SJ Sustainability Report 2025

SOURCING

HOW NEW MATERIALS, RECYCLING AND ORGANIC FARMING FACTOR INTO SOORTY’S DENIM DEVELOPMENTS

AAS THE TEXTILE INDUSTRY continues to face intensifying pressures—like regulatory shifts, consumer expectations and the urgent need for decarbonization— Pakistani vertical denim manufacturer Soorty is scaling its sustainability efforts.

Here, Eda Dikmen, senior marketing and communications manager at Soorty, discusses how the company is integrating advanced technologies—like its Collagen Denim and Second Life® recycled cotton initiatives— to create more sustainable, transparent production processes while reducing waste and environmental impact.

SOURCING JOURNAL: Soorty recently unveiled its latest concept, Collagen Denim. Could you explain the technology and sustainability properties behind this fabric?

Eda Dikmen: Collagen Denim merges advanced biotechnology, wellness science and denim craftsmanship to create a fabric that enhances comfort and self-care. It is powered by UMORFIL® Bionic Fiber, an innovative bio-based technology that infuses collagen peptides derived from fish scale waste—an abundant byproduct of the seafood industry—into the fiber structure. Known for their moisturizing and soothing properties, these peptides enhance the product’s ability to support skin hydration, making it particularly beneficial for individuals with sensitive skin.

Beyond its functional benefits, Collagen Denim offers exceptional softness, a luxurious hand feel and superior shape retention, ensuring a consistently perfect fit. These attributes make it an ideal choice not only for mainstream fashion, but also for adaptive clothing designs tailored to individuals with specific skincare needs.

Soorty also offers Second Life®, a brand of recycled cotton products. How does this initiative revolutionize textile production?

E.D.: Second Life® is our recycled cotton brand, pioneering denim-todenim recycling by transforming worn-out garments, production defects and textile waste into new, traceable and durable denim. It is a fully integrated, in-house recycling system, making post-consumer waste (PCW) and post-industrial waste (PIW) a resource rather than an environmental burden.

Second Life® enables us to capture, sort and repurpose global textile waste while maintaining the durable fibers required for new and high-performing denim production. Unlike traditional recycling—which often weakens fiber integrity—our sorting and shredding technology and decades of experience in weaving durable denim fabrics help us maintain yarn strength, allowing for high-quality recycled fabrics.

On the topic of cotton, Soorty launched the Soorty Organic Cotton Initiative (SOCI) in 2021. What impact has this program had since its launch?

E.D.: The SOCI is a transformative program reshaping Pakistan’s organic cotton landscape that brings regenerative practices, farmer empowerment and full supply chain traceability under one umbrella.

“WITH STRICTER GLOBAL REGULATIONS AND GROWING CONSUMER EXPECTATIONS FOR ACCOUNTABILITY, BRANDS WILL NO LONGER BE ABLE TO RELY ON BROAD CLAIMS ON SUSTAINABILITY—THEY’LL NEED DATA-DRIVEN PROOF OF IMPACT.”

EDA DIKMEN senior marketing and communications manager, Soorty

Since its launch, the SOCI has engaged over 1,000 farmers across 2,025 hectares, increasing organic cotton availability while maintaining certification standards. It has also equipped farmers with the knowledge and tools of organic farming while creating socioeconomic benefits such as fair wages, financial inclusion, vocational training and infrastructure development, with a special emphasis on empowering women.

To further drive innovation in responsible cotton sourcing, we launched the Soorty Responsible Cotton Research Hub last year, piloting sustainable farming techniques using advanced technologies. Additionally, we recently established the Soorty Seed Purity Laboratory, ensuring non-genetically modified organism (GMO), contaminant-free cotton seeds that enhance traceability.

Our next step includes bale tracking, reinforcing transparency and accountability across the supply chain, which will be actively operational in December 2025.

What is your top sustainability prediction for the denim industry in 2025?

E.D.: With stricter global regulations and growing consumer expectations for accountability, brands will no longer be able to rely on broad claims on sustainability—they’ll need data-driven proof of impact. By 2025, we anticipate significant shifts in the denim industry driven by social responsibility, technological innovation and material advancements. That said, I believe radical transparency will become the industry’s defining sustainability challenge and opportunity. ■

EDIT OR IAL

Peter Sadera Editor in Chief, Sourcing Journal

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Veja: Building From the Ground Up

Numerous pieces of legislation are winding ahead with the goal of taking on the growing problem of textile waste.

