Jaden Smith is not your average superstar celebrity offspring. He’s got a lot of his own shit going on. Having released his debut album, Syre, a couple of months back on his own label MSFTSMusic via Roc Nation, he’s now starring in coming-of-age movie Skate Kitchen and is gearing up to release a sustainable collection in cooperation with G-Star RAW. Like that wasn’t quite enough, the indigo child recently founded the eco-friendly water company JUST WATER with his pops, Will.
Such a skilled multitasker is Jaden that we could easily go on listing his accolades for the rest of this feature, but there are more pressing matters to discuss here. You see, after the G-Star RAW talk he gave at Berlin’s Bread&&Butter by Zalando on how the youth are leading the charge in sustainability, we caught up with the 20-year-old. Sensing he’d probably have some good advice about how we can stop killing our planet, we asked him to fill us in.
“First of all we have to talk about global warming and the fact that the four hottest years on record ever were the past four years,” Jaden tells us. “That’s crazy. There are a lot of other issues, but the first one that will kill us all will be the heat.” According to NASA, the rate of Antarctic ice melting has tripled in the last decade and the global sea level has risen about eight inches in the last century. Probably about time we took action instead of just talking about it, right? That’s where Jaden comes in. Here are his five practical tips on how to save the world…
1. Start by going meat-free one day a week…
“This big craze about going vegan or becoming a vegetarian is too much of a commitment for some people. But if everybody did it for just one day, it would make such a big difference to the planet as agriculture is a huge pollutant. We could feed more of the world if everybody was eating plants.”
2. Use your waste to create…
“We have so much waste that we need to use it as a matter to create — create clothes out of it, create buildings out of it, and create solar panels out of it. We should make everything that we can in our lives out of trash, because we produce so much of it.”
3. Go electric…
“25% of CO2 emission comes from inefficient buildings. So it starts from going into buildings and retrofitting them to make them more efficient. I feel like electrically powered vehicles are another one of the steps, partnered with renewable energy and sustainable batteries. So much pollution comes from gathering energy.”
4. Make sustainable clothing choices…
“I wanted to partner with G-Star because of the way they are jumping into the innovations of sustainability like nothing I have ever seen in this industry.”
5. Petition to put up a renewable energy grid…
“So much pollution comes from gathering energy, so I would definitely say that setting up a renewable energy grid would make a difference. The amount of sunlight that hits the earth in one hour could power the world for a whole year. I feel like using what we have to help us instead of pulling things out of the ground and burning it would really help.”
The G-STAR RAW x Jaden Smith collection is coming soon to breadandbutter.com
