Polyester is in almost all of your clothing, and it’s almost impossible to recycle. Some innovators are looking beyond turning plastic bottles into fabric.

In a recent report, the UN Fashion Charter said there’s still a long way to go to meet its net-zero emissions goal, and signatories are dropping. It’s raised questions about impact and accountability.

The GROW pop-up exhibition of the Fashion for Good Museum is open in Hungary until 25 March. The interactive exhibition showcases clothes and accessories made from sustainable bio-materials such as banana fibre, orange and coconut shells, and is located at the Budapest Metropolitan University. [HUNGARIAN ARTICLE]

In this new episode of the podcast Smart Creation, Kathleen Rademan, Director of the Innovation Platform at Fashion for Good tells us how the platform works, how it is financed, its innovative projects and the particularity of their museum. 

What is sustainability? How is it linked to the fashion industry? And what are the essential components when we define sustainable fashion? [DUTCH ARTICLE]

Fashion companies to look at making business models more circular in a bid to reduce supply chain risks.

Can recycled and bio-based solutions accelerate the transformation in an industry that is circular when it comes to textile production? Fashion for Good helps investigating on how sustainable the industry can become in the short term.

How can we tell if the clothes in our wardrobes really are what they claim to be? Fashion for Good mentions the insights and issues of international fabrics’ certifications along the supply chains.

Fashion for Good launches the Home-Compostable Polybag Project, a pilot to test alternatives to conventional single-use polybags,

Materials like 100% biodegradable Fleather from Phool, which was part of Fashion For Good’s innovation programme in 2020, stand out as a unique category.

Fashion for Good was selected in three categories of the Excellence Category shortlists for the 2022 Awards organised by Just Style

Fashion for Good innovator Renewcell’s new factory is one of the first steps toward a system that turns old clothes into new high-quality clothes made entirely with recycled fabric, addressing the mountains of textile waste accumulating worldwide.

With pioneering ideas, Katrin Ley, winner Business category, wants to make the fashion industry more sustainable with her innovation platform and museum Fashion for Good and contribute to a better world. [DUTCH ARTICLE]

The Sorting for Circularity Europe Project highlights the significant opportunity for circularity, with only 2% of post-consumer textiles diverted to fibre-to-fibre recycling today.

As fibre-to-fibre textile recycling commitments increase across Europe, as well as the amount of textile waste collected, the infrastructure required to drive the move towards circular systems requires significant investment to scale.

Levi’s launched the next iteration of its “Buy Better, Wear Longer” campaign. The project is built on the brand’s long-term commitment to prolonging the lifespan of its products.

With an average growth between 15% and 20%, the circular fashion industry could reach 75 billion dollars in 2025. As a result, the EU funded the AllThing.BioPRO project to help consumers make more informed choices in bioeconomy.[ITALIAN ARTICLE]

For a long time, the fashion industry has been caught up by its excesses such as overproduction. It is with the aim of giving new life to fabrics that the start-up developed two innovations, which, when combined, allow clothes to be easily “unsewn” and thus facilitate fabric recovery. [FRENCH ARTICLE]

A Innovation Platform Director at Fashion for Good explains that the pandemic highlighted the challenges that the sector must face when the supply chain is blocked and that, to face this, it is necessary to “implement innovative solutions”. [SPANISH ARTICLE]

Chicago-based LanzaTech made headlines last year by working with Zara and Lululemon to make garments from captured steel mill emissions. Now Rubi Laboratories from San Francisco, recently raised US$4.5 million in a successful seed funding round to develop its method of producing cellulose from CO2.

Circular fashion company Circ has secured an investment of thirty million dollars, equivalent to thirty million euros. Several large corporations participated in the investment round, including the fashion group Inditex, according to a press release from Circ. [DUTCH ARTICLE]

Swimwear is becoming a lot more sustainable thanks to Econyl, nylon made mainly from old fishing nets. “I immediately thought it was such a good story.” [DUTCH ARTICLE]

Fashion leaders gathered in Copenhagen for the annual Global Fashion Summit. Circularity, carbon, community and pre-competitive collaboration, the four C’s of sustainability, dominated this year’s Global Fashion Summit in Copenhagen. The resounding message? Urgently needed progress is reliant on the industry working together to achieve it.

