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Everlane made waves for being among the first brands to eradicate virgin plastic from its supply chain. In 2019, after years of work, the startup managed to switch out new plastic with recycled plastic, largely made from discarded water bottles. It began incorporating them into jackets and fleece sweaters and bodysuits. It was a big step towards sustainability, since recycled polyester has a lower carbon footprint and diverts plastic from landfills. In the years that followed, many other brands on the marketfrom H&M to Pradafollowed in Everlane’s footsteps, but it didn’t solve the bigger problem of what happens when people decide to get rid of their recycled garment. But unless a recycled polyester jacket is further recycled at the end of its life, it will end up in a landfill. Since plastic does not biodegrade, but break into microplastics that will end up in our waterways and food chain. “We challenged ourselves to think, What does leading sustainability look like today?” says Alfred Chang, Everlane’s CEO, who joined a year ago. “We need to think beyond recycled fabric, to trying to make clothes that are, as much as possible, fully recyclable afterwards.” Today, Everlane launches a puffer jacket called Everpuff that can be recycled back into a garment at the end of its life. It is designed to be durable and easy to mend, but also easily taken apart so all of its component partsfrom the polyester exterior to the inner down fill to the hardwarecan be recycled. It’s part of Everlane’s broader vision to make the rest of its product line fully circular. The Challenge of Fabric-to-Fabric Recycling For decades, environmental activists have urged societies to transition away from a linear economy, where natural resources are used to make products that will eventually be discarded at the end of their life. Instead, they argued we should move towards a circular system, where products are kept in the economy for as long as possible (through mending and resale) then recycled back into new products. This process would vastly reduce humans’ reliance on natural resources, and cut down on the greenhouse gas emissions used to extract those materials from the earth. The fashion industry has talked about circularity for a long time, but until now, brands have tended to focus on extending the life of the garment by repairing them and creating secondhand sites. Recycling old garments into new ones proved a challenge because the technology to do so was still in its infancy. But Chang says that over the last few years, Everlane has been tracking how the recycling industry has been evolving. “We’re trying to understand where opportunities like when it comes to the infrastructure and investments in recycling,” he says. Fabric-to-fabric recycling is much more sophisticated than it was just a few years ago. Over the last few years, Everlane has focused on sourcing recycled fibers. For instance, it has partnered with Circ, which transforms fabrics made from polyester and cotton blends into recycled polyester and lyocell fabrics. It also partners with Manteco, an Italian mill which recovers wool fibers and turn them back into wool fabric. With Everpuff, the company take back the jacket at the end of its life and transform it into a new garment. It has partnered with Debrand, a company that can disassemble the garment, separate out the polyester, down, and hardware, then send each of these components to be recycled. Katina Boutis, Everlane’s senior director of sustainability and sourcing, says that the company’s designers partnered closely with Debrand to create a jacket that would be as easy to recycle. For one thing, they made it from as few materials as possible. The exterior is made entirely of recycled polyester while the interior is made entirely of recycled down; since these are mono-materials, they are far easier to transform back into polyester and down. They also designed the jacket without any complex stitching, so it is easy to take it apart with Debrand’s machinery. “We’re working with real innovators in this space, getting feedback about what challenges them in their operations, so we can create a product that isn’t just good for the customer but considers the entire lifetime of this product,” she says. Designing for Durability While this puffer can be turned back into a new puffer, Change points out that it is still important for the customer to wear it as long as possible. After all, it still takes a lot of resources to manufacture and recycle a product. “To be truly sustainable, we need to be thinking about how long a garment will be in circulation,” he says. “We want to offer guarantees and repairs to ensure the product can be kept for a long time. We’re also thinking about how it can be resold or passed down to another wearer.” The Everpuff is the first Everlane product to come with a lifetime warranty that will allow the customer to receive a free repair (or replacement of the jacket if the damage is beyond repair). Customers can also pay for additional repairs. To create this program, Everlane partnered with Tersus Solutions, which has expertise in repairs. Everlane also partners with Poshmark on a resale program called Re:Everlane, which allows you to more easily resell an Everlane item. The system automatically adds the style name, fabric content and original price, lower reducing the burden on the reseller. “A lot of circularity comes down to education,” says Boutis. “We want to create a ecosystem that allows our products to have a second or third life, before taking it back when it’s truly time for it to be retired. We’re trying to tell this story in a fun, creative way to keep people engaged.” The big question now is whether consumers really care about sustainability. At a time when politics and the economy are volatile, eco-friendly consumerism may not be a priority. Chang acknowledges that there are many other things consumers are worried about right now, but he says Everlane is trying to make the case the sustainable clothing offers immediate benefits to the customer, such as durability and the absence of toxic chemicals. “A lot of investments we put into sustainability equates to a better-made product,” he says. And ultimately, Change believes the pendulum swings back and forth. Eventually a time may come when consumers do care about the state of the planet, and when that happens, Everlane will have a clear edge. “We’re trying to have a sharp position in the marketplace, to show that this brand matters,” he says.
