Monique Maissan is an EO Shanghai member, CEO of Vision Textiles and founder of Waste2Weave.
Plastic seemed like a miracle when it was invented in 1907. Now, 110 years into the Plastic Age, it’s a menace to our environment and our health. We’re seduced by its convenience: more than 50% of plastic is used once and thrown away.
What’s worse, virtually every piece of plastic that has ever been manufactured still exists in some form, except a very small percentage that has been incinerated, because plastic takes from 500 to 1,000 years to degrade. Plastic enters our oceans at an alarming rate, killing 1.5 million marine animals each year. In humans, certain plastics are known to disrupt the endocrine system, impair neurological function, and have been linked to cancer, obesity, early puberty and recurrent miscarriages.
As CEO of Vision Textiles and founder of Waste2Weave, Monique Maissan is a social entrepreneur endeavoring to solve the problem of plastic by transforming it into fashion, like the ensemble pictured at left. (more…)