News & press

Fashion for Good Selects Twelve Innovators for 2023 Innovation Programme

Published on 21/03/2023
Fashion for Good welcomes twelve new start-ups to its Global Platform. The selected Innovators will participate in a nine-month innovation programme with bespoke support to validate their technologies in preparation for implementation across the fashion value chain.‎
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    2023
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    How Can Companies Recycle Clothes Back Into Clothes?

    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.

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    The Fashion Charter is on track to miss its key goal. What now?

    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.

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    Dress made of orange peel at the GROW exhibition in Budapest

    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]

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    Smart Creation, the podcast. Episode 54

    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. 

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    'Truly sustainable?' Vogue's guide to sustainable fashion

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

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      Investments
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    Model poses with a piece made with recycled materials at a fashion show. REUTERS/Ann Wang

    Green is the new black as fashion sector fast-forwards on sustainability trend

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

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    Can textile innovation lead the fashion industry towards a sustainable future?

    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.

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      Transparency & Traceability
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    Why fabric fraud is so easy to hide

    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.

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      Manufacturing & Retail
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    Fashion for Good launches the home-compostable polybag project

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

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      Raw Materials
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    The vegan leather made from India’s waste flowers

    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.

    2022
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    Award Shortlists 2022

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

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    Will We Ever Be Able to Recycle Our Clothes Like an Aluminum Can?

    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.

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    The winners of Bazaar's Women of the Year Awards have been nominated

    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]

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    Recycling of textile waste in Europe could generate €74m per year, report

    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.

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      Investments
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    Increased investment key to accelerating Europe’s textile recycling

    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.

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    Travel Through 50 Years of a Pair of Levi 501’s in Latest Buy Better, Wear Longer Initiative

    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.

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      Raw Materials
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    BioMaterials: resource of sustainable fashion

    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]

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      Manufacturing & Retail
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    With its soluble sewing thread, Resortecs facilitates the management of unsold garments

    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]

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    Study Explores India’s Potential to Lead Circular Textile Sorting

    India has the potential to secure a role as the leading circular textile sourcing region, according to a new first-of-its-kind study that claims to be the most comprehensive analysis of the Indian textile waste landscape.

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    Georgia Parker: "The Elephant in the Room Continues to be Overproduction"

    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]

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    Meet the Innovators Turning CO2 into Textiles

    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.

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    Circular Startup Circ Raises Thirty Million Dollars from Inditex

    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]

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    The Latest Swimwear Takes Back to the 90s, Even the Thong Is Making A Comeback. But Then Made of Ocean Plastic

    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]

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    Key takeaways from the Global Fashion Summit: More diversity, more collaboration

    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.

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      Transparency & Traceability
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    Fashion Brands, Ready To Accelerate Your Sustainable Transformation with Digital Traceability?

    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.

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      Raw Materials
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    Bags and Shoes Made From Mushrooms: The Future?

    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]

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    Fashion for Good Welcomes Asian Innovators

    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.

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      Raw Materials
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    Pangaia, Vivobarefoot, Ecovative to Research Mycelium in Fashion

    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.

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    Are These the New Heroes of Fashion?

    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.

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    Project to Transform Agricultural Waste into Green Fibers for Fashion Sector

    “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.

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    Turning Waste into Black Pigments

    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]

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      Raw Materials
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    Fashion's Race for New Materials

    “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.

     

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    How a Kering and adidas-Led Consortium Aims to Dry Out Fashion’s Water Problem

    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.

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      Processing
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    Is this the Future of Fashion?

    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.

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      Processing
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    Fashion Players Team Up to Slash Textiles' Water and Carbon Footprint

    A new sustainability initiative for the fashion sector is aiming to bring together eight different companies working on innovative solutions to reduce the environmental impact of materials processing, one of the most resource-intensive stages of the fashion supply chain. Plasma and laser treatments, spray dyeing, foam dyeing and supercritical CO2 are all set to be tested in Fashion for Good’s D(R)YE Factory of the Future Project.
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    From Deodorant to Digital Fashion: Design and Innovation Go Hand in Hand

    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.

    2021
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    PVH, Bestseller Get ‘Priority Access’ to Ecovative’s Mycelium ‘Forager Hides’

    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.

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    Levi's in Pilot to Use Plant-Based Indigo

    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]

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    Fashion for Good Asia Builds Momentum

    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.

