassatly: to measure their impact and their sustainability and test five indicators and not one of them is socioeconomic. It's things like global warming potential, water consumption, toxicity, eutrophication, nothing about socioeconomic impact. 

[00:12:47] Rebecca Burgess: I asked Kassatly how silk was measured using the Higg MSI. She notes in her description of how this took place through something called an LCA to briefly describe what [00:13:00] that is,

[00:13:01] Rebecca Burgess: an LCA is a life cycle assessment. These assessments aim to measure the environmental impact of a material. 

[00:13:09] Veronica Kassatly: They got it from Quantis which is one of these many companies that supplies LCAs for these very substantial sums of money. And they have a database called the WLB and apparently the Higg says, this is where they get their data from.

[00:13:23] Veronica Kassatly: It took me a very long time to find out which LCA Qantis were using, but it turns out that it is a single LCA, which was published, I think in 2014, by the Oxford silk group, which looks at the practices of 100 silk farmers in Tamil Nadu in 2006. Tamil Nadu India that is. Which they added some cultivation recommendations from Uttar Pradesh from 2013.

[00:13:50] Veronica Kassatly: They in fact didn't have irrigation data for these farmers. So they used rainfall from Bengaluru to estimate the amount of irrigation [00:14:00] required in Dompur Tamil Nadu. I mean, these places are all hours by car apart. I think that under pred, I like 13 hours by car from Dompur. Already, this is problematic. 

[00:14:14] Rebecca Burgess: Kassatly says the authors of the silk study said that this was the best available data that they could find at the time.

[00:14:22] Rebecca Burgess: They were never pretending to produce a study of global silk. They were rather attempting to highlight worst practices in silk production that people might want to address. And so they made this LCA and the Higg has quite literally lifted this LCA and said, this represents global silk production. She says, this is unmitigated nonsense.

[00:14:44] Veronica Kassatly: But there we are the internationals culture committee protested to the SAC about this at the end of 2020 and the SAC were not really interested. So in fact, thes culture commission filed a complaint with the federal trade commission, your us federal trade commission [00:15:00] at the beginning of 2021 on June the 16th, 2021, the federal trade commission wrote back to say that they had added the sustainable apparel coalition, their list of companies of interest.

[00:15:10] Rebecca Burgess: So who is currently defining the global sustainability conversation in fashion. And what generally do we see in terms of their backgrounds? How are they funded? She says the largest global player in the sustainable fashion space is the sustainable apparel coalition or SAC. This organization was founded by Patagonia with Walmart and eventually many other brands and manufacturers joined.

[00:15:35] Veronica Kassatly: Basically, we're looking at the major initiatives being entirely industry created. And when I say industry, I mean actually the largest, fast fashion and athleisure brands, entirely industry created and pretty much entirely industry funded. There's been a proliferation of other initiatives. Some of them started independently, but many of them now are financed

[00:15:58] Veronica Kassatly: by some group [00:16:00] of either the SAC or textile exchange or loudest foundation, which is a private foundation that belongs to the Brinkmeyer family who own amongst other things, CNA.

[00:16:12] Rebecca Burgess: As Kassatly properly stated in the report, The Great Greenwashing Machine, major brands have developed their own sustainability efforts.

[00:16:20] Rebecca Burgess: And many are struggling to meet their goals because they're using partial definitions of sustainability and a very selective implementation process. Consider this: the price differential between polyester and silk. Joao says polyester is about $1 per kilo and silk $65 per kilo. Berdu offers data on how many people globally are engaged in the production of silk.

[00:16:47] Rebecca Burgess: He says the social relevance of silk appears when we talk about these major producing countries. In 2020, the production of raw silk yarn reached [00:17:00] 92,000 tons. According to this recent study, with these 92,000 tons, more than 12 million jobs were created among these 8 million were small farm households.

[00:17:13] Joao Berdu: Silk culture and silk industry accounts from more than 20% of the general income of the population in Uzbekistan. It is remarkable. Silk offers good opportunities for hero women to start their own business. As you know, Not only hearing the silk worm, but reeling the cocoon and the weaving fabric and producing some, uh, handcraft item and selling it.

[00:17:39] Joao Berdu: So in a spec stand about 90% of, uh, people working with silk are women and the silk production is also a form of social protection for the poorest segments of the population. 

