- You probably have a bunch of clothes that you never wear just sitting in your closet or your dresser.

So if you ever get around to spring cleaning, think twice before you throw them out.

The average American throws out like 81 pounds of clothes a year.

That's a mountain of t-shirts, jeans, and other cheap crap that goes straight into the landfill.

So how did we get here?

On this episode of Rolling Through, we're diving into the fashion waste crisis.

Also in this finale of Rolling Through, we roll into New York City, taking in the sights, the streets, and the flavors along the way.

And the big question, will we make it to the end of the Empire State Trail?

Watch now to find out.

This is Rolling Through, a bicycle travel show.

The day is finally here.

After what's felt like a true odyssey, this is our last day on the trail.

We're up early with the sun and brisk morning air.

We roll out from Brewster, and it's a smooth ride, mostly downhill, so we're able to just coast.

It almost feels ceremonial and good thing because we're not stopping until New York City.

There's a lot ahead of us.

So Greg and I keep moving and decide to push on for one last long haul.

We're feeling the miles, but with each one, the anticipation builds and then we hit a major milestone.

Literally.

This is a pretty special moment right now.

We just biked hundreds of miles across days to arrive to this right here.

As we cross into Manhattan, it starts to sink in.

Maybe it's the views, maybe it's the relief, but the scale of it all really hits.

We're riding on the busiest bike path in the country.

At peak, the Hudson River Greenway sees more than 10,000 cyclists a day along its 13 mile stretch.

It's basically one long park along the waterfront.

Not a bad place to finish a ride like this, but we're not done yet.

Over the past couple decades, this city's transformed when it comes to bikeability.

And a big part of that is e-bikes.

They've lowered the barrier to getting around.

They open up micro-mobility to a lot more people.

So I'm heading to talk to some of the folks pushing that forward.

We stop in to Propel E-Bikes in Brooklyn to meet CEO Cat Strain.

- We carry frontloading cargo bikes, and long-tail cargo bikes.

So frontloading, you can put your cargo, whether it's your precious cargo, your children in the front, or whether it's commercial use or personal use, your groceries, furniture, Christmas tree, whatever.

It can all go in the front of a cargo bike.

And same for the rear.

There's options for storage on the back of the cargo bikes, and you can carry a kid up to 40 pounds in that seat and then transition that seat to another seat pad or a captain's chair, or just all sorts of accessory options.

- Can we see how it runs?

- I'd love to.

Let's do it.

- Let's check it out.

- Yeah, so this bike path is a protected path by the sidewalk.

And there's a barrier and it's a two-way path.

- Somebody who's from Rochester and loves Wegmans, you could ride right over to Wegmans and load up all your groceries right on here and then get home faster than you would like taking an Uber.

- Yes.

And that's really one of the reasons I love riding my bike, especially around the city or just riding bikes.

And I'm also not somebody that would ride a non-electric city bike just because I've become accustomed to having the electric assist.

And it's not my preference to ride without it.

And I don't know, it keeps me riding.

- Yeah, and I feel like that's an important distinction when talking to people.

'Cause I've heard folks say, oh, you have an e-bike, that's cheating.

And I don't think that argument really holds any water.

- Well, I'm not racing, right?

So like, I don't feel like I'm cheating.

I feel like this is improving my quality of life because I am now able to do something that I was capable of doing before, I was not interested.

- I feel like it's also a great way to get people who wouldn't otherwise bike, or who couldn't otherwise bike, like out there biking.

- And I want to say 70% of people who purchase an e-bike ride it way more than they ever thought they would, which is, you know, that in itself is, and I'm evidence of that.

I think the best way to get more people on bikes is to just encourage every single person to try one.

And that's what we're seeing that experience a lot in store of people that are just like, okay, I want to, you know, I want to get out and get on a bike.

And the electric ability is really allowing that.

- I feel like every time we're like turning, it's like, all right, now it's a little more chaos.