It all started with a desire to break recycled polyester out of its black box.

As a new administration offers less incentive to go green, commercial benefits carry more weight.

What’s Next for SB 707?

While a good first step, many feel the legislation leaves more questions than answers.

Textile recyclers have formed a new industry association to ensure that recyclers have a role in shaping policy.

Reju Finally Crack the Code?

By 2034, the “materials regeneration” firm plans to be a $2 billion business with an estimated 20 “megafactories.”

Next-Gen Materials Maintain Momentum

Despite a tempestuous 2024, brands are still bringing alternative fibers and sustainable swaps to the runway and the retailer.

in the Mix

Sourcing Journal caught up with a wave of sustainabilitydriven startups on the brink of making an impact.

Brands Embrace Canopy

The forest preservation initiative has been working with several of the countyr’s biggest players.

Beyond Policy Cycles

Sustainability will remain a top priority in procurement.

Carbon Emissions Amid a Tariff Backdrop

Ty Colman, co-founder of emissions management software firm Optera, talks carbon mitigation options and the importance of data. THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM IS THE FACT THAT WITHOUT THE INDUSTRY WORKING TOGETHER, WE’RE NOT GOING TO GET THERE.”

Patrik Frisk, Reju

CUTTING MICROFIBER POLLUTION

OFF AT THE SOURCE

IINDIVIDUAL MICROFIBERS are tiny, yet their collective impact is significant; each year, microfiber shedding from textile production releases the equivalent of over 800 million polyester shirts into the ocean.

Innovation company Matter, in collaboration with development partner Paradise Textiles, is on a mission to slash microplastic pollution with its Regen.® for Textile Production filtration technology. As an early investor in the project’s R&D, Paradise Textiles will integrate Regen.® into its new fabric mill in Egypt by Q4 of 2025. “The installation presents an important opportunity for the industry to rethink textile manufacturing, showcasing Regen.® together with other reduced-impact manufacturing systems and practices,” said Lewis Shuler, vice president, advanced concepts at Paradise Textiles, part of Alpine Group.

Here, Shuler and Matter CEO Adam Root discuss their collaboration to bring this solution to market.

SOURCING JOURNAL: Why is the microfiber pollution problem more urgent now?

Lewis Shuler: Microfiber pollution is a growing concern because it affects our water, air and food systems, with increasing evidence linking it to severe health and environmental impacts. Importantly, all fibers—not just synthetics—can contribute to this issue, as they often carry chemicals that hinder biodegradation.

The textile industry must take responsibility by innovating to reduce fiber shedding, improving manufacturing processes and adopting solutions like advanced filtration technologies. Crosssector collaboration is key to driving change, setting industry benchmarks for fiber pollution and raising consumer awareness to enable more informed choices.

How did Matter’s Regen.® technology come about? How have you adapted it for textile producers’ needs?

Adam Root: The idea for Regen.® came after witnessing microplastic pollution’s colossal impact. Wanting to use my engineering skills to solve this global challenge, I set out to create a microplastic filter based on cradle-to-cradle design principles. While scaling our technology for industrial use, we analyzed why existing filters weren’t being adopted by textile producers, and found they were expensive, inefficient, lacked durability and consumed too much energy. In response, Regen.® is a robust, low-energy, high-efficiency microfiber filtration technology designed to reduce operational costs and energy use for textile manufacturers, while helping brands meet sustainability targets by cutting microfiber emissions.

How are Paradise Textiles and Matter collaborating to scale this technology?

L.S.: Three years ago, we discovered Matter through their Kickstarter campaign for Gulp, a domestic microfiber

“THE TEXTILE INDUSTRY MUST TAKE RESPONSIBILITY BY INNOVATING TO REDUCE FIBER SHEDDING, IMPROVING MANUFACTURING PROCESSES AND ADOPTING SOLUTIONS LIKE ADVANCED FILTRATION TECHNOLOGIES.”

filtration device. Recognizing its potential, we partnered with them to scale this technology for textile manufacturing. We’ve collaborated closely, leveraging our expertise in material science and manufacturing to adapt the technology for largescale production. A key challenge was ensuring a retrofittable design that could be applied universally across factories with varying equipment and wastewater processes. Our collaboration has deepened industry understanding of microfiber release, improving capture efficiency and enabling the development of lower-shedding materials.

