Collaboration Needed to Fuel Fashion’s Circular Makeover

Collaboration Needed to Fuel Fashion’s Circular Makeover

COVID-19 offers the chance for the fashion industry to reset toward a more circular production model, but scaling up recycling efforts is going to require collaboration.

A webinar moderated by Accelerating Circularity brought together speakers from Lenzing, Officina +39 and Meidea to discuss their companies’ solutions for sustainability. These three firms also collaborated on The Circle Book, a lookbook of circular, traceable fashion concepts bringing together their respective expertise in fiber production, dyeing and chemicals, and design.

The process for The Circle Book began before the pandemic as a call to action for different players in the supply chain to “act together.” But with the health crisis, the project became more digital and in demand. “We have to create to the principle of circular design,” said Lucia Rosin, founder of Meidea. “And we have to investigate in all the materials and the things we are using to be able to see if this can be in the circle. This is a huge opportunity also to refresh and to rethink the way we design.”

In the United States, 16.9 million tons of textile waste is collected each year, with 11.2 million tons destined for landfills and 3.2 million tons incinerated. Less than 1 percent of textile waste is recycled into new materials.

“Fashion is still currently deeply rooted in a linear approach—it’s make, use and dispose,” said Andrea Venier, CEO of Officina +39. “I’m not a designer, but…I think that the right approach within creativity and circularity should be turned into a simple question, that is: What if you could redesign everything using sustainable, resilient, circular materials? And the rule should be imagination must have no limits.”

At the raw material level, Lenzing entered the circular economy with TENCEL™ Lyocell with REFIBRA™ technology in 2017. At launch, REFIBRA™ technology used just 20 percent post-industrial recycled material, but since then it has scaled to 30 percent upcycling cotton from post-industrial and post-consumer waste , with plans to reach 50 percent post-consumer waste by 2024.

One of the challenges around scaling up circular materials is cost. “For many of the retailers and brands that I’ve worked with, they’ll say ‘Well, I only want to do something if it’s cost neutral.’ And we have to think better than that, because we actually also have to look at how we’re defining value and where we’re looking at cost…It might not be the raw material inputs, but where is the total cost.  It shouldn’t be the burden of one particular sector of the supply chain to take on all of that cost,” said Tricia Carey, director global business development at Lenzing.

Another hurdle is education, particularly around the differences between mechanical and chemical recycling processes, and the fact that recycled materials are not inferior to ones with virgin inputs. Carey also pointed out the need for commitment throughout the entire “supply network,” particularly from the brands and retailers.

The end consumer can be influential in pushing companies to adopt circularity, but in the end, Venier sees it as the role of players including governments and brands to create a system for sustainability.

“The industry has talked for a long time about collaboration, but we’re in a place today where if we don’t collaborate, we’re going to fail,” said moderator Karla Magruder, founder and president of Accelerating Circularity.