Fashion is often described as one of the world's most polluting industries. The scale can be difficult to grasp as it feels so personal, but every year, billions of garments are produced, sold, worn briefly and discarded, with consequences that reach far beyond our wardrobes.

The industry is worth around $2.4 trillion and is estimated to account for up to 8% of global carbon emissions. It consumes around 15 trillion litres of water each year and is responsible for roughly 11% of plastic waste. Yet many of these impacts are not accidental by-products of the system. They are linked to the way the industry is organised, from production planning and purchasing practices to inventory management and sales.

Changing that system is not straightforward. But across the industry, some businesses are trying to reduce waste by keeping materials, products and resources in use for longer

This week’s episode, the third one in the fashion arc, is a little different than usual: We've brought together two conversations that explore what "reduce, reuse and recycle" actually looks like in practice.

Firstly, Giulia spoke to Niccolò Cipriani, founder and CEO of the Italian circular fashion company Rifò, about what it means to set up a sustainable fashion company. They discuss the realities of building a business around recycled materials, the challenges of fibre recycling, and why suppliers initially viewed discarded textiles as low-value inputs rather than useful resources.

Giulia then sat down with Kenchen Arjandas Bharwani, fashion consultant at Empire Apparel, who walked us through the ins and outs of the fashion supply chain – including how perfectly good garments can be discarded for very minor reasons, how deadstock accumulates, and how the off-price market helps find a home for products that might otherwise go to waste.

Together, these interviews provide a window into a part of the sustainability conversation that often receives less attention. Instead of talking about 'sustainable fashion', much of the discussion focuses on what happens before a garment reaches a shop, and what happens to it when it doesn't sell.

That raises a larger question. If waste is being created at multiple points throughout the system, can fashion become more sustainable simply through better consumer choices, or does it require changes to the way the industry itself operates? Because while individual choices aren’t irrelevant, some of the most important decisions in fashion are being made long before we ever see a price tag.

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The clothes you're wearing have travelled a remarkable distance before reaching your wardrobe.

A typical garment may spend months moving through a global network of farms, mills, factories, suppliers, logistics providers and retailers. Raw materials are sourced in one country, processed in another, assembled somewhere else and shipped across continents before arriving in stores. What begins as simple clothing design often passes through dozens of hands before it reaches the customer.

Fashion is a $1.7 trillion industry built on supply chains designed for speed, flexibility and low costs. Those same qualities have helped drive growth and keep prices down, but they can also create vulnerabilities when conditions change. As trade tensions, tariffs, climate impacts and geopolitical uncertainty increase, supply chains that appear highly efficient can become increasingly exposed to disruption.

Environmental impacts often dominate sustainability discussions, but many of the industry's biggest challenges are social: poor working conditions, labour rights abuses, weak worker protections and the lack of meaningful oversight across complex supplier networks. When pressure enters the system, those risks are often borne by the workers with the least power to influence the outcome.

In this week’s episode, Giulia Bottaro discusses what this means for fashion’s future with Áine Clarke, head labour rights in supply chains & investor strategy at the Business and Human Rights Centre.

Their conversation explores why modern fashion supply chains have become increasingly vulnerable, how business models built around speed and flexibility can amplify risk during periods of disruption, and why workers often bear the greatest costs when commercial pressures move through the supply chain.

The discussion also challenges the common assumption that transparency alone is enough. Knowing where risks exist is only the first step: without changes to purchasing practices, stronger worker protections and meaningful accountability, transparency risks becoming little more than a reporting exercise.

As sustainability increasingly becomes a conversation about resilience, this episode asks a fundamental question: who ultimately bears the cost when fashion's supply chains come under pressure?

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For years, sustainability in fashion has often been discussed almost as a parallel conversation to the business itself. Some brands publish reports, set targets and talk about responsibility, while others turn their sustainability credentials into a marketing tool.

Yet, at the corporate level, many of the real decisions are still being driven by the old metrics of margins, supply chains and growth – but that's beginning to change.

Behind the scenes, there is a vast global industrial system increasingly exposed to climate volatility, energy prices, material shortages and carbon regulation. And its stakeholders have realised that sustainability is crucial to competitiveness: climate change can affect energy prices, raw materials and supply stability.

