Here from @ligi 's tweet.
I have in the past worked for an NGO that bootstrapped a social enterprise that up-cycles textiles, be them industrial waste or collected for this specific end. An easy way to go about this would be for companies to contract slow-fashion companies to produce their merch. Recycling, in general, sounds great but it isn’t, even less so for textiles. The problem is most approachable at the source.
Customizing 1 piece of merch on the entire duration of devcon and tokenizing the logos as well as perhaps sizes and designs of the supporting layer (tshirt, skirt, hoodie, sleeveless shirt, etc) so that the resulting piece of clothing would be co-created, experience-driven and potentially unique is worth dogfooding, but is it possible?
The likely case is that the sponsors have their ambitions, frame of mind and are unlikely to give up on merch control easily. There’s a compromise that can be creatively reached; for example each piece of swag having one random logo slot that is allocated in line with DEVCON sponsor tier hierarchy; with the final product being the result of participants deliberately opting in to having a X company logo on their item. This would generate some interesting dynamics insofar as companies would likely entice attendants to host their logo. That sounds like… fun? The actual materialization of each unique item can be on-site, during the event, or not. There’s lots of ways to be creative. And I’m sure we could co-opt slow fashion designers for the physical structure and positioning of logo slots. I’m also sure that logo encapsulation designs would get more creative.
To recap, “the idea”. If sponsors are willing to give up merch control, (or devcon affords to be totalitarian about it) each participant would receive 1 substrate of choice NFT that is optionally composable only during the conference with other n sponsor logo nfts. The burning of the resulting NFT materializes the garment, at the conference, or after at a previously contracted, environmentally conscious facility for a predefined duration. We get 0 waste, a significant cost reduction and a participant-sponsor co-created NFT collection that tells a story. Maybe. Now the question is: Will you burn your swag NFT anon?