TrusTrace, a market-leading platform for supply chain transparency and product traceability within the fashion and retail industries, has joined forces with Fashion Revolution and Fashion for Good to accelerate sustainable transformation in the fashion industry with the help of a one-stop guide.

Mycelium-fabrics with muschroom, offer an alternative for leather, hoping to make big fashion brands such as Stella McCartney and Adidas more sustainable. The production takes place in a nursery in the Gelderse Hedel. [DUTCH ARTICLE]

Sustainability initiative Fashion for Good has announced the seven innovators to take part in this year’s Asia Innovation Programme.  Those selected – Picvisa, Gaiacel, An Herbals, Fermentech Labs, Sodhani Biotech, Vaayu and UKHI Hemp Foundation – are said to offer solutions which focus on raw materials, processing, and end-of-use.

The collective mycelium research pairs Vivobarefoot and Pangaia with Ecovative’s team of mycologists, engineers and designers, to develop a line of fungus-based, petroleum-free foams and hides for their products. It also sees the three join the Fashion for Good Cooperative.

At the heart of this growing revolution sits Fashion for Good (FFG), a global initiative that is catalysing and supporting innovators dedicated to reimagining the industry. Today it announced the eight change makers that will join its 2022 Global Innovation Programme.

“This ambitious project explores a new source of feed stocks for the fashion industry that, if scaled, will help drive both the agriculture and textile industry towards net-zero. We see great potential for these various agriculture waste streams that would otherwise have few secondary uses. By applying innovative technologies to develop natural fibers, we can diminish the pressure on existing natural fibers and shift away from unsustainable materials and sources,” says Katrin Ley, managing director, Fashion for Good.

Fashion for Good launched the Black Pigment Pilot project on Tuesday with partners Bestseller, Birla Cellulose, Kering and PVH Corp., in collaboration with Paradise Textiles, and innovators Graviky Labs, Living Ink and Nature Coatings. The project aims to validate and scale black pigments derived from waste feedstocks such as industrial carbon, algae and wood that could replace synthetic dyes and offer a more sustainable means of textile production with a lower carbon impact. [SUBSCRIPTION REQUIRED]

“The race to develop new materials and processes is gaining momentum thanks to rapidly maturing technology and more substantial and deeper partnerships between brands and innovators who were often “slow on the action front””, said Georgia Parker, Head of Innovation at Sustainable Project Fashion for Good accelerator. This case study of Business of Fashion examines three innovations in the production of raw materials that are gaining momentum and providing opportunities for the fashion industry to reinvent the destructive materials and practices it has long relied on.

Global accelerator Fashion for Good has announced a new consortium, the D(R)YE Factory of the Future project, backed by Kering and adidas, among others, aimed at reducing water use in textile production. The initiative is directed at accelerating the fashion industry’s shift to dry textile processing—methods that use little to no water, produce no wastewater and reduce overall energy use.

Fashion for Good has launched the D(R)YE Factory of the Future initiative in a bid to clean up one of the most polluting processes in the industry. It is in the pre-treatment and colouration phases of textile production that the highest emissions of the fashion value chain are generated. To combat this, the new global consortium project led will bring together innovations that can transform these stages and pave the way for a seismic shift in processing techniques from wet to dry.

Design is present on all levels of our society. With every design, it’s a matter for designers to stay one step ahead of us. They work now on the designs of tomorrow, seemingly requiring a crystal ball of some sort. But lacking that, an innovative mindset is crucial. Our Marketing & Communications Director, Anne-Ro Klevant Groen, discusses what design and innovation exactly mean for all the fashion industry stakeholders involved.

PVH and Bestseller are first in line to trial Ecovative’s mycelium “Forager” hides in a new cooperative revealed today. Alongside the brands, Amsterdam-based nonprofit Fashion for Good (which Ecovative has been working with for the past three years) is also a strategic partner as Ecovative refines production.