- Oh my god.

- My god.

- Oh my god!

- Who would've thought?

We just went through like an absolute tempest of chaos with construction and now we're going over cobblestone roads and you're just like zipping along.

- With a huge smile on my face, right?

- With a smile on your face because that's the other thing too, like, I only get in a car, especially in an area like this where it's extremely scenic.

Right now we're under the Manhattan Bridge.

You can hear the train and we're on cobblestone streets.

If you're in a car, like, you get that low visibility from the roof.

Like if you're traveling at 12 miles an hour, you can still take it all in and you get this beautiful view, this like grand scale that you wouldn't otherwise be able to get.

- And one thing that I noticed just about the physical make of a car versus a bike is that the overhead visibility being blocked and how there is a lot of freedom and a lot more joy in experiencing what's above.

I probably never would've noticed it if I hadn't experienced bike.

But I know when I'm in the car now, I'm like always bending down, wanting to see more, just from knowing what's possible in getting around my bike and being able to just look up and see the whole sky, the whole view all around me.

Just look at how many people we pass by and we happen to be filming, but when you're by yourself, there are smiles exchanged or just different interactions of, hey, I like your bike, or cool shirt or whatever.

Just different interactions that wouldn't otherwise happen.

- And we're out in it.

- We're out in it.

- Cat, thank you so much for talking with me.

- This is awesome.

- As Cat rides off, I'm left thinking about the kind of change e-bikes could help accelerate, especially in a city this big and dense.

As systems like Citi Bike expand and if the infrastructure keeps up, it can start to fill gaps, getting more people around more easily.

But that kind of shift doesn't just happen.

It comes down to policy.

Amsterdam made that call decades ago when cars were taking over the city.

Now it's one of the best bike cities in the world.

Today, other world class cities like Paris are following suit.

So the question is, where does New York go from here?

A new friend's meeting me under the Brooklyn Bridge.

So while I wait, I take a second just to take it in.

The history, the scale, everything this place has built.

It doesn't take too long before he pulls up and we're out for a quick loop of one of his favorite spots.

This is Makesi Duncan, founder of Dad Bod Cycling.

An inclusive fitness movement And nonprofit aiming rethink the stereotypes of the cycling community And he's about to show me what riding in the city is all about.

Like what have you found from cycling?

- So I believe it truly changed me mentally, emotionally, physically is a huge one.

It's a journey.

You're not good when you start cycling at all, but it depends on who you're comparing yourself to.

I live by me versus me.

So I love to see the progress I make year after year.

And it's been an amazing journey.

I went from struggling with eight miles to now I'm able to travel to different parts of the country and do a hundred mile rides and feel amazing doing it.

- And how about the connection aspect?

How is it like meeting new people out there and riding with folks?

- So in New York itself, it's such a diverse community.

You can meet a cyclist from any part of the world in New York, you can start in Brooklyn and you can meet someone from any island in the Caribbean that rides a bike.

Or you can head over to Jersey and you meet anyone from South America, Europe.

It's just such a diverse and welcoming community.

It's unbeatable.

You cannot beat cycling.

- So in New York especially, you know, I lived here for many years.

I cycled here for many years and love it.

But anytime I talk to somebody about it, they're, oh, you're wild for doing that.

I can't believe you would cycle there.

Can you talk to me about the safety if somebody's apprehensive?

- Well, if someone's apprehensive, the infrastructure is there.

It's on a lot of our council members to really push for the importance of safety in the city.

It's not going to happen unless you have people in high places pushing for it.

And that's something we push for as a community.

Cycling is eco-friendly.

It's something that keeps this world going.

It keeps us going, especially in New York.

It's there.

As long as we use it and advocate for it, it'll stay amazing.

- And then can you tell me a bit about the cycling community in New York in general?

- There's nothing wrong with riding by yourself or just riding with one person, but the cycling community in New York is, it's very welcome.