A.R.: This partnership will showcase the tangible benefits of Regen.® for Textile Production in a real-world, commercial setting. We hope to inspire wider adoption, driving industry change at scale. This collaboration with Paradise Textiles will also allow us to assess effluent purity from specific washing processes and explore material reuse and recycling. Ultimately, the installation will demonstrate

measurable impact, challenge industry standards, disrupt the status quo among brands and shift consumer perceptions.

What is the potential impact of this technology, both for Paradise Textiles and beyond?

A.R.: The textile industry is responsible for 20 percent of global water pollution and emits over 160,000 tons of microfibers annually. While synthetic materials continue to be used, the industry needs an immediate solution to stop these toxic fibers polluting waterways. Regen.® for Textile Production offers effective wastewater filtration without the carbon impact. With Matter’s technology, a single mill could save thousands of kilowatt-hours annually and capture over 90 tons of microfibers, reducing carbon emissions by over 2,000 tons. With over 150,000 textile factories worldwide, Regen.® for Textile Production offers a game-changing opportunity to make a significant impact across the industry. ■

LEWIS SHULER vice president, advanced concepts, Paradise Textiles

From left: Lewis Shuler and Adam Root

TAKING RECYCLING RULES TO THE NEXT (FEDERAL) LEVEL

Numerous pieces of legislation are slithering ahead with the goal of taking on the growing problem of textile waste. by

Jasmin Malik Chua

chellie pingree cannot imagine throwing perfectly good clothing away. The idea, in fact, is practically anathema to her.

“I come from the state of Maine; I represent Maine,” the Democratic congresswoman said. “We’re a very thrifty, Yankee kind of culture that loves nothing more than buying clothes in a thrift shop, passing down a good wool shirt to a family member or, you know, having your boots resoled. It’s second nature to me.”

Little could prepare her, even as ranking member of the House Appropriations Interior, Environment and Related Agencies Subcommittee, for the knowledge of how much textile waste—from apparel, yes, but also footwear, carpets and household linens— gets landfilled or incinerated in the United States. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that the amount of textile waste generated by the nation nearly doubled from 9.5 million tons in 2000 to 17 million tons in 2018, the most recent year for which data is available. Of that, only 14.7 percent was recycled.

When Pingree began pitching the idea of a Congressional Slow Fashion Caucus to tackle the onslaught of cheap and low-quality clothing she blames for the trend, her fellow lawmakers initially balked. Still, she kept at it, filling the ranks of what is now a growing coalition.

“People were like, ‘Sorry, I don’t care about clothes,’” she said. “But the more I described to both male and female members the volume of clothing we’re throwing out, the impact of foreign manufacturing and the impact on the environment, I found that it’s a topic that interested people more than they realized. Our government doesn’t really have a very good organizational structure for measuring the amount of waste and doing something about it. But it’s not to say that we shouldn’t.”

That the U.S. government needs to take a heavier hand in tackling the scourge of textile waste is why Pingree led a request to the Government Accountability Office, or GAO, to produce what ended up being hailed as the first federal report on fast-fashion pollution in December. The agency put its findings, titled “Textile Waste: Federal Entities Should Collaborate on Reduction and Recycling Efforts,” in less sound-bitey terms, but the

sentiment still held. The increasing dominance of fast fashion’s high-turnover use-and-dispose business model, GAO said, has ramped up the production of clothing waste. But so has the dearth of centralized systems for collecting, sorting and grading discarded textiles for recycling or to retain their value on the secondhand market.

“It’s not only that more textiles are being produced but also that these are fabrics that aren’t necessarily of the highest quality, so they’re usually not going to be recycled,” said Alfredo Gomez, director at GAO. “Or they may have synthetic fibers, which also have difficulty, as we learned, in the recycling process.”

