textile-recycling
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Kristy Caylor
Kristy Caylor is the founder and CEO of Trashie, the first scaled recycling-and-rewards platform in the US, whose internet-famous Take Back Bag lets people stuff a closet's worth of unwanted clothes and old gadgets into a prepaid mailer and get rewarded in TrashieCash to spend at places like Sephora and Uber Eats. An industrial engineer by training who spent two decades in fashion (Gap, Banana Republic Japan, Gap's Product RED, and the ethical-luxury label Maiyet she co-founded), Caylor built Trashie out of For Days, the circular apparel brand she launched in 2018. Her bet is that sustainability wins when it is convenient and fun rather than guilt-driven, and the numbers back her: hundreds of thousands of bags sold and millions of items kept out of landfills.
Nick Benavides
Nick Benavides is the cofounder and CEO of Everywhere Apparel, a Los Angeles materials-science company that turns cotton waste into 100% recycled, GRS-certified blank apparel through its CirCot process - no water, no dyes, no microplastics. A Stanford religious-studies grad who went from Bain to helping start the trading app Robinhood, he pivoted from finance to fashion after he and two co-founders, frustrated by the lack of genuinely sustainable band merch for their indie record label, decided to build the supply chain themselves. Everywhere now produces recycled garments for artists like Chappell Roan, Paramore, Wilco and Dead & Co., and was named Counselor's 2025 Sustainability Advocate of the Year.