There's so many groups that'll have new rider days or have so many days where they have an easier ride, a welcome ride, or just an introductory ride to cycling that there's no difficulty finding it.

- And there's a lot of different like subcultures in bikes too.

Like you have bike punks, you got people who like collect vintage bikes and ride.

- You have your road cyclists, you have your party cyclists that ride on Thursday nights.

You have, believe it or not, you have your gravel cyclists in New York that will find gravel a little bit to the north.

Or even in Brooklyn there's a whole gravel route.

- So we've ridden across like the entirety of New York State.

And you know, it's been a very long journey for Greg and I, it's been really rewarding.

But I think riding here, something that I, you know, kind of want to get across to people is at least cycling in New York City.

I feel like there's no bad ride.

It seems like this is like this beautiful view.

You can go out for just a casual cruise and you get this.

- Again, as a Brooklynite, just riding over the Brooklyn Bridge, every time you really just look up and see it.

It's like I live in the best city in the world.

And then you get to the west side or even the east side, you look that way.

You can see the Statue of Liberty.

It's like everywhere you look, there's something iconic that you see in a movie every day and you just live here.

- I feel like that's kind of representative of our trip in a way because it was very scenic but also historic.

And there's just a sense of like, I dunno, gravity around everything here.

And there's an epic scale to it with these views.

This is enticing.

But how do we make cycling more welcoming for people?

- I think just welcoming people with an open arms and everything.

Also getting kids on bike is a huge aspect to that.

When they grow up riding in the city, you're just passing things on to the next generation, passing your knowledge on.

If you give a kid a bike and they have their own way around the city, they're going to grow up loving it.

I hope more people on bikes is that it becomes an easier process, hopefully a cheaper process.

Something that's more accessible to all the communities in the cycling community and all the communities within the city.

- Build bike lanes, free bikes, and get people out there riding.

- I agree.

- Makesi, thank you so much.

- No problem.

- This is awesome.

And before we head back to Manhattan, we wind up under the Brooklyn Bridge.

So it'd be a shame if we didn't cross it.

Especially now there's a dedicated bike lane along the lower lane.

One less lane for cars, one more for bikes.

And after a full morning riding, we've definitely worked up an appetite.

So we're heading towards lunch, but before our spot opens up, we take it slow and take in a few sights.

We roll into Bryant Park for a much needed meal.

And I'm especially excited for this one because it's with Scott, founder of Scott's Pizza Tours.

In a city where pizza's the staple, he's the right guy to point us in the right direction.

- I'm Scott Wiener, the founder of Scott's Pizza Tours and Slice Out Hunger.

And we're here in Bryant Park, New York City across the street from a very secretly delicious pizzeria.

- On a beautiful day, Scott.

- The most beautiful day.

- And maybe one of the most beautiful pies.

- Yeah, and what I love about this pie is that it's classic, it's a pizza margherita, when you bake in an oven as hot as they're doing at Heritage, which is in the 750 to 850 area, you get even caramelization, like an even bronzing.

But you also get this light puffy pop on the edge.

- It looks like a painting like a fresco.

Shall we dig in?

- Yeah man.

I'd love to dig in.

I'm curious which slice you go for and why.

- I go for usually the biggest slice in front of me.

- Yes.

- Because I've biked 650 miles to get to this slice.

Let's try it.

- But now I feel weird 'cause I only biked like seven or eight miles today.

- That's enough to work up an appetite.

- Yeah, I walk across the room and I work up an appetite.

Cheers.

- Cheers.

- Yeah, hell yeah.

- I understand.

- The simplicity of a pizza margherita.

- Incredible.

- Yeah.

- So tell me a little bit about Scott's Pizza Tours.

- So I'm obsessed with pizza obviously, but I also am obsessed with understanding how things work.

The idea of the Scott's Pizza Tours is to introduce people to the science and history that change from one spot to another.

So rather than there just being one place that's better, I'd rather teach people to understand, well what's going to make this one crispier?