The problem is figuring out who’s responsible. While that’s a perennial issue whenever there are multiple actors in a value chain, the United States is an expansive and fragmented nation governed by a patchwork of federal, regional and local policies. Textiles that are chucked into household trash enter the municipal waste stream, leaving cities and counties to ultimately decide what gets picked up at the curb for processing or recycling. But state leadership also has its say, with Massachusetts banning textiles from disposal or incineration in 2022, California requiring apparel and textile producers to fund and implement a statewide program to reuse, repair and recycle their products by 2026 and both New York and Washington cueing up similar moves of their own.

“Traditionally, waste is managed at the local level, so cities and counties and local government are the ones contracting with the haulers and getting the materials out of people’s homes,” said Joanne Brasch, director of policy and outreach at the California Product Stewardship Council, a nonprofit that focuses

OUR GOVERNMENT DOESN’T REALLY HAVE A VERY GOOD ORGANIZATIONAL STRUCTURE FOR MEASURING THE AMOUNT OF WASTE AND DOING SOMETHING ABOUT IT. BUT IT’S NOT TO SAY THAT WE SHOULDN’T.”

on extended producer responsibility, better known by the acronym EPR. “And it gets elevated to the state level when the product is problematic or big enough of a volume that the local government can’t figure it out on their own. And that’s kind of what happened to textiles. It was just too complicated.”

Brasch would argue that a state approach is preferable because it allows for more transparency and enforcement. At the same time, federal entities are responsible not only for defining national strategies but also for funding research, conducting education and outreach and deploying grants to states, municipalities and other downstream stakeholders. The EPA, for instance, finalized in 2021 a plan to achieve a 50 percent nationwide recycling rate, including for textiles, by leveraging a bipartisan infrastructure deal that earmarked $350 million for solid waste and recycling grants. The National Institute of Standards and Technology, under the Department of Commerce, developed reference data to help textile sorters who use near-infrared spectroscopy to sort castoff clothing. And the Advanced Materials and Manufacturing Technologies Office, as part of the Department of Energy, funds the Reducing Embodied-energy And Decreasing Emissions manufacturing institute—REMADE for short—

Congresswoman Chellie Pingree

and its efforts to bolster textile circularity.

Even so, federal efforts involving textile waste tend to be implemented in isolation, with varying approaches and limited interagency collaboration, the GAO report said. Or, as Gomez put it, “there’s no one in charge.” There’s also the fact that information on possible federal funding sources for advancing textile recycling for other stakeholders, including municipalities and nonprofit organizations, is rarely readily accessible.

GAO proposed that the six federal entities it looked at—the EPA, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the National Science Foundation, the Office of Science and Technology Policy, the Department of State and the Department of Energy—coordinate on their work through an interagency mechanism that “follows leading practices,” perhaps at the behest and direction of Congress to “take federal action.” While the organizations agreed with GAO’s findings, they also pushed back at its recommendation to “form an interagency coordinating group,” which Gomez said wasn’t what the report had suggested, since the “mechanism” could take the form of memorandums of understanding, working groups or charters.

“So that’s what we call a partial disagreement,” he said. “Moving forward, we will be tracking their actions and then updating them on our website. Sometimes Congress holds agencies accountable by holding hearings or wanting to know if the agencies have implemented GAO’s recommendations. But we’ve issued the report to the people that asked for it, so it’s now in their hands.”

While states and municipalities can take initial steps to wrestle with the problem of textile waste, any long-term success will be limited without a cohesive federal mandate that pairs harmonized regulation with largescale incentives, said Rachel Kibbe, CEO of American Circular Textiles, an industry lobbying group that includes reuse, resale and recycling stalwarts such as Circ, ThredUp, The RealReal, Vestiaire Collective and USAgain.

“The fragmented approach we’ve seen with plastics has demonstrated that state-level policies often struggle to scale effectively, leading to inconsistent enforcement, compliance challenges, consumer confusion and limited infrastructure investment,” she said. “This is especially true because we see EPR bills starting with our largest economies in the U.S. We are embarking on collecting massive amounts of textiles that we neither have the infrastructure nor the markets to handle yet.”

