Blue Cast: Karla Magruder on Building Fashion’s Circular Future
Traditionally, the fashion industry has been all about take, make, waste. Take resources, make a garment and then create waste—both during the production process and after the consumer discards the item. Rinse and repeat until closets are bursting and landfills are packed with castoffs.
For an alternative, fashion can look to the natural world for inspiration. Plants and animals have systems that inherently prevent waste. While it may not be as innate for manmade industries to do the same, creating more circular paths for garments can lessen waste and the overall footprint of the fashion industry. However, currently a mere 9 percent of human behavior is circular.
One of the individuals paving the way towards a more circular fashion industry is Karla Magruder, who has had a 35-year career in textiles. She worked at Textile Exchange, and founded Fabrikology International in 2013. Most recently, in 2019, she created Accelerating Circularity, an organization that brings together companies across the supply chain—from fiber makers to brands—to study and advance circularity. Our latest Blue Cast podcast episode brought together Karla and Lenzing’s Tricia Carey for a chat on how fashion could better close the loop.
“As people started to talk about circularity, it seemed like it was just going to be another one of these items that was sort of hijacked as the concept du jour,” said Karla. To combat greenwashing and focus on actual progress, she founded Accelerating Circularity. “I wanted to gather people who are really interested in actually taking action.”
Even though the name circularity references a flat geometric form, Karla explained that the shape should actually be closer to a 3D sphere due to all the elements that need to connect. In addition to building circular supply chains, traceability and transparency is needed to enable these systems to work. Moving circularity forward also requires a combination of technology, policy work and commitment from brands and manufacturers.
The brand piece is an important part of the puzzle. And companies need to be open to sharing what they need, such as what types of inputs they require for recycling. Often, brands can stall progress by being afraid to disclose what they consider intellectual property.
“Collaboration really means action,” Karla said. “It doesn’t mean sitting on the sidelines and watching what other people are doing.”
Karla noted that when approaching circularity, companies need to think of more than price. While at Textile Exchange, her work focused on recycled polyester commitments. Brands would say they couldn’t get recycled polyester that would fit their color quality standards. However, this was because they were seeking out cost-neutral solutions that were preventing them from finding existing options that would work better.
“We have to start looking at what does cost neutral really mean: cost neutral just to dollars and cents and pennies to what we’re doing today with virgin materials, or cost neutral when we’re looking at the true triple bottom line—a real balance between people, planet and profit,” she said.
Since moving from New York City to Milan about three years ago, Karla has noticed a difference in how her new home approaches recycling. In Europe, there is more governmental policy surrounding recycling. One piece of legislation from the European Parliament requires that by 2025, all textile waste must be collected separately. The second aspect that is different is consumer awareness and participation in recycling. Bins with numerous categories—including paper, plastic and glass—are everywhere.
In the next three to five years, Karla would like to see collection, sorting and processing work at scale to create inputs for recycled materials. “We need these feedstocks, so that these other segments of the supply chain work,” she said.
Listen to the episode here.