Fashion for Good is working with Levi’s Strauss & Co. and natural dye start-up Stony Creek Colors to pilot the use of plant-based indigo at scale in the denim’s industry supply chain. Stony Creek Colors will provide their IndiGold indigo dye to select denim mills used by the two companies to run performance trials, with the aim to have Levi garments dyed with IndiGold pre-reduced dye on the market by late 2022 or early 2023. [SUBSCRIPTION REQUIRED]

The Fashion for Good Asia Programme celebrated another successful year, sharing the highlights of 2021 at their Innovation Fest this week. Continuing to drive innovation across the region, Japanese fibre and textile manufacturer Teijin Frontier was officially welcomed as a partner, establishing a footing in East Asia where the programme is gaining momentum.

The writing is on the wall for polyester and its crude oil origins. Today, Amsterdam-based innovation firm Fashion for Good announced a new polyester-focused project, Full Circle Textiles Project – Polyester, borrowing from the findings in its Full Circle Textiles Project, which launched formally in September. The current project aims to validate and scale up promising technologies in polyester recycling. [SUBSCRIPTION REQUIRED]

Together with partners Adidas, Levi Strauss & Co, and PVH Corp, Fashion for Good is backing a new consortium project to understand both the pre-consumer and post-consumer textile waste streams in India, and to pilot sorting and mapping solutions. The Sorting for Circularity India Project aims to build an infrastructure towards greater circularity in the years to come.

It’s common practice for apparel brands to hop from factory to factory in search of cost savings. This needs to change, but this requires the necessary funding. The Apparel Impact Institute and Fashion for Good estimate that it will take a trillion dollars in global investment to decarbonize the industry. Their new report calls it an investment “opportunity,” but brands are not exactly climbing over each other to get involved.

The fashion industry cannot meet its COP26 climate commitments, nor can brands meet their individual goals to decarbonise, if they don’t address the major lack of funding needed to overhaul the supply chain, experts say. There’s a significant funding gap in fashion’s sustainability commitments, made clear in a new report estimating a $1 trillion deficit in reaching decarbonisation goals. We unpack where, why and how to fix it. [MEMBERSHIP REQUIRED]

Annually, we use about about 500 billion plastic bags to store, transport, and protect garments, footwear and accessories. Less than 15% of polybags in circulation are collected for recycling, according to Fashion for Good. However, if the startup Sway has its way, more thin film packaging like polybags, retail bags, and wrappers will be compostable and even carbon negative. The packaging company makes seaweed-based, home-compostable replacements for plastic packaging, which even come in bright, cheerful colours.

The global initiative Fashion For Good has formally announced its partnership with technical textile supplier Gore Fabrics, home to the GORE-TEX brand. The cross-industry collaboration demonstrates the newly affiliate partner’s commitment to achieving its environmental goals and driving systemic change within the fashion industry. [ACCOUNT REQUIRED]

Technical textile supplier Gore Fabrics, which owns the GORE-TEX brand, has officially joined the Fashion for Good initiative. The newly affiliate partner said that it looked forward to the cross-industry collaboration through this partnership, demonstrating that they want to accelerate their sustainability efforts. Gore Fabrics officially partnered with Fashion for Good in early 2020 and is already participating in the recently announced Renewable Carbon Textiles Project, together with other partners from Fashion for Good. [SUBSCRIPTION REQUIRED]

It is clear to everyone involved that the current state of the apparel industry has detrimental impacts on our environment. A handful of brands and tech or bio-startups have been focusing on better solutions, but collaboration was lacking within the industry. However, ‘bridge builder’ Fashion for Good aims to put all these heads together. Its current exposition “GROW: the future of fashion”, demonstrates this by connecting young Dutch design talent with textile innovators and displaying the results in their Museum. [DUTCH ARTICLE, SUBSCRIPTION REQUIRED].

Amsterdam-based fashion and textile innovation platform Fashion For Good’s funding initiative to aid sustainable manufacturing, the Good Fashion Fund (GFF) has signed its first deal with Pratibha Syntex Limited (PSL). The Indian textile and apparel manufacturer receives a $4.5 million long-term loan as part of the deal. Initiated in 2019, GFF provides long-term funding to the textile and apparel industry in Asia to achieve the Five Goods — Good Energy, Good Water, Good Materials, Good Lives, and Good Economy.

