LONDON — The current state of the environment is changing faster than a teenager chasing trends — and so is the terminology surrounding it. 

With new sustainability regulations and material innovations popping up every other day, designer and lexicographer Hana Towobola saw a need to bring the industry’s complex vocabulary into one place.

Her new book, “Sustainable Fashion Vocabulary,” launched this week at the British Library, where educators and industry leaders learned of Towobola’s mission to help reverse the damage that has been done and educate people so it doesn’t happen again.

Towobola first started research for the book in 2020, having previously studied chemistry and fashion design before moving to practical climate science at Harvard University.

“I experienced the beauty of creation, all the shows and the brutality of the costs,” said Towobola. 

She came up with a system called PULI, which was intended to help organize sustainability information and evaluate its impact in simpler terms.

P is for planetary boundaries, which refer to climate; U stands for U.N. SDGs, or United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, which deal with people; L is law for regulations, and I stands for the industry of fashion for materials.

Towobola claimed that there is so much noise around sustainability that the most important information is drowned out. She decoded her findings through research papers, data analysis and conversations with industry experts.

The encyclopedia explains over 1,000 terms and aims to move beyond policy and terminology to highlight emerging materials and production ideas, from seaweed-derived fibers to textiles made from agricultural or food waste like coffee-ground leather. 

Each terminology page has a section titled “Honest Tension,” offering a space for the audience to generate ideas and teach new systems of thinking. 

Towobola used a University of the Arts London postgraduate to test how this book can be integrated into a curriculum. Using the term “AI Slop,” the student saw how poor AI images weren’t a technological failure, but an economic one.

Julia Redman, a fashion business lecturer at the London College of Fashion, said: “It’s a brilliant resource for me in teaching. I see this as being a bit of an invaluable resource.”

Towobola hopes the encyclopedia’s accessible approach would help create a shared understanding of more eco-friendly techniques. 

“If everyone in sustainability had foundational knowledge of these particular terms, we would actually make a lot of progress in the fashion industry,” said Towobola.