"There's nothing wrong with cotton itself," says Parkes. "It's about our systems. We've over-industrialized it. We're killing the ground it grows in and everything that grows around it. We have to find alternate solutions, and it's not that we're looking for a single alternative, because that's actually the problem. The solution is biodiversity.
Being a material science company first and foremost, Pangaia is — or strongly appears to be, rather — remarkably breezy about selling its physical garments. It operates a robust B2B sales department, which sells its proprietary textiles across the industry. Its direct-to-consumer business, meanwhile, revolves around versatile, everyday items that today's consumers wear to shreds, loungewear chief among them., feature polycarbonate lenses made partially from carbon dioxide.
Consumer behavior aside, denim is still known as one of the more resource-heavy, environmentally damaging industries, for reasons that stem back to the cotton that's used to construct it. The vast majority of the planet's cotton is not only grown with dangerous fertilizers and pesticides, but also requires tremendous amounts of water to produce.
Like so much in science, as in business, the answer to this question isn't clear-cut. But Parkes is confident that, at the very least, it begins with the way we discuss supply chains overall, across all retailers.
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