Pratibha Syntex Limited, an Indian manufacturer, has struck an agreement with the Good Fashion Fund, a fund established by Fashion for Good to promote sustainable manufacturing practices. Pratibha Syntex’s anticipated capital expenditures for updating machinery and expanding sustainable equipment in several divisions will be supported by the $4.5 million long-term loans. The $4.5 million investment will be used to replace gear in the spinning, processing, and garmenting divisions, as well as to purchase new equipment to expand their operations and facilities.

On World Rainforest Day, Fashion for Good celebrates the success of the Viscose Traceability Pilot Project, a consortium to trace sustainable viscose in clothing using the company’s blockchain tracing solution. TextileGenesis innovator. With around 30% viscose coming from threatened forests, the validation of TextileGenesis’ solution is an important step towards transparency in the value chain and ensuring that the fibers come from renewable sources.

Hope still exists. Concerted efforts to remedy the reliance on plastic fibers has already begun, with the most recent launch of innovation consortiums like The Renewable Carbon Textiles Project in June with Fashion for Good, funded by the Laudes Foundation. In collaboration with global players including PVH Corp, the group are committed to developing replacements for fossil fuel-based fibers. By experimenting with PHA polymers, which provide a bio-based, marine and soil compostable alternative to materials like polyester, the project is pioneering viable alternatives.

Intrinsic to this is building robust recycling infrastructure within the country, which is the target of the Circular Fashion Partnership – an initiative the GFA launched late last year alongside Reverse Resources and the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association (BGMEA).

The claim comes as the project today welcomes its latest cohort of signatory brands, manufacturers, recyclers and organisations, including Primark, Gymshark, Benetton, Evrnu, Natural Fiber Welding and Fashion for Good.

Amsterdam-based Fashion for Good is launching the Renewable Carbon Textiles Project, bringing together a powerful consortium to accelerate the development of polyhydroxyalkanoates or PHA polymer fibres – a promising biosynthetic alternative to fossil based fibres with the potential to reduce carbon emissions in the fashion supply chain.

The conglomerate has also partnered with the Amsterdam-based incubator Fashion for Good to help identify and grow start-ups working at the intersection of fashion and sustainability. Daveu points to Balenciaga’s October 2020 catwalk collection, comprised of 90 per cent recycled, upcycled or certified-sustainable materials, as an example of the changes brought about by these investments.

If you have ever wondered what biomaterials are, a trip to plan as soon as possible in this post-pandemic summer is in Amsterdam, where the Fashion for Good Museum has inaugurated a new exhibition dedicated to sustainable innovation in the field of materials, which sees protagonists fabrics from fruit peel , “skin” grown thanks to special fungi, spider silk, dyes produced by bacteria and algae.

The Fashion for Good initiative is bringing together industry leaders – including Adidas, Bestseller, Zalando and Zara owners Inditex – in a new initiative aimed at increasing the recycling of waste textiles.

The Sorting for Circularity Project will use innovative near infrared (NIR) technology to analyse textile waste more accurately, while also mapping the capabilities of textile recyclers.

To highlight the positive impact reusable packaging could generate, Fashion for Good, in partnership with Utrecht University and the Sustainable Packaging Coalition, have collaboratively authored a white paper, “The Rise of Reusable Packaging: Understanding the Impact and Mapping a Path to Scale”, presenting an overview of reusable packaging in the fashion industry and providing the industry with key considerations for wide scale adoption.

Katrin Ley, managing director of Fashion for Good, on fashion and textile innovations in South Asia and why the Indian region matters

It has been a little over a year since Fashion for Good, the Amsterdam based platform for fashion and textile innovation, launched its South Asia Innovation Programme. Yesterday, April 13, the organisation announced its third batch of graduates from the region—a cohort of 10 innovators including three from India.

