A marketplace to buy and sell unused textiles, keeping them out of landfills and turning pollution into profit.

You want to reduce pollutants; the textile industry is a good place to start. Fabric production not only creates a lot of pollution, but also wastes enormous amounts of water. And, according to some estimates, $120 billion a year of unused material is thrown into landfills, burned up or just laid to rest in warehouses. Plus, the waste problem happens everywhere from mills to retailers.

That’s where Queen of Raw comes in. Founder Stephanie Benedetto started the company to build an online marketplace that matches buyers and sellers of unused fabric. More recently, she took the platform’s blockchain and machine learning-based technology engine and built MateriaMX, a service for enterprise sellers aimed at helping them find waste in their supply chains in real-time. Then they can automatically send inventory to the Queen of Raw marketplace. Thus, instead of depositing the material in a landfill, they can resell it and turn the stuff into profits. It’s a particularly pressing matter for companies that have signed commitments to reduce their waste by 2030.

Queen of Raw, of course, isn’t the only impact start-up using state-of-the-art technology, such as blockchain and artificial intelligence, to form the backbone of their businesses. Blockchain technology, often described as a distributed digital ledger, creates time-stamped, tamper-proof records. Though most of the buzz about it has focused on cryptocurrency, its signature ability to build users’ trust in the security and veracity of documents on the blockchain also lends itself to many other uses.

When you slip into your favorite tee-shirt, you probably don’t think about where it came from and at what cost. You just enjoy the soft fabric and the fun pattern.

But that comfy shirt required a third of a pound of chemicals and 700 gallons of water to produce and another 700 gallons of water to wash over its lifetime. The fashion industry as a whole account for more than five percent of global carbon emissions, second only to oil and gas. And the fashion marketplace operates inefficiently; more than 87 percent of clothing produced ends up incinerated or in a landfill.

Benedetto was working as a corporate lawyer during the 2008 market meltdown. That financial catastrophe got her thinking about doing something more meaningful and going back to her roots. At the end of the 19^th century, her grandfather, an immigrant who settled on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, started repurposing unused fabrics, turning them into other garments. Benedetto decided to build a company that could accomplish something similar—repurpose material and turn it into something useful—but employ current technology to do so.

Her first move was in 2012, when she started Paper No. 9, a company that made a sustainable alternative to leather. Then she got the idea for Queen of Raw. The online platform would use blockchain and machine learning to find and track excess fabric— post-consumer waste, fabric on rolls, you name it—and then match it to factories, retailers, designers and other buyers looking for that material. She co-founded the business in 2014, selling the excess Paper No. 9 fabric on the platform.