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E-Commerce
The rise of artificial intelligence in recent years, along with the surge in AI-generated online content, has given more credibility to a decades-old conspiracy theory known as the Dead Internet Theory. It holds that most of the content we encounter online isnt actually produced by living humans but by lifeless bots. AI is increasingly turning the once-fringe theory into a reality, but even today, at least one of the participantsthe living, breathing observer browsing the web on the other side of the screenis still usually a real, sentient being. Yet this may not be true for much longer. Thanks to AI systems increasing reliance on a technology known as headless browsing, artificial intelligence is becoming a primary consumer of the internet. And if that happens at scale, the internet will truly be a land of the unliving. Heres what you need to know about headless browsing, a term youll likely hear increasingly often in the years ahead. Headless browsing is nothing new Nearly every web browser youve ever usedwhether its Google Chrome, Apples Safari, or even Microsofts old Internet Exploreris a traditional visual browser. It features a graphical user interface (GUI), which includes buttons, tabs, scrollbars, and, of course, a large window that displays content (i.e., a website) that you can see. You navigate a visual browser mainly by clicking with your mouse cursor on hyperlinks or other buttons on a web page. If the web page requires you to enter text, such as in a form, you click in the text entry field and use the keyboard to type your characters. But for decades, another kind of browser has existed: the headless browser. A headless browser has no graphical user interface (GUI). It has no window that displays a webpage and does not support pointing and clicking with a mouse cursor. Instead, a headless browser processes a website’s content by reading its code directly. It interacts with the site, such as clicking on a link to go to the next page or entering text into a form, all through direct interaction with its code. Since humans are visual creatures, its clear why GUI browsers are the primary way most of the world accesses the internet. So then, what are headless browsers used for? Historically, they have been tools for web developers, as enterprise proxy provider Oxylabs explains. Because every graphical user interface element on a webpage has corresponding code, an automated program designed to help devs find errors on a website running through a headless browser can interact with that website just like a person wouldbut much faster since no visual interface needs to be displayed. The traditional benefit of headless browsers is that websites become more stable and reliable because headless browsing allows errors to be found relatively quickly. But human developers arent the only ones using headless browsers anymore. Headless browsing in the age of AI Once a tool for web developers and other programmers, headless browsers are now being employed by new userswho dont have heads at all. Increasingly, artificial intelligence systems are the primary users of headless browsers. AI browsers, such as Perplexitys Comet, use headless browsing to scan websites to carry out your prompts quickly. For example, when you prompt an AI browser for a list of the capitals of the 50 United States, the browsers AI will read the content of numerous websites via headless browsing to quickly retrieve the answer. But headless browsing goes beyond letting AI scan a website to retrieve information. As artificial intelligence systems evolve from being simple answer bots to becoming personal assistantsknown as AI agentsheadless browsing is also being utilized by these agents to interact with websites on your behalf, performing tasks like clicking links, checking boxes, or even adding items to your shopping cart. A large part of why an AI agent can perform tasks you prompt it to do so quickly is due to headless browsing. For example, say you prompt an AI browser to order the ingredients you need to make Thanksgiving dinner from multiple grocery websites. The browsers AI agent isnt actually perusing grocers websites through any visual interface and then clicking on Buy Now buttons to find and add items to your shopping cart. Its using headless browsing to read and interact with the websites code directly. But while headless browsing makes AI more efficient and versatile, theres a negative side to AIs use of it, particularly if youre a website or one of its advertisers. An internet where AI is the main user, not humans As more people turn to agentic AI and AI browsers, these AI systems will utilize headless browsing to visit websites and carry out tasks assigned by humans. This means that AI has the potential to be the primary type of user that is visiting a website. And there are already signs of this happening. A report from the AI monetization platform TollBit last month showed that, for the most recent quarter, human traffic to the websites that TollBit monitored declined by 9.4%, while AI traffic