Join us for the third Sustainability Showcase speaker in our 2021-22 Driving It Home series, which explores issues of community resilience. Our speaker will be Dr. Nikolay Anguelov, Associate Professor at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth, who will be speaking about issues of fast fashion and the global supply chain.

Globally 92 million tons of textile waste are produced annually, the equivalent one dump truck’s worth of clothes every second being incinerated or buried. Moreover, supply chains for this system rely upon an economic model that makes it impossible to pay living wages to the millions laboring in sweatshop conditions around the world. How can we address this problem and change our relationship to fashion and clothes?

The Sustainability Showcases make connections between faculty research, personal and professional interest and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals while broadening the discourse surrounding sustainability. Speakers are invited to give a 45-minute talk, answer questions and hang around to mingle with attendees.

Facing COVID-19 and climate change, and having national conversations about racism and anti-Blackness in America, has made it clear — as last year’s Showcase theme suggested, the time to act for a more sustainable world is now. The Penn State community can and should be at the forefront of this change.

This is why our theme this year is theme of – Driving it Home – exploring the origins and meanings of home, identify local social and environmental issues that hit home for students and other attendees, and empower attendees to begin addressing those issues to make communities more resilient.