In this episode of Shaken Not Burned, Felicia speaks to Kristina Elinder Liljas, senior director for sustainable finance and engagement at the Apparel Impact Institute (AII), about how climate volatility is set to upend many companies' forward strategies within the next five years. From supply chain disruption and rising sourcing costs to carbon pricing and energy volatility, they explore why sustainability is shifting from a reporting exercise or a worthy side conversation to a core business issue.

In its Cost of Inaction report, the AII looks at the literal price tag of climate risk in fashion. The findings are striking, and the message is clear: inaction may just be the most expensive strategy on the board.

For an industry built on speed, scale, and razor-thin margins, sustainability is a matter of corporate survival.

This is week one of our four-part fashion arc. Over the next month, we are tearing down the curtain on global supply chains to see how this industry impacts people, the planet, and the bottom line.

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AI is no longer just a technology issue, it’s starting to reshape how whole systems operate. Yet we’re not paying enough attention to that yet: most of the focus on AI is on what it can do, with individuals and organisations alike rushing to implement this new technology.

But AI capability is advancing extremely quickly, while the systems around it — governance and regulation, infrastructure, organisational learning, labour markets, productivity models and even public understanding — are struggling to adapt at the same pace.

And all of this is unfolding inside a world already dealing with climate disruption, geopolitical instability, infrastructure stress, declining institutional trust and widening inequality.

In this week’s episode, the final in our AI arc, we explore what happens when AI becomes embedded inside the systems that underpin everyday economic and social life. Co-hosts Felicia Jackson and Giulia Bottaro discuss the implications for infrastructure, institutions, labour, energy, trust and governance — and ask whether societies and economies are prepared for the scale of change we now face.

The conversation ranges over stories about AI going rogue, the capability vs governance gap, the physical impacts of something that is still perceived by many as intangible, how AI promises the democratisation of technology while fuelling inequality, and what companies are doing to address these challenges.

For businesses, the questions are becoming increasingly operational: what governance, oversight and accountability systems need to exist once AI becomes embedded inside day-to-day decision-making? It’s worth asking: is your business prepared for what happens once AI starts influencing real operational decisions?

The arc on AI is now complete! You can find the rest of the episodes (alongside our entire catalogue) here.

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As AI systems become more autonomous, the conversation is shifting from capability toward something much bigger: trust, legitimacy, identity and participation in digital systems.

In this episode of Shaken Not Burned, Felicia speaks to Erika Maslauskaite, co-founder and CEO of alongID, about the rapidly evolving world of digital identity, interoperability and cross-border trust infrastructure — and why these questions are becoming increasingly important as AI agents begin acting on behalf of people and organisations.

From digital wallets and verification systems to fraud, privacy and governance, the conversation explores the growing tension between convenience, security and control in an increasingly AI-driven world.

Because beneath the technology itself sits a deeper challenge: how do societies build systems that people can trust, how do institutions adapt to rapid technological change, and what happens when increasingly autonomous technologies collide with fragmented infrastructure and real-world human complexity.

This episode is a grounded and wide-ranging discussion about digital identity, AI infrastructure and the future of participation in an increasingly connected world.

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Generative AI promised to transform how we work, while Agentic AI is beginning to transform how businesses themselves are built.

In this week’s episode of Shaken Not Burned, Felicia Jackson talks to Ethan Ouyang, who is AI ATOMS Spokesperson and responsible for North America Market & Partnerships. ATOMS is the venture building platform developed by DeepWisdom, one of China’s leading artificial intelligence companies. It has been designed as an agentic AI system, helping businesses, particularly small and medium-sized enterprises, integrate AI into their operations.

Unlike traditional generative AI tools, agentic AI systems can take goals, execute tasks, adapt in real time and increasingly function as operational actors inside organisations. From launching products to running marketing campaigns and managing workflows, these systems are beginning to shift AI from a support tool to fundamental business infrastructure. This trend is dramatically raising the stakes in today's AI conversations.

As AI systems move from producing outputs to taking actions, they are not simply improving productivity; they are beginning to reshape entrepreneurship, business formation and operational decision-making itself. Using DeepWisdom’s platform Atom, AI agents are increasingly able to research markets, design products, launch businesses, run marketing and optimise revenue — pushing AI beyond content generation into execution.