continued to rise. And its rising a lot. In the first quarter, TollBit found that 1 out of every 200 visitors to the sites it monitors was AI. By the second quarter, AI visitors accounted for 1 out of every 50 visitors. Thats a fourfold increase in less than a year. TollBits report goes on to note that when AI agents visit a website, the website often has no way to tell that it’s an AI and not a human being. Thats terrible news for companies, which rely on web advertising to pay the bills. Advertisers sell things to human beings, and if advertisers can no longer trust whether a website knows precisely how many actual people are visiting it, they likely arent going to spend their limited ad dollars on that site. For what its worth, an executive at an unnamed large digital publisher told Digiday that they believed headless browsing does not currently pose a major issue for publishers. However, they noted that if big players in the AI space, such as OpenAI or Google, adopt the technology for their AI agents, headless browsing could become a significant concern. And if headless browsing does become the norm, it also means that the Dead Internet Theory could take on an expanded meaning. No longer would the phrase be used to signify only an internet where human beings do not make the majority of the contentbut where the majority of the browsing is no longer done by humans either.
Category:
E-Commerce
If you ride along a bike path in the U.K. city of Leeds and approach a street, the traffic light can automatically turn green for youor stay green if you’re already midway across. The city is one of a growing number testing technology that uses sensors, anonymous data, and AI to make it easier to cross streets. Made by a company called VivaCity (known as Viva in the U.S.), the sensors can detect cyclists and pedestrians from more than 200 feet away. In some cases, someone on a bike might not need to stop at the corner. Pedestrians can keep walking without breaking their stride. (Cities can choose to program traffic signals to give cyclists either a shorter wait or full priority.) Traditionally, most traffic signals force people who arent in cars to push a beg button and waitor risk their life to cross while the lights still red. If automated sensors exist, theyre typically just for cars. [Image: Viva] At the moment, a lot of traffic signals don’t detect cyclists, says Matt Shaw, head of product at VivaCity. If they’re really basic, they operate on a fixed time schedule, so it will just rotate 30 seconds at a time. Or they might have vehicle detection, so they know if a car’s approaching, but they don’t know if a cyclist is. Wires embedded in the pavement can detect metal, but often miss bikes. VivaCitys technology also analyzes direction, so the automatic walk sign isnt triggered if a pedestrian is just passing by without intending to cross. It also counts the number of people waiting, so cities can choose to use a formula to change the light faster if more people are waiting. Most traffic controllers now have no idea if it’s one pedestrian or a hundred, says Shaw. If you’re in New York City and somebody pushes the button, you’ve got no sense of how many people are waiting. [Image: Viva] Unlike standard traffic signals, Viva’s system also knows if someone in a wheelchair or an elderly person with a walker is still crossing. Being able to know if a pedestrians still on the road, and hold the green light for them, is pretty important, he says. (The data collection focuses on privacy; after the AI analyzes the video feed, it deletes it, leaving only the number of people and the path that theyre taking, not their identity. The data cant be used for enforcement.) In Leeds, the city hasnt yet gone as far as giving cyclists and pedestrians full priority at major intersections. But at certain crossings where bike paths or sidewalks meet a road, the sensors already prioritize people walking or biking. The tech is one piece of a bigger strategy to become a city where you dont need a car, as the city puts it. That also includes improving bus service and building a better network of bike routes and bike parking. Making streets easier to crossand shrinking the time that cyclists or pedestrians waithelps make it a little more likely that people will want to walk or bike. Some cities are using the underlying data without yet connecting to traffic controllers. In New York City, for example, the Department of Transportation has been using the sensors at some intersections to track trends over time, from the number of bikes or scooters to how fast theyre traveling and the paths that people take to cross the street. The technology can also track near misses, which lets cities flag dangerous intersections and design interventions, such as changing the timing of signals or banning turns on red at intersections where cyclists have repeated close calls with turning vehicles. You cant solve the problem if you dont understand where people are cycling, Shaw says.
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E-Commerce
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