[00:17:52] Rebecca Burgess: With low investment in a Mulberry tree, you can have something with value to sell. After about a month's time, he [00:18:00] says it's light work

[00:18:01] Rebecca Burgess: that brings significant additional income to the elderly and the differently abled. It provides social aspects to work and women's empowerment. These common aspects are found in each of the major, super producing countries from China to Brazil. I was curious about the planting of all these trees and the photosynthetic carbon capture that they provide.

[00:18:25] Rebecca Burgess: Berdu has done some work on the carbon footprint, along with researchers from Sao Paulo State University and others. They wrote a paper about the mitigation of the carbon footprint of silk manufacturing through the carbon that is sequestered by Mulberry trees. 

[00:18:41] Joao Berdu: We believe that these could be a way to spread and to let know for more people, the great importance of having the Mulberry to the silk production.

[00:18:53] Joao Berdu: And what we have is that to have one ton of , silk fiber producing [00:19:00] Mulberry trees, they will take out from the atmosphere 735 tones of carbon CO2. So this is the relationship that we have about mitigation. 

[00:19:14] Rebecca Burgess: It's clear that bringing the work, the philosophy, and the approach of rural communities into the center of sustainability conversations would support a more authentic conversation about how to achieve climate stability while retaining livelihood.

[00:19:31] Rebecca Burgess: What I've observed is that there's very few crops that will keep people employed on small acreage and crops that can also employ women consistently. It's a very rare niche that protects women and other community members who could be more vulnerable in agriculture or the economy writ large. When I hear that over a million acres of Mulberry farms have disappeared,

[00:19:54] Rebecca Burgess: my sense is that that's definitely land that's going to be consolidated.[00:20:00] 

[00:20:00] Joao Berdu: Here in Brazil with the same investment, low investment that is needed to start the silk production, it is not possible to start any other crop that gives relatively the same amount of silk, because a grape will be a very profitable crop per actor, but the investment you need to start, the production of grape is, uh, very high and it'll take years.

[00:20:32] Rebecca Burgess: The silk grower community has been forced to justify its existence as sustainable. And as Kassatly tells us the irony of that is not lost on those who've looked into its history. 

[00:20:44] Veronica Kassatly: Silk, it's almost a myth valve, how silk production started in China and the silk cocoon that fell into the empresses cup of tea

[00:20:51] Veronica Kassatly: and so on. But basically they found in a neolithic site in Xang they found a utensil that [00:21:00] had images of silkworms on it. And this utensil dates from 4,000 BC. So we are talking something like 6,000 years ago, they appear to have been producing silk in China and they still produce silk, or they would if it was more profitable.

[00:21:14] Veronica Kassatly: And the notion that something that has been produced continually in the same place for 6,000 years is somehow the world's least sustainable fiber as the Higg MSI claims. I mean, you're looking at this and you think, well, how can this be possible if it's so unsustainable, how can they still be producing it in the same place?

[00:21:34] Veronica Kassatly: In many instances in exactly the same manner as you're producing silk in 15th and 16th century. They still use the same dikes when you think, well, how can this be unsustainable? The evidence is there on the ground, that it is sustainable. They're still doing 

[00:21:47] Veronica Kassatly: it. 

[00:21:48] Rebecca Burgess: The Higg MSI utilizes what we call cradle to gate boundaries.

[00:21:53] Rebecca Burgess: That means that the very beginning stages of a fiber's creation through the manufacturing process, the [00:22:00] reality is that those boundaries have been shown to measure different impacts at different stages of the life cycle of a fiber, depending on the fiber. It's the comparisons between fibers that are difficult to make.

[00:22:14] Rebecca Burgess: Especially when the boundaries are shifting between how we're measuring these materials. 

[00:22:20] Veronica Kassatly: I'm only talking about the MSI, which is supposed to be what enables people, brands, consumers, to choose more sustainable fabrics and fibers. And this, I think it's intolerable in a democratic society that what consumers are going to be told is more sustainable or less sustainable is determined by private corporations behind a pay wall.

[00:22:43] Veronica Kassatly: In a democratic society, we have the right as consumers and as voters to go and see what the data is, where it came from, who collected it, how, who peer reviewed it and so on. And you can't do that. And the fact of the matter is that [00:23:00] nobody peer reviewed it. It's something that was created by the SAC that only the SAC knows.