ACT was behind a provision in the 2024 bill known as the Americas Trade and Investment Act, a.k.a. the Americas Act, that would appropriate more than $14 billion in grants, loans and credits to foster domestic textile circular innovation and development. It’s the first time textile circularity has been considered at this kind of scale, Kibbe said. Tying it with onshoring and nearshoring efforts also taps into the second Trump administration’s “America First” agenda, making it less a matter for partisan debate.

She also supports bills that she wasn’t directly involved in, such as the Strategies to Eliminate Waste and Accelerate Recycling Development, or STEWARD, which was introduced in the Senate in February and seeks to improve recycling capabilities across various materials, including textiles. Passing this would shore up the nation’s recycling

and composting infrastructure in rural and underserved areas and allow greater accessibility and transparency of waste management data.

“Efforts like California’s SB 707 and other state efforts are important catalysts, but to drive systemic change, we need federal leadership that aligns policies, streamlines regulations and funds scaleable solutions,” she said. “This includes incentives for circular design, recycling infrastructure and reshoring textile manufacturing, which will not only address waste but also support economic growth and supply chain resilience.”

For Michelle Gabriel, director of the master’s program in sustainable fashion at IE College New York, textile waste is both an issue of responsibility and of infrastructure. Gabriel was a member of a task force that examined how New York City could reduce the environmental impact of the textilebased goods it purchased, used and disposed of based on Local Law 112, which went into effect in 2022.

The law, as far as Gabriel and her team could tell, is the first of its kind within the United States. In a report published in August, they argued that it should be viewed as an “important foundational step” to advancing textile sustainability and procurement efforts by the city and the broader textile industry.

It was almost immediately, however, that they ran into a singular problem: bad and missing data.

“When we received all the data from the city, it was almost unusable, because there was no material content, among other things,” Gabriel said. “So we had to develop this risk assessment process based on a combination of what we know generally about textiles globally and what we can infer about practices from each agency’s limited descriptions of their textile-based purchases.” This meant everything from uniforms to office carpeting. What the task force found was that cities have unique opportunities to better manage their environmental and procurement policies by investing in infrastructure that will eventually drive down the costs of those activities, even though the assumptions it made in the absence of “all those intricacies” mean it would have to home in on each agency or even department to make targeted

recommendations, she added. The fact that few end-of-life solutions existed despite how resource intensive and polluting it is to create textiles, particularly in the case of synthetics, however, was a major throughline. And that’s something that’s going to take everyone at every level to change.

“We need the federal and state governments to enact EPR laws which more equitably redistribute the responsibility of textile waste from exclusively local municipalities to include producing firms,” Gabriel said. “We need local governments to rethink the costs of and incentives for generating waste within their communities: increasing the costs of landfill tipping fees to fund the currently externalized costs to communities for the management of such unbridled waste and at the same time disincentivize out-of-sight, out-of-mind tossing of ‘waste’ that comes with laughably low fees. We need local, state and federal governments to aggressively invest in the necessary infrastructure to divert textile waste from landfill for use in more circular economies, which can contribute meaningfully to textile-totextile recycling and other novel applications.”

There’s also the option to not legislate at all, but experts say that leaving it to businesses to come up with solutions on their own without

THE FRAGMENTED APPROACH WE’VE SEEN WITH PLASTICS HAS DEMONSTRATED THAT STATE-LEVEL POLICIES OFTEN STRUGGLE TO SCALE EFFECTIVELY, LEADING TO INCONSISTENT ENFORCEMENT, COMPLIANCE CHALLENGES, CONSUMER CONFUSION AND LIMITED INFRASTRUCTURE INVESTMENT.”

Rachel Kibbe, American Circular Textiles

regulatory carrots or sticks may not bear the same results. They include Phil White, co-founder and chief strategy officer at social innovation agency Grounded World, who said that it’s “weirdly enough” more costeffective to continue to create, take, make and discard, than it is to build a reverse logistics or infrastructure to help promote circularity. What that has also led to is the phenomenon of “donation dumping” where unwanted garments get shipped off to countries such as Chile or Ghana, where decaying textiles pile up in collapse-prone mounds, clog up waterways or otherwise fuse into the terrain.