Fashion for Good, the global platform for innovation, has selected ten new innovators to participate in the third batch of its South Asia Innovation Programme. The batch includes innovators from 8 countries adding Singapore and Indonesia to the roster. 3 out of 10 innovators are from India, who are making a global footprint with their sustainable approach.

The Dutch Fashion for Good Museum developed an in-house exhibition called GROW which shows biomaterials which might just be the future of fashion materials.

With the GROW exhibition, visitors are shown conventional biomaterials, like ecological (lab-grown) cotton, flax and hemp, but also innovative materials like fabric made of citrus peels, mushroom leather, spider silkand dye made with bacteria and algae.

Levi Strauss & Co. has long been an innovator in sustainable design and production practices. Many of the programs we talk about most often – Water<Less®, Screened Chemistry, cottonized hemp – came from within. It’s a record of scaling internal innovations that we’re quite proud of.

But we also know that we can’t work alone if we’re going to do our part to deliver solutions on an industry-wide scale or reach the ambitious goals we’ve set for ourselves. There are networks we need to tap into, innovations we can benefit from, and solutions we can help to scale. And that is precisely why we have joined Fashion for Good.

Ecovative wants to become the first to offer a plant-based leather alternative that’s ready to scale, and could up the ante in fashion’s race for leather replacements that are both more sustainable and higher quality, with a more attractive look and feel, than plastic-based vegan materials.

“Oftentimes with these different materials, you get a proof of concept that comes out and it takes time for these materials to then scale,” says Georgia Parker, innovation manager at Fashion for Good.

Wasting no time, Fashion for Good has gotten the 14 start-ups recently selected for its accelerator program get started.

The latest roster was selected from among 22 entrepreneurial companies during Fashion for Good’s virtual selection day. The chosen start-ups are offering solutions for raw materials, processing, end-of-use, digital acceleration, plastics and impact tracking, among other topics. As participants, they are receiving mentoring, guidance and industry expertise to help scale up their technological businesses.

Katrin Ley: For many years, I worked in the apparel and footwear industry, both on the strategy consulting side and the corporate side. And for the last couple of years, I was in the world of impact investing, investing in early-stage startups with circular ambitions.

The path that led me to Fashion for Good wasn’t that clear cut, and the career choices I made didn’t seem to connect for a while. I became more and more aware of the problems and challenges that face the fashion industry — the need for change as well as the potential solutions and innovations that exist.

“Online sales at retailers may have increased enormously, but many entrepreneurs say it is nowhere near what they would sell in their stores”, says Anne-Ro Klevant Groen, marketing and communication manager at Fashion for Good, a organization that focuses on innovation in the fashion industry. “There is still a large stock.”

The polybag, the clear plastic film used to store and transport clothes before reaching store, is one of fashion’s most ubiquitous packaging products: approximately 180 billion are produced each year and less than 15 per cent of those in circulation are collected for recycling. At the end of 2019, Fashion for Good, an Amsterdam sustainable fashion accelerator launched a circular polybag pilot programme with support from Adidas, Kering and PVH among others that tested Spanish technical recycling company Cadel Deinking’s polybags, which de-inks and removes adhesives from consumer plastic waste, allowing it to be recycled into new polybags for a circular alternative.

In 2019, Zalando partnered with platform for sustainable innovation Fashion for Good on its “Organic Cotton Traceability Pilot”, which combines on-product authentication markers and blockchain technology to track organic cotton from farm to consumer. In December 2020, the German etailer started supporting Fashion for Good’s newest project, the Viscose Traceability Project, which uses blockchain technology to trace viscose. It also supports the Open Apparel Registry (an open-source map and database of global apparel facilities) to map garment facilities worldwide and allocate a unique ID to each facility.

For instance, Local Projects designed tech-enabled bracelets for Amsterdam-based Fashion for Good, a museum, store and think tank to educate on and combat climate change. The bracelets were made from plastic dredged from the city’s canals, and visitors could use them to make pledges about behavioural changes throughout the museum.

Sourcing sustainable cotton—whether it’s regeneratively grown, recycled or organic—has become a common goal for fashion companies looking to prove an eco-minded ethos. Fashion for Good, a sustainability-focused organization whose partners include Adidas, Target and Chanel, is looking to investigate a new way to address some of the environmental issues associated with growing cotton, namely water and pesticide usage.