[00:23:06] Veronica Kassatly: And on an ethical level. I think this is unacceptable. If we're going to have legislation based on the proported environmental scores, if we're going to have labeling the consumer's gonna see based on proported environmental scores, then this has to be completely open. It has to be completely transparent. It has to be based on accurate representative data.

[00:23:29] Veronica Kassatly: And everybody has to have a right to look at it. And if you are a fiber producer and you feel that your fiber has been unfairly singled out, as we know alpaca, leather, and silk all did back in 2020, then you have a right to seek some kind of redress none of which exists at the present time. 

[00:23:48] Rebecca Burgess: If you were going to try to compare one thing to another, an apple, to an apple, an orange to an orange or silk to cotton, to polyester, to nylon.

[00:23:58] Rebecca Burgess: You would wanna make sure [00:24:00] that you were setting the boundaries similarly for each fiber before you started measuring and before you started comparing them to each other. These LCAs, don't all share the same boundaries and the same methodologies. 

[00:24:13] Veronica Kassatly: For instance, you have the upstream impacts of manure included for silk, which makes silk look like has very high GWP and eutrophication and you have the upstream impacts of manure not included for organic cotton, which makes organic cotton look like it has very low GWP.

[00:24:30] Veronica Kassatly: and eutrophication. In fact, the recommended application manure in India for cotton and silk cannot hugely dissimilar per Hector. When you look at these numbers, you are not seeing a real difference. You're simply seeing a difference in the way the manure was accounted for. And obviously this is extremely 

[00:24:48] Veronica Kassatly: misleading.

[00:24:50] Rebecca Burgess: Kassatly writes about how we will mitigate and hopefully ameliorate the conditions that are causing climate change and how we are actually going to reverse some of the damage. [00:25:00] How this actually is done will require a very different approach to measurement. She and other international thinkers are recommending that we move from a cradle to gate, to a cradle to grave understanding of our textiles.

[00:25:15] Rebecca Burgess: If we looked at the materials that we wear from the conception point to the end or the finality of that garment's life, what kinds of impacts would start to be included in our measurement framework that we're just not including now? 

[00:25:31] Veronica Kassatly: The most important determinant of how sustainable a garment is because clothing is not Kleenex,

[00:25:37] Veronica Kassatly: it's not a sandwich, the most important determinant of how impactful it is in its life is how many times it's worn. And obviously the more times you can increase the number of wears the lower, the impact her wear becomes. And this applies not just in terms of environmental impact, it also applies to your own wallet.

[00:25:56] Veronica Kassatly: So this is something that I think we should be transmitting to consumers is look guys, [00:26:00] don't be fooled that it says $12 or $10 when you see it on the Shein site. How many times will you wear it? Will it have any resale value when you're finished with it, or would you be better saving up, choosing something a little better made that you'll wear many more times just trying to alter the way consumers perceive their garment purchase.

[00:26:23] Veronica Kassatly: That's really where we need sustainable apparel space to move to. We need to move it away from being funded by and run by the major athleisure and fast fashion brands and basically people from sourcing. And we need to move it into the academic, the intellectual space. We need to get the people from leading universities, from leading research institutes, from leading agricultural research stations who actually know these things in detail, who, when they publish work, it has to be peer reviewed.

[00:26:54] Veronica Kassatly: You can't publish a report on snails in an academic journal without it being peer reviewed. How can we allow people [00:27:00] to publish sustainability data without anybody peer reviewing it?

[00:27:08] Rebecca Burgess: Unless people keep selling these garments to each other. They often find their way into some kind of bin. And that in many instances are exported to either Ghana, Chile, or another location in the global south. When people discover that the textiles are worthless, they dump them. And sometimes they burn them.

[00:27:29] Rebecca Burgess: A lot of these clothes have been blended with plastic, cotton, poly blends, or just straight up polyester garments. So when communities end up having to burn these garments, they're burning plastic. Now that we understand the foundation, which is fairly rickety for how we're defining the impact of silk and these other fibers.

[00:27:51] Rebecca Burgess: I wanted to get a feel from Kassatly about how she weighs the role of European policy in setting out to define sustainable textile for the European [00:28:00] community. 

[00:28:01] Veronica Kassatly: But it's really important that we all look at what the EU is doing, because obviously this is going to set the tone for what comes afterwards. And it's much easier to stop something before it becomes a law than it is to stop it once it has become law.