And what's going to lend to the density of this?

Why are they using cornmeal and these guys are using semolina?

How things work is way more interesting to me than arguing over if your taste is better than my taste.

- That's a really good philosophy and I wish we could apply that to everything like the way you do with pizza.

- We can.

- Really great.

- I just think it starts with, you got to find common ground first.

And we can talk about pizza and we can literally talk about pizza.

Yeah.

And we could talk about how it's a food brought to the United States by immigrants.

But it's a food that only developed in Southern Italy.

Not because of just Italians, but because of foods that came into the port of Naples from all over the world.

So the basil on this pizza, basil is not native to Southern Italy.

It's from India.

Buffalo mozzarella is from also South Asia.

And then tomato is not from Europe at all.

It's from Central America, South America.

But like breaks apart the idea of there being this nativism about food.

You break it down.

And then suddenly you like disarm everybody.

And I think we kind of need to disarm ourselves and that's why the ability for pizza to adapt is what has made it so relevant today.

Because even though this is a food that's been around in one way or another since the early 18th century, the version of it from the early 18th century is not what we're eating today.

Therefore, the idea of authenticity or a rule of tradition doesn't really exist with foods at all.

Especially pizza.

- It's poetic.

- It's also delicious.

- It's poetic and delicious.

So can you tell me a little bit about Slice Out Hunger?

- When I started running pizza tours 2008, I did it with a full understanding that we are treating food as entertainment on a food tour.

- Yeah.

- And that not everybody can afford to do that.

So how do you balance that and respect the community that you live in and respect the fact that people face food insecurity and can't afford to spend money on a ticket to go and treat food like it's like a movie.

And so Slice Out Hunger became this other arm of what we do where we partner with pizzerias all across the United States and we do fundraising and we do events that all support organizations that fight food insecurity.

And they all participate by donating to local shelters and soup kitchens.

And then we help them by bringing them all together and giving them the benefit of community.

It's like a good way to form a club and teach people that even though they are independent pizzerias, they don't have to operate independently.

They can operate like a community.

- Building community, pizza for good.

- Pizza really took off in popularity when it became a food of sharing.

- Yeah.

- And when it became a shareable food, suddenly it's the thing that brings people together over a central dish and it becomes the thing that you and I can talk about why you chose that slice and why I chose that slice.

It's literally common territory.

- After going back for an entire second pie, putting that away, Greg and I hop back on the bikes and head out cutting through the fashion district.

New York is one of the fashion capitals of the world.

Trends start here and spread everywhere.

Clothes maketh the man, but what maketh the clothes?

- or how, that's where things get complicated, the decisions behind that.

They shape a lot more than just what we wear.

There's a lot in that system that's not working.

So we detour out to Bushwick Brooklyn to see what a different approach might look like.

- The idea for Zero Waste Daniel kind of has always been my life.

I started sewing when I was a little kid.

I needed to make things.

I have those itchy maker hands.

And when I was a little kid, maybe five, six years old, the first material that I started working with was scraps.

As I pursued a career in design and I learned about all of the industrial practices, I realized that everybody has this problem, but it's on a huge industrial scale.

- So waste in the fashion industry.

Like talk to me about how you're trying to tackle that.

- So waste in the fashion industry looks different all the time, but one of the main things that it looks like is, you know, we think of those piles of clothing coming in and out of, you know, fast fashion stores, H&M, Zara, that kind of thing.

But that's post-consumer waste.

Pre-consumer waste is actually one of the biggest offenders.

And that's all the little pieces that fit together in between those pattern pieces that get cut out.

And I like to think about it like making cookies.

So if you've ever rolled out a sheet of cookie dough and then you take your cookie cutters, that's just like pattern making and the little pieces in between.

You know, when you're making cookies, you can ball that up and roll it out, squeeze one or two more cookies out.

But in fashion, we just take those leftovers and we throw them away.

