Your Clothes Contain Plastic, Meet Entrepreneurs Trying to Change That [Video]

When Chui-Lian Lee and Valentina Gomez embarked on their academic journeys as textile developing and marketing majors at the Fashion Institute of Technology, they were eager to learn more about the clothing industry. Some of the things they ended up learning shocked them.

“My family had a denim business while I was growing up, so initially when I went to college, I wanted to work in denim,” Gomez, 26, tells PEOPLE. “And when I got to college, I learned how horrible denim actually is for the environment and quickly decided that I didn’t want to do that.”

Through their studies, Lee, 35, and Gomez found out that denim is only part of problem — roughly 11 million tons of textile waste end up in landfills each year, and the chemicals and gases that emerge during decomposition pollute the earth.

“Every single class that we joined, we’d go through the impacts …