Walk through the Tiffany lamps and ornate wood paneling of the Carnegie Mansion’s Great Hall, turn left into the entrance of a small exhibition on textile reuse, and you will be greeted with an alarming fact: “The textile and apparel industries are some of the most polluting in the world, second only to oil.”

Needless to say, with “Scraps: Fashion, Textiles and Creative Reuse,” the Cooper Hewitt Museum is not handling this issue with kid gloves. The show opens the mind to less wasteful possibilities by focusing on three very different women who are likely to recalibrate your standards for “sustainability” and “reuse.”

Take Christina Kim of the apparel and home brand Dosa, for example, who purchased jamdani saris in India, cut and sewed them into one collection, had her scraps pieced into panels, created a second collection, then overdyed the panel scraps to use for a third collection. Across the globe, Luisa Cevese repurposes Lurex and other remnants, embedding them into polyurethane to make playful accessories and bags. Textile designer Reiko Sudo, on the other hand, is finding new uses for kibiso, a silk waste once prized for its water and UV resistant qualities that industrialization has deemed cost-ineffective to use.

Throughout the richly-appointed rooms, supply-chain descriptions are interspersed with diaphanous textiles and dangling handbags. But the work risks being overshadowed by the exhibition’s clear agenda—beside the introductory statement, there are framed 18th and 19th century darning samplers from the Netherlands to “remind us of the respect and care once universally given to textiles.” The ingenuity of the three featured designers is also evident, and genuinely inspiring. Designers can take this crucial inspiration into their heart and studios!

“Scraps: Fashion, Textiles and Creative Reuse” is on view at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum through April 23.