And in the industry, there are giant table saws that can cut up to 500 layers of fabric at a time.

So imagine that little triangle in between those patterns 500 times.

That's a lot of waste.

So textile waste is one of the biggest offenders in the fashion industry.

And one of the reasons it's so problematic is that it is so resource intensive.

So it's not just that fabric.

A lot of fabric actually starts on a farm.

So think about a cotton t-shirt or a pair of jeans.

Cotton is very water intensive to produce, and then it's energy intensive to mill.

There's byproducts and then it gets dyed and finished and washed with enzymes and all kinds of, you know, mixed with things like spandex and other man-made additives.

So that little triangle that gets cut out is often something that has been flown around the world and takes resources from many different industries, agriculture, scientific, and otherwise.

And so to throw that away is an enormous market failure.

- So do you take that triangle and you make new clothes with it?

- So the whole kind of aesthetic of my brand and mission of my business is to take those discarded off cuts, join them back together and make what I call re-roll.

So we re-roll our scraps into a new sheet of fabric that you can cut a new pattern out of.

And because of the nature of doing that, there's something really artistic about it.

A little example with something like a crop top.

So we always use the same patterns, but because we have all these different little off cuts, each one will come out a little different than the next.

- I love that.

- And that's pretty fun.

- You get your own unique piece.

- Exactly.

- That's great.

What's your hope for awareness when it comes to waste in the fashion industry?

- It's interesting to think about it right now because I think when I started doing this, my hope was that this idea would catch on and become mainstream and other designers would start incorporating this philosophy and this way of doing things into their practices.

And 10 years into this business, this collection, it's happening.

It's, you know, people on TikTok making things, major companies like Levi's, thinking about scraps and waste and denim.

Huge high-end brands like Alexander McQueen are posting about how they're using their scraps and their leftovers.

And so we as consumers need to show big businesses that there's money in this.

So if we show up and we buy things that are made out of recycled materials and it shows that that's trending, then more things get recycled because those businesses want to do what's hot and what's trending.

Being the type of designer that I am and living the life and lifestyle that I do, I think queer people often feel the relationship to scrap material.

Because being part of any marginalized community, you know what it's like to feel like an offcut or an outcast, and then seeing how strong those things are when they come together is very powerful.

So I think there's always something in joining the things that feel discarded together and then creating something beautiful and powerful out of that.

- With the sun getting low and a long day winding down, Greg and I ride up to my old neighborhood, meet up with a group heading out together.

This is Ridgewood Rides, a weekly ride built around cycling as a community.

These modern groups show the beauty in cycling.

Its transportation, its recreation, and its culture.

There are whole worlds within cycling, bike punks, roadies, mountain, street, messengers, commuters, different styles, different scenes, all connected by the same thing.

It is easy to forget, but this is a bike world.

The bicycle is the most common vehicle around the globe.

It's one of the simplest machines we've ever built.

And when we ride, it makes us one of the most efficient moving creatures on the planet.

It gets us around, but maybe more importantly, it brings us together.

Earlier today, before heading back to Brooklyn, we made one more stop down at The Battery.

This is where the Hudson River Greenway ends.

It's a place that's endured from its namesake days of protecting New Amsterdam to threats of being torn apart by development, to what it faces now with rising seas, but it's still here, which makes it a fitting place to end this ride because we made it all the way from Buffalo over downed trees, through rain, alongside old friends and new ones.

Across 720 miles to get right here, the end of the Empire State Trail.

So that's the Empire State Trail.

And as I've ridden many miles over many days, I realized a few things.

The trail itself is many things.

It's scenic, it's historic, and it's pretty lengthy.

And another thing I've learned is that there are a lot of really good people across this state working on solutions to the climate crisis from farmers, advocates, activists, grassroot organizations.

They're all working to make a difference.

And while the climate crisis may be bad, if we have these good people alongside us, I think we'll be okay.

I'm Pat Kelly and this is Rolling Through.

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