Fashion for Good is today launching a two-year pilot project that will experiment with more efficient technologies for growing cotton. The organization works together with fashion conglomerates Kering and PVH Corp, as well as textile producer Arvind Limited, it reports in a press release.

Even before the COVID-19 crisis, the fashion industry had begun to make changes, many of which have been accelerated by the crisis. Innovation, particularly in challenging times, has proven its relevance time and again to reinvigorate business as usual to achieve organisational objectives, and brands, manufacturers and retailers that are looking to innovation at this time, are better prepared to emerge stronger from the crisis.

Anne-Ro Klevant Groen, who works at Fashion for Good, an international innovation platform that strives for “circular fashion”:
“Many retailers now have a surplus of stock due to COVID-19, many stores are closed and clothing cannot be sold. However, online sales have skyrocketed at many retailers, but in general sales have gone down and unsold or not shipped clothing is a problem for many clothing brands. The solutions for this are, for example: selling in a later season, adjusting clothes and selling, reselling, renting out, recycling or ‘downcycling’.

Fashion for Good, which launched an industry coalition last September to advance and promote textile recycling, said that can impair the economics of recycling — particularly when clothes contain chemicals that were once commonplace in fashion, but are now banned out of concern for health or environmental impacts — and managing director Katrin Ley says that’s another reason to eliminate the use of hazardous chemicals in new clothing.

In the ‘New Cotton Project’, a consortium of brands, manufacturers, suppliers, innovators and research institutes will have to prove that circular, sustainable fashion “is not only an ambition, but can also be realized today”. The twelve participating fashion companies and brands include Adidas and the H&M Group, the Finnish biotechnology group Infinited Fiber Company, Aalto University, Fashion for Good, Frankenhuis, Inovafil, Kipas Textiles, REvolve Waste, Rise, Tekstina and Xamk.

Bio-materials, however, remain an ill-defined category, with words such as bio-fabricated, bio-synthetic or bio-based used in relation to innovations in this space. Fashion for Good, a global platform for sustainable fashion innovations, teamed up with Biofabricate, a platform for bio-material innovators and brands, to conduct interviews of more than 30 global material innovators and consumer brands, and has compiled the learnings to help the fashion industry understand these various terms and innovations.

Dutch sustainability initiative Fashion for Good (FFG) has reported that its South Asia Innovation Programme has enjoyed a fruitful first year, with nine of its promising start-ups becoming graduates of the scheme.

Dutch sustainability initiative Fashion for Good has kick-started a Viscose Traceability Project which assesses blockchain technology’s performance in tracing the cellulosic fibre throughout the textile supply chain.

When Fashion for Good first launched four years ago, it started with a handful of brands and retailers as its corporate partners. Now, it counts manufacturers among its collaborators too. “We realised how important it was to get those upstream suppliers at the same table,” said Brittany Burns, director of strategy and development at Fashion for Good. “We felt like it was really important to create these opportunities for a cross-pollination of ideas, but [also] co-development across the industry.”

Industry giants Adidas and H&M are partners on this project and will work together to facilitate “the scale and volume needed to properly test this (technology),” said Infinited Fiber’s CEO Petri Alava during a recent video call. Representing Fashion for Good, who are facilitating stakeholder collaboration during the project, was Kathleen Rademan: “What we (at Fashion for Good) have noticed is, in order to get something like chemical recycling off the ground, more than one brand is needed.”

In  Robert Zemeckis’ film Back to the Future , the main characters navigate between the past and the future in a long process of discovery and transformation. Throughout these trips, Marty (one of the protagonists) has as main mission to repair the damage created by him in history. Although fiction and reality intersect more than we think, we still do not have the ability to travel through time or repair the damage that we have been creating throughout history. We know today that the great environmental or, in general, society challenges result from human intervention (global warming, social inequality, etc.). We also know that reversing these damages is particularly difficult because, unlike the characters in the film, we cannot change the past. We can, however, change the future and the consequences of our actions.