But this rapid acceleration of capabilities raises deeper questions. As AI capability expands, governance, ownership, financial models and operational discipline are still evolving. What happens when businesses can be built faster than the systems designed to regulate them? Where does accountability sit when AI agents act on behalf of founders or organisations? And what risks emerge when speed outpaces governance?

This conversation explores:

• The shift from generative AI to agentic AI
• How AI is transforming business creation and operational execution
• Human-in-the-loop decision-making and delegated authority
• Ownership, IP and evolving business model challenges
• Why governance structures may be lagging behind capability
• Sustainability, infrastructure, and the resource demands of AI at scale

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AI is becoming one of those topics where the scale of the claims can make it surprisingly difficult to work out what is actually happening.

We are told it will transform business, unlock extraordinary productivity gains, reshape jobs, and even help solve major global challenges like climate change. At the same time, there are growing concerns about energy demand, governance failures, bias, job losses, and the sheer speed at which these systems are developing.

The dominant narrative tends to swing between utopian optimism and existential fear, often without spending enough time on a more practical question: what actually happens when AI is introduced into real organisations, real systems, and real decision-making? This is the focus of this week’s episode, which is the first in our AI series.

Rather than debating whether AI is inherently good or bad, Felicia Jackson speaks with Professor Saeema Ahmed-Kristensen, Associate Pro Vice Chancellor for Research and Impact at the University of Exeter and Director of DIGIT Lab, about something much more grounded: why so many digital and AI transformation efforts struggle in practice and what that reveals about the limits of technology alone.

One of the most useful distinctions in the conversation was between problems that are well-defined and those that are not. AI is particularly powerful when objectives are clear, data is available, and success can be measured relatively easily. In those contexts - pattern recognition, diagnostics, optimisation - it can offer extraordinary value. But many of the most important challenges organisations face are different.

Sustainability, climate strategy, major organisational change, and social systems are messy, politically embedded and filled with trade-offs. They are often what researchers describe as wicked problems: issues where there is no single right answer, where choices create consequences elsewhere, and where uncertainty is part of the challenge itself.

That distinction matters because it shifts the conversation. It suggests that AI may be extremely useful in supporting parts of decision-making, but it does not remove the need for human judgment. In fact, in many cases, it may make governance, accountability, and strategic clarity even more important.

AI is powerful, but power is not wisdom. Better tools do not automatically create better outcomes. What they do do is make it even more important to understand what kind of organisations, systems and governance structures are capable of using them responsibly. As this new Shaken Not Burned AI arc begins, that feels like the right place to start.

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This is the final episode in our mining arc. Rather than revisiting what we’ve already covered, we step back to ask a different question: what does mining actually teach us about how change happens in complex systems?

Across the series, one tension kept coming up. The transition to a cleaner economy depends on scaling one of the most environmentally intensive industries on earth. We need more minerals, but we are deeply uncomfortable with how they are extracted. In practice, that tension shows up in whether projects can actually be built.

In this episode, we pull those threads together and explore five recurring gaps shaping the sector, from industrial dependence and supply chain constraints, to misplaced faith in quick technological fixes and, ultimately, whether our systems are even set up to deliver the transition we say we want.

One insight stands out in particular: trust is not a "soft" issue. In mining, projects that involve communities early and give them a real stake in the outcome are getting approved faster, facing fewer delays and attracting more consistent capital. In other words, legitimacy changes the economics of delivery.

Mining makes this dynamic unusually visible because its impacts are immediate and contested - but the lesson for industry is much broader. Whether it’s infrastructure, energy or data centres, more industries are running into the same constraint: formal approval is no longer enough if the people affected don’t believe in what’s being built.

This episode is an attempt to make sense of those tensions. Not just in mining, but in how we think about sustainability, trade-offs and what it really takes to deliver change.

Key takeaways:

• Why the energy transition depends on scaling a contested industry
• The five systemic gaps shaping mining today
• How trust and community involvement affect speed, risk, and access to capital
• Why social licence to operate is becoming a constraint across multiple sectors

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