These in-their-own-words pieces are told to Patricia Lane and co-edited with input from the interviewee for the purpose of brevity.

Marcelle Moreira dos Santos (Mars to her friends) is using artificial intelligence to clean up fashion waste. This 24-year-old from Vancouver and her friend, Khushi Khosla, started DreamStill to revolutionize sustainable fashion by developing an app to guide textile reuse and a robot-assisted textile waste sorting system.

Tell us about your project.

Vancouver sends more than 20,000 pounds of textile waste to the landfill every year. That is so wrong. We need different ways to dispose of the clothes we don't want anymore and change our approach to buying them in the first place. We have partnered with the University of British Columbia’s Capstone program and now, five computer engineering students are developing an app for us that will make it easy to decide what to do with used clothes. It will provide information about responsible thrift stores in your neighbourhood and let you know the original purchase price.

To raise awareness, we are hosting an event on the afternoon of October 5, 2024. Participants at Ecorise Festival can play a card game to learn about climate change, help........

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