[00:28:13] Veronica Kassatly: So we're talking politicians, we're talking legislators. These people have many, many topics on their hands to look at, and it's all very complex. It's all very detailed. And so there's a role for as many voices as possible to step up and say, hang on, guys, you forgot about this aspect. You forgot about that aspect and try to make it easier for our legislators and for our politicians to understand what it is that matters.

[00:28:38] Rebecca Burgess: She adds that microfiber release, which is the fact that all clothes release fibers every day, won't be part of the conversation either. Some microfibers, particularly plastic microfibers are increasingly being seen to have environmental problem and human health implications. I wanted to know what recommendations Kassatly would like to [00:29:00] see if we were to create policy that would bring us to the point where we might see true sustainability or policy recommendations that could at least move us that direction. 

[00:29:10] Veronica Kassatly: In part one, we basically break green washing machine part one, we made two recommendations and the first was that fashion corporations and global policy makers must assess socioeconomic impact fiber production in countries and place this front and center and all sustainability claims and rankings.

[00:29:26] Veronica Kassatly: It is really vital that we look very carefully at the impact of not buying cotton. For instance, we've been in because so much of the global south, so many countries, there really is no other employment opportunity. There is no other income opportunity than farming. And so simply saying, oh, well, we won't buy cotton and that'll take those number of GHGs off the market.

[00:29:48] Veronica Kassatly: And that amount of water will not be consumed well, actually, no, because these farmers are going to carry on farming. So what are they going to do instead? And when we start looking at it like that, would we be better instead of constantly [00:30:00] investing in new fibers? And would we be at investing in helping these farmers to produce as efficiently as possible, both in terms of environmental sustainability and in terms of their own income.

[00:30:12] Veronica Kassatly: And then the second recommendation that we made for breaking washing machine pot one was. Regulatory frameworks must include living wages because that's another thing that they want to leave out of the path and that the German Gruener Knopf wants to leave out is they want to tell you something sustainable without mentioning the fact that this was made by somebody who was not paid a living wage. 

[00:30:33] Rebecca Burgess: In the largest producing fiber countries, the minimum wage is only 50% of a living wage.

[00:30:39] Rebecca Burgess: So it's nonsense to tell someone that that's a sustainable model. It really isn't and consumers are being grossly misled if they're being told that something made by someone who was not paid a living wage is sustainable. 

[00:30:53] Veronica Kassatly: Moving onto the next report, The Great Green Washing Machine part two, we then set the recommendation three was that governments must [00:31:00] require fashion brands to provide comprehensive, accurate, and verified sustainability information.

[00:31:05] Veronica Kassatly: Private corporations cannot be allowed to unilaterally decide upon the impact of different fibers. Obviously, this is much easier said than done. And there used to be a lot of discussion about what constitutes verifiable information. And then recommendation four was global resources must be better managed to promote the use of farmed fibers and code products so that we don't have wastage with wool that is being land filled or hides that are second quality being land filled;

[00:31:34] Veronica Kassatly: we actually use these. There's a lot of wastage going on at the moment in a resource strap world. Again, that's gonna be a difficult one to assess. It's going to be a difficult one to implement. And then recommendation five, which is really, really easy, which is reduce the use of plastic fibers. 

[00:31:50] Rebecca Burgess: Her recommendations hit home for me with many years under the belts of trying to improve on farm income and looking at the requirements of how we [00:32:00] build decent and meaningful livelihoods in textile manufacturing,

[00:32:04] Rebecca Burgess: I know that if these recommendations were acted upon and implemented, it would create the kind of change required to meet the challenges.

[00:32:24] Rebecca Burgess: This episode is made possible because of all the people who work behind the scenes on it. I'd like to thank my producer, Jennifer O'Neill, audio editor, Bethany Sands, an intern Maha Sanad. I'd also like to thank Whetstone founder, Stephen Satterfield. Whetstone head of podcast, Celine Glasier, sound engineer, Max Kotelchuck, music director, Catherine Yang, associate producer, Quentin Lebeau, production assistant, Shabnam Ferdowsi and sound intern, Simon Lavender.

[00:32:56] Rebecca Burgess: The cover art by Whetstone art director, Alex Bowman. [00:33:00] You can learn more about this podcast at wetstoneradio.com, on Instagram and Twitter @WhetstoneRadio, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, Whetstone Radio Collective for more podcast video content. You can learn more about all things happening at Whetstone at whetstonemagazine.com.