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    Fashion for Good’s Latest Project Spotlights Polyester Recycling

    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]

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    Fashion for Good Turns to Polyester

    Amsterdam-based Fashion for Good is launching the Full Circle Textiles Project – Polyester, with the aim of validating and securing funding for the disruptive technologies of CuRe Technology, Garbo, gr3n and PerPETual. The project brings together a consortium of stakeholders, aiming to validate and scale up promising technologies in polyester chemical recycling and encouraging financing and offtake commitments from the fashion industry.
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    Launch of Sorting For Circularity India

    India is a critical hub, not only for textile production and consumption, but also as a global post-consumer textile waste destination. It is for this reason that Fashion for Good launched the Sorting for Circularity India Projectm a collaboration which aims to drive forward the creativity and ingenuity needed to unlock the potential of circular materials within the industry. By bringing together industry players adidas, Levi Strauss, PVH Corp., Arvind, Birla Cellulose and Welspun India, the project aims to build an infrastructure towards greater circularity in the years to come.
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    Project to Build a New Textile Waste Value Chain in India

    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.

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      Investments
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    The Fashion Industry Could Reduce Emissions—if It Wanted To

    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.

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    Fashion's Climate Goals Have a Funding Problem

    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]

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      Manufacturing & Retail
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    Seaweed-Based Sway Against Single-Use Plastic Packaging

    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.

     

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    GORE-TEX as Official Partner of Fashion for Good

    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]

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    Gore Fabrics Joins Up with Fashion for Good

    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]

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      Raw Materials
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    Sustainable Fashion: Mycelium Leather, A Wood Pulp Dress, and Banana Fibres

    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].

     

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      Investments
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    Sustainability Scanner: Making Fashion Good Again

    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.

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    Good Fashion Fund To Assist Pratibha Syntex To Go Sustainable

    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.

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      Transparency & Traceability
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    Fashion for Good Celebrates The Success Of The Viscose Traceability Pilot Project

    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.

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    From Textile Waste To Sound Insulation – The Acoustic Felt Made From Recycled Polyester

    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.

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    GFA Figures Highlight Bangladesh Recycling Potential

    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.

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      Raw Materials
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    Consortium Plans PHA Fibres For Fashion

    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.

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    Sustainable Materials Are A Vision Of Fashion’s Future

    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.

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      Raw Materials
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    Sustainable Fashion: Fashion for Good And The Biomaterials Project

    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.

     

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    Brands Back Bid To Boost Textile Recycling Premium Article

    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.

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      Manufacturing & Retail
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    The Path To Scaling Reusable Packaging In E-commerce

    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.

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    Innovating Sustainably in South Asia with Fashion for Good

    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.

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    Fashion for Good South Asia Announces 3rd Batch of Innovators

    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.

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      Raw Materials
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    The Future of Fashion Materials

    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.

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    Levi Strauss & Co. Joins Fashion for Good

    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.

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    The Race for Fashion’s Leather Alternatives Heats Up

    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.

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    Fashion for Good Chooses New Innovators

    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.

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      Manufacturing & Retail
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    Building the Business Case for Circular Business Models Part 2: Rental

    Both one-off rentals and rental subscriptions can be profitable circular business models in fashion, based on the 2019 analysis by Accenture and Fashion for Good, ‘The Future of Circular Fashion’. The economic analyses presented in the report are encouraging but we must note that the assessment was done at garment level, and does not fully take into account investments needed to operate and build these models to scale.

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    Katrin Ley of Fashion for Good Tells Us How They are Making All Fashion Good

    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.

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    Mountains Of Unsaleable Clothing Due to Lockdown Show That the Fashion Industry Can Be Much More Sustainable

    “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.”

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      Manufacturing & Retail
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    The Single-Use Plastic Overhaul Is Coming For Fashion

    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.

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      Transparency & Traceability
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    The Search for Fashion Supply Chain Transparency

    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.

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    How to Make Technology a Tool for Connection

    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.

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      Raw Materials
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    Cotton Grown in ‘Resource-Efficient’ Pilot Will Make Calvin Klein Fashion

    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.

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    Consortium Around Fashion for Good Starts Pilot Project for More Efficient Cotton Construction

    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.

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    The Impact of COVID-19 on Sustainable Fashion Innovation

    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.

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    Will Clothing In The Shops - After The Lockdown - Be Out Of Fashion?

    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’.

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    The Hidden Obstacle to Circular Fashion: Chemicals

    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.

    2020
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    Best of 2020: Sustainable reads

    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.

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      Raw Materials
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    Bio doesn't always mean better, need to validate sustainability claims

    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.

    • Feature

    Fashion for Good celebrates success in South Asia

    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.

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      Raw Materials
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      Transparency & Traceability
    • Feature

    Blockchain’s potential tested in new viscose project

    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.

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      Investments
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    Why big brands are investing in sustainability start-ups

    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.”

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      End of Use
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    H&M and adidas join industry consortium partners delivering a blueprint for circular fashion

    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.”

    • Feature

    Back to the future: the role of technology in solving major challenges

    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.