No matter what it’s for, 50 billion dollars is a very large sum. And when it is the amount of money that migrants have sent home to their families in Mexico, it is astounding. Migrants in this case include legal as well as undocumented. The amount has surged during Covid, and the total for 2021 is expected—not all tallied yet—to pass $50 billion. Mexico is one of three countries along with China and India where total remittances are large enough to be a part of the economy. In 2020 those remittances represented 3.8% of the Mexican GDP and the percentage of households it reached was 5.1%. Bearing in mind that the people sending these remittances are often not high earners and the total is even more astounding. It evokes people making sacrifices for their family, enduring deprivations to share what they have. It means living in cramped quarters and foregoing little luxuries, or perhaps even something that’s a need. The money sent home usually goes for necessities, such as food and medical expenses. It also goes for items like a refrigerator, an appliance that actually helps people save money on food. Placed in context the existence of remittances is not a fact that is without issues, how long can sending remittances last? Or when will Mexico no longer be dependent upon them? Adding to the poignancy of remittances is also the fact that many of the families live in violence prone areas of the country and have to be very careful not to let it be known they receive money. They could then be prey for gangs and be kidnapped for ransom. Regardless of these issues, or perhaps even more so because of them, what jumps out to someone like me is the sheer goodness of the people behind the remittances, people who put their families first, people who undergo hardships to share what they have, people who are courageous, devoted, resilient, people we should honor a lot more than we do.
Danielle Levy
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A New Durable Fabric
Some recycling stories, are more than being about recycling. They reveal creativity, initiative, cleverness, intelligence, and it took all that for old fabrics to become something new. Actually it is more than old fabrics, it is fabrics for clothing nobody wants, it is fabrics too old or too whatever to be useful. To just recycle fabric is complicated, because there are so many kinds of fabrics, and there are dies too. Some fabrics are just called unrecyclable. But all the obstacles were overcome and the result was something durable and useful. The design studio Envision partnered with an engineering company Imat-Uve to tackle the project. The result is called Fiber Unsorted. The recycled fabric made from fabrics that would have otherwise ended up in landfills ends up as something that when processed is a textile of high quality and strong enough that it can be used for instance for car interiors. One of the techniques that made this new fabric possible is Imat-Uve innovation to unweave the fabrics without damaging them so that the fibers can then be spun into high quality yarn. The technique can be used on just about any type of garment or fabric filtering out only about 15% usually because the fibers are too short. In addition the technique involves no chemical process making the innovation environmentally sustainable. Once the yarn is ready Envision then refines it using different textures, patterns and colors. Besides the automotive industry, the fabric can be used in furniture design, upholstery, even flooring. I may not know if my next car will use some of this fabric, but it’s enough to know it might.