Kickstart: The family behind recycled PET fleece clothing gives its fortune to the Earth

Earlier this week, the founder of the outdoor clothing and gear company Patagonia announced that he and his family had donated all $3 billion worth of shares in the company to a nonprofit that will use the money to help fight climate change.

The move by Yvon Chouinard matches his past commitments — by both himself and his company — toward making a more sustainable impact on the world.

Consider Patagonia's response when it found out that one of the biggest sources of microplastics in the world's oceans is clothing, including its own products.

Patagonia was part of the team that introduced fleece clothing made from recycled PET bottles in 1993. When researchers first reported finding microplastics in the water, fleece was tagged as the main culprit in this microfiber pollution, although later research has shown that all clothing can release fibers.

Patagonia began investing in research to determine what causes fiber shedding and how to stop it. It now instructs customers on how to wash better.

"There is no material that does not come with environmental and social costs — only trade-offs," Patagonia noted in a 2018 update to its research on microfibers. "Our goal is always to find ways to do less harm, while giving you tools to make it easier to keep your stuff in use longer."

Plastics will be part of a new farm in Virginia that will supply 20 million pounds of strawberries, tomatoes and leafy greens year-round to the East Coast.

Plenty Unlimited Inc., a California-based vertical agriculture startup, announced Sept. 14 that it has secured 120 acres near Richmond to build the "largest, most advanced indoor vertical farm campus in the world."

Vertical farms are indoor greenhouses that use long, narrow plastic containers, specialized lighting and watering systems and robots. The Richmond site's first farm will grow Driscoll-brand strawberries and will be designed to produce more than 4 million pounds of the fruit each year.

Expect the first crop in the winter of 2023-24.

The first two Charles F. Sears Dri Air Industries Endowed Scholarship Fund recipients at the University of Massachusetts-Lowell have been named.

Zubin Pinkham completed his master's degree in plastics engineering earlier this year. Prior to graduate school, he served five years in the U.S. Army and earned a bachelor's degree in mechnical engineering from UMass-Lowell.

Ferry Irawan is currently an undergraduate student expecting to complete his degree in 2023.

"As someone who grew up in a less privileged community and being raised by a single mother who never finished middle school, attending college was only a pipe dream for me," Irawan wrote. "Scholarship opportunities such as this one opened doors for me to achieve the impossible and I am forever grateful for it."

Dri-Air Industries founder Sears died in 2018. The scholarships in his name are among 500 endowed scholarships at UMass-Lowell.