Startup GrindX

A corporate attorney turned fashion tech and sustainability entrepreneur Stephanie Benedetto is a Techstars graduate and recently launched her flagship product Materia Mix, a marketplace to quickly and easily sell unused fabrics online. Because, today, more than $120 billion worth of excess fabric sits in warehouses and your home and ends up in the in the waste stream.
Why you should care? The textile industry is second only to agriculture as the biggest polluter of clean water globally. The dyeing, rinsing and treatment of textiles release toxic chemicals into our water supply that cannot be filtered or removed.
Think of your favorite cotton T-shirt. It requires 700 gallons of water and ⅓ of a pound of chemicals to produce. That’s enough water for one person to drink for three years. And that’s just one shirt — more than 2 billion shirts are sold worldwide each year. If we continue at the current pace, two-thirds of the entire world’s population will face shortages of freshwater and be exposed to these hazardous chemicals by 2025.