Latest news with #ZaraSummers
Forbes
01-05-2025
- Business
- Forbes
Career Advice Women Leaders Want You To Know This Earth Day
women colorful hats - Pixabay -5963960 At The Earth Day Women's Summit last week, about a dozen accomplished female innovators and leaders talked to the audience about specific strategies for growing a clean green economy, including how to communicate creatively, sustainable business practices that work financially, socially and environmentally, and about new financial, investment and business models. They also described how agricultural innovations are reinventing fashion and food, in unexpected ways, and the impact on women who make up the majority of the fashion workforce and small-scale farmers. Several of the women who spoke also gave insightful career advice, specifically for women in midcareer on Electric Ladies Podcast. Zara Summers taling on panel - ED Women's Summit - 4-22-2025 'Naming it sometimes helps, right?...Say you're scared right now, but, what is the honest absolute worst thing that could happen? And when you really talk through it internally, you realize like, yeah, even it doesn't go well, but look at all the experience I'm going to gain.…And if you look at it from that perspective, it becomes less scary.' Zara Summers, Chief Science Officer, LanzaTech Telle Whitney 'For many engineers, especially women, but pretty much any engineer, they haven't necessarily been trained to communicate their ideas. And I think if you want to take your career to the next level, learning how to tell your story and what you want is really an important skill….It's just as important as the product development itself. And I'll say that again, it's as important as the product development itself and for many engineers, but especially women that is a tough lesson to really take in.' Telle Whitney, Author of the new book. 'Rebooting Tech Culture: How to Ignite Innovation and Build Organizations Where Everyone Can Thrive'; Co-Founder of Anita Borg Institute For Women in Technology and Cofounder of the Grace Hopper Conference. Jennifer Hough facilitating Circles at ED Women's Summit 'Especially when you've heard someone can be difficult or someone can be skeptical or cynical, it might take three lunches to get to know them well enough. If you make that the priority, that is going to mean the world to the results that you're seeking the world, huge, massive.' Jennifer Hough, author of 'Unstuck: The Physics Of Getting Out Of Your Own Way,' TEDx speaker and advisor to leaders. Chelsea Henderson on Comms-Culture panel at Earth Day Women's Summit 4-22-2025 'Women are really great at supporting other women. And so I think leaning into that and hearing, you know, the pitfalls, what was hard, what was easy. A lot of times we get focused on talking about what's hard and not on what's fun or what has been easier or what makes your day…. Plus don't let imposter syndrome cripple you.' Chelsea Henderson, Director of Editorial Content at RepublicEn ('conservatives for climate change' and author of 'Glacial: The inside story of climate politics.' Alison Ward speaking on panel - ED Women's Summit - 4-22-2025 Alison Ward, CEO of CottonConnect As we close out Earth Day Month, these women remind us that we have choices about what we do with who we are, how we frame issues in our minds, what we buy, who we hang out with, what we are learning, and how we spend our time.
Forbes
30-04-2025
- Business
- Forbes
The Surprising Future Of (Sustainable) Fashion
Zara Summers explains fuchsia leggings made from captured CO2 (l to r) Joan Michelson, Summers, ... More Robin Currey, Alison Ward at Earth Day Women's Summit - 4-22-2025 We may not think one pair of leggings or one t-shirt or cotton dresses that we buy make a difference in the planet or the economy, but they do, according to innovative women leaders in the fashion supply chain at The Earth Day Women's Summit last week at EarthX2025. How can they tell? Some items are labeled. Some of the products sold by LuluLemon, or the parkas and fleece jackets sold by Craig Hoppers in the UK are labeled as CO2 Renew, for example, because they are made from captured CO2 through a process developed by LanzaTech, their Chief Science Officer Zara Summers, Ph.D. explained at the Summit. Summers previously led the ExxonMobil biosciences division for 10 years. 'It's ask yourself, what am I buying today? Is there an alternative that, where this carbon has a second life?' she suggested. The United Nations says the garment industry is the second highest CO2-emitting industry, and that garments make up 7% of our landfills and put 500,000 tons of microplastics into the oceans each year. Screenshot - UN Fashion Alliance Summers explained that the LanzaTech process, oversimplified, is leveraging microbes that turn CO2 into ethanol. That ethanol can become sustainable aviation fuel, for example. 'It's actually a building block of everything that petroleum is used for today,' she said. Joan Michelson holds up CO2-based T-shirt while Zara Summers explains it - at The Earth Day Women's ... More Summit - 4-22-2025 She added that they can make 'pretty much any synthetic fiber that you can get from fossil, we have a path to create.' Then she showed the audience two pieces of clothing she says they made from captured CO2. 'This running shirt started off as a carbon emission from a steel mill in China. And so we're able to, instead of pumping that carbon monoxide and dioxide directly into the atmosphere, we pump it into our massive, kind of like a brewery, but cooler, huge, huge 500,000 liter tanks of living, breathing, spinning out ethanol microbes. And so we harness that.' They also partnered with REI on products. The other clothing is a pair of fuchsia-purple leggings by Athleta of Lululemon (pictured above), which she said were also made from captured CO2. She added that Lululemon has a stated goal of having ~25% of the polyester they use in these leggings 'to be from emissions produced ethanol.' She said it's 'a massive step change.' In the garment industry, 80% of the workers are women. Summers said that she and her team visit the factories using their products because, 'we follow through the whole supply chain.' CottonConnect - women & cotton & climate report 2025 'They (manufacturers and retailers) need to know the people in their supply chains and know where their cotton's coming from,' Alison Ward, CEO of CottonConnect said in a session at the Summit about food, fashion and agriculture in the face of the climate crisis. 'We've started with the farmer and started tracking the cotton from that farmer up in the supply chain.' By using sophisticated tracking systems, they can tell which farm cotton is sourced from in the CottonConnect network. 'We work with people like Primark, Carrefour, big French retailer across Europe and Asia, really. How do we hold them account in their supply chains?' Now they have a QR code, too. 'So when the farmer sells their cotton, that QR code scans that and it goes up into our tracking system,' adding that at this point, 'the equivalent of 1.7 billion t-shirts are being traced through our system.' CottonConnect is a global organization that trains small-scale farmers in regenerative and sustainable agricultural techniques and technologies, especially female farmers in India, Bangladesh, China, Egypt, Peru and Pakistan. They also create partnerships with fashion brands to help those farmers bring their cotton to market. In addition, 'now there's some really clever techs through a couple of companies. There's one which is an isotope test. So you can test the soil in the village, and then the isotope tells you that that cotton is from that soil in that village.' Alison Ward speaking on panel - The Earth Day Women's Summit - 4-22-2025 'There's also a DNA marker that you can spray on the cotton and then it goes through all of the washers and all of the different processing, and you can tell that that is the unique DNA marker that was sprayed at a particular point in the supply chain. So technology's really leaping forward,' Ward explained. Cotton makes up about 25% of global textile production, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and brands are being pressured by consumers – 85% of whom are women – to use more sustainable and ethical business practices. Even in today's economy, a 2024 study by PwC found that a majority of consumers are willing to pay more for sustainably-produced products. 'But right now, just 30% of the world's cotton is classed as 'sustainable',' according to CottonConnect. Paying attention to these steps on the manufacturing side, and buying aligned with our values, are ways we as consumers drive the market.
