Photo: Jared Soares/Jared Soares
Linda Greer, fashion industry’s foremost sustainability scientist, is well-known. She wishes she wasn’t such a rare thing.
Greer raises her eyebrows over her dark-rimmed glasses and says that there are many times when I will make a point about a company or sustainability group. I tell them that this is not special knowledge. This is what environmental professionals do. This is why I am unique in the world. It tells you a lot.
Greer was a senior scientist at The University for over 25 years, earning her a reputation. National Resources Defense CouncilOne of the largest environmental nonprofits in the country. She developed a unique program to reduce pollution in the fashion industry, which was accepted by Kering (parent company Gucci and Saint Laurent), Target and Levis. She used her scientific knowledge to advise global fashion companies as well as industry coalitions on how to reduce their environmental footprint.
She is TheMaxine Bdat is a pioneering scientist in this area and Maxine Bdat is the founder of The New Standard InstituteAuthor of Unraveled – The Life and Death Of A Garment. Sean Cady (VP of global sustainability & responsibility at VF Corporation), which owns Supreme Timberland and North Face, considers Greer to be the most intelligent environmental advocate I have ever worked with. Stella McCartney once wrote a admiring tribute to Greer. EssayAbout her for Vanity Fair.
Greers isn’t proud to have accomplished so much, she says from a chair by a huge window that overlooks her backyard and the flowering trees. She says the point is that not much of what she is praised should be considered revolutionary.
Linda Greer at home
Photo: Jared Soares/Jared Soares
Greer is wearing an old black cardigan over a patterned yellow top, which she has worn for so many years that she doesn’t know where they came from. However, she believes the top was a thrift store find from 20 years ago. I can only see a hint at a brand logo when Greer’s husband is also an environmental scientist and walks out of her home in a button-up shirt, a quarter zip Patagonia pullover, and to say hello.
When Vanity FairTo accompany a 2015 story about Greer, Annie Leibovitz set up a photo shoot. Stylists called to inquire about Greer’s favorite designers. I answered, “I work for a nonprofit and don’t buy designer clothes.” She recalls that she doesn’t have a favorite designer. She had been working with some the most famous brands in the globe, including a number of luxury labels, for at minimum six years.
Greer was born in Fall River, Massachusetts. It is a small city of less than 100,000 people, perched on the banks the Taunton River. She says that although it was once the world’s largest textile manufacturing center for woven cotton fabric and was once the most important, the beginning of her life seems fateful. It meant that she grew up in an economically depressed area, which was the result of a major industry leaving the area to seek cheaper labor elsewhere.
Greer was the child of a doctor. Growing up in a wealthy family and facing the challenges of a failing community, Greer felt the need to do good and help others.
As a way to achieve this, she chose environmental science. In 1972, when she entered Tufts University’s college, the field was still relatively new. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency was only two years old. She became so interested in the topic of pollution as a subject for scientific inquiry that she continued her studies at Tufts University, UNC Chapel Hill graduate school, and finally to Washington, D.C. where she was hired as a staff scientist at Environmental Defense Fund. While pursuing her Ph.D. in Environmental Toxicology, she began lobbying at Capitol Hill. This meant that she had to talk to representatives from her student union’s pay phone.
She moved to the NRDC in 1990 and spent the next few years working with her colleagues to improve the U.S. environment regulatory system. She admits it was a huge task, especially with two children, but it was a very rewarding time to work on environmental policy. So much felt possible: She was able to get invited to both Republican as well as Democratic staffers’ weddings and bipartisan compromise seemed possible. She says it was a completely different world.
However, pollution in the United States began to decline. This was not due to environmental problems being solved, but because they were following the manufacturing process overseas. Greer began to focus her attention on the international stage. So Greer found herself working in fashion. While reviewing the data on one province in China, she noticed that the apparel sector was second in terms contributing to local water contamination. (She is now concerned that this finding, which was intended to inform her own internal priorities at NRDC might have contributed to the spread of the disease. Infinite repetitionBut Completely Debunked Claim that fashion is the worlds second-most-polluting industry. This idea is a pain for her as she values accurate data. What we do know could result in drastically different rankings depending on whether we were tracking water contamination, greenhouse gas emissions, or any other indicator.
Greer’s pursuit of pollution in the apparel industry led to Greer’s trips to China with Gap founder and other corporate leaders. Clean by Design was launched in 2009 as a result of all the factory visits, conversations with corporate actors, endless rounds of tea drinking and endless discussions with dyehouse owners. It was designed to reduce pollution from fashion companies. It listed ten easy-to-execute but deeply researched solutions. Best practicesThis could help factories reduce water and energy consumption. It also included insulation, processing, and reusing wastewater.
Greer wanted start in the fashion sector and move on to other polluting areas. I was thinking of this as one sector. I was going to move on to the next five sectors once I had figured everything out.
She didn’t know how difficult it would be for the fashion industry to change. Perhaps it was because sustainability people didn’t work closely with those in companies that had real decision-making authority. Perhaps insulate your valves was not a glamorous enough solution to attract fashion people’s attention. At its core, she believes that the problem was that fashion firms didn’t think they had an environment problem. And with very little government oversight, there wasn’t any regulation to hold them accountable. Greer pitched Clean by Design the Camera Nazionale della Moda Italiana. This body represents and oversees the Italian fashion sector and it blew everything away, she says. She pitched the program at Walmart to a vice president, who said, with a smirk: You should be in sales.
Clean by Design received the endorsements of key players from Burberry and Kering to Target, H&M and H&M. Save!3 million tons of water, 61,000 tonnes of coal, 400 tons chemicals and $14.7 million in operating expenses by 2015.
Linda caused more change than she realized, Cady said. She reduced the amount of water required to produce jeans and drove the chemical industry to eliminate toxic and hazardous chemicals.
The fashion industry has made great strides in recent years to acknowledge, at least in words, that its planetary impacts are a problem. Greer returns to her original question. Why aren’t more scientists studying this issue? She believes that fashion companies don’t think they need help from people like her because their environmental work isn’t serious enough.
After a 27-year tenure at NRDC, Greer resigned in 2018. Although Clean by Design did not succeed to the extent she had hoped it would, it lives on today through adoption by the Apparel Impact Institute. This describesThe program has been highly successful. Companies that adopt its efficiency-boosting techniques are reimbursed by lower operating costs in less than two year. Greer is currently working with China’s largest environmental non-profit, the Institute of Environmental and Public AffairsShe is still tracking her colleagues from D.C., her home. Fashion footprintAlong with other sectors. With a framed copy, she sits in an office stuffed with mementos of her global travels. Vanity Fairarticle in the hallway. A poem by one her old colleagues, written on the backs two NRDC envelopes hung on the wall. (A sample line reads. [Linda]Inspiring designers to make clothes sustainably / she didn’t take a single gift.
Greer talks about fashions current environmental woes. As a fox roams through her yard and a spring drizzle water the garden, Greer oscillates between being hopeful, frustrated, impatient, and energetically optimistic. It looks like the tide is turning for those who observe her path and the space she cleared from the outside.
Frances Beinecke, former president of NRDC and Greers boss, said that Linda was at first a lonely voice. The idea that the fashion industry needs to be more sustainable is now well-known. I was impressed by the amount of attention that fashion received at the U.N. Climate Conference in Glasgow last year.
Is Greer able to bring together enough people at the intersection of fashion and environment science to make a real impact? She hopes so, as business as usual is causing the city to crumble. I am cautiously optimistic that these organizations will step up as the sector and these companies are under more pressure.
Linda Greer, the only Linda Greer, will continue to do all she can.