“That’s the really strange thing: even though everybody understands the need for circularity and everyone sees the value, including many brands that are starting to commercialize resell and reuse, it’s still cheaper, to quite a large extent, to stick to the current linear production and send it to a landfill, incinerator or another country than it is to build a reverse supply chain,” he said. “So that’s the nut that we need to crack. That’s the tension in the industry right now.”

Congresswoman Pingree, for one, is a fan of EPR and how it puts the responsibility for managing textile waste on its producers. And she intends to pull whatever levers she can find to pass legislation or include language in appropriations bills to push for whatever she can.

“Right now, it’s a system where a manufacturer can kind of do anything they want, and then basically the taxpayers, the municipalities have to deal with the waste and the cost of the cleanup,” she said. “I hope that over time, we’re really focusing on how to change the system for many parts of our waste stream, but clothing seems like a prime one.”

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EXAMINING FASHION’S SUSTAINABLE FUTURE

As a new administration offers less incentive to go green, commercial benefits carry more weight. by

historically, the fashion industry and its retail counterparts—has been more inclined to listen to its customers than Congress when it comes to charting a course, according to global end-to-end returns management solution provider ReturnBear.

“The real driving force behind sustainability in retail isn’t the White House; it’s the consumer,” said Katherine Lehman, ReturnBear’s chief marketing officer.

“The effects of climate change can’t be ignored any longer, and the younger buying generation is taking note [as] shoppers are voting with their wallets. Regardless of the administration, brands that ignore this shift risk long-term brand erosion.”

While a second Trump term may yield a rollback of federal regulations or incentives supporting corporate social responsibility, Lehman said the momentum isn’t going to just vanish.

“When you look at the political and legislative landscape from a global perspective, there is still considerable market momentum toward circularity,” one anonymous source highlighted. “If anything, we’re seeing stronger interest this year in circularity programs that prioritize recycling in addition to reselling.

Government regulation isn’t going to impact this customer—they’re already sold on the benefits of a more circular economy.”

While agreeing with Lehman that supply chain disruptions have increased uncertainty and complexity for brands, Canopy is not so sure of this repetition.

“Historically, this would have been the juncture where brands deprioritized sustainability commitments; but something different is happening now,” said Nicole Rycroft, founder and executive director of the global non-profit. “There’s a recognition that ‘take, make, waste’ production systems are increasingly unstable with floods, fires and other disruptions along with pricing volatility.”

That recognition is warranted, according to Liz Alessi. This is perhaps why the Tapestry executive turned circularity consultant is a “firm believer” in supply chain diversification. The idea, she continued, isn’t of a political nature.

“It could be a climate situation, right? Like there’s flooding here, or a global pandemic. Your supply chain is, unfortunately, affected by all these things,” Alessi said. “We just happen

to be in a political landscape that’s changing things for us.”

While diversification is one way to fortify your supply chain, that may be easier said than done.

“Budget cuts might make sustainability more difficult, but, in my mind, it’s no reason to slow,” Rob Behnke, co-founder of fashion brand Fair Indigo, said. “In a way, it forces brands to take ownership of their ESG commitments.”

The biggest challenge, per Behnke, lies in sourcing sustainable materials at reasonable prices.

“I’m worried the market might be taken over by cheaper, more unsustainable materials,” he continued. “This makes it really hard for ethical brands.”

It’s a valid concern.

“One of the biggest challenges ahead is how brands will navigate supply chain disruptions while maintaining trust with suppliers, investors and consumers.

Uncertainty leads to hesitation, and hesitation delays the deployment of real solutions,” said Lewis Perkins, president of Apparel Impact Institute (Aii). “While some brands are proactively diversifying sourcing and strengthening partnerships, many are still reacting to change rather than shaping it.”

Alexandra Harrell

That said, Perkins continued, this moment presents an opportunity for ESG innovation. As long as brands are willing to engage.

“The bottom line: sustainability is no longer optional, but action is lagging,” Perkins said. “The future will belong to those who move beyond compliance and invest in solutions that drive measurable impact. The question is, who will step up?”

Online clothing alteration and repair service firm FXRY is doing its part. Their model is intentionally built around consumer needs and not regulations.

“The future of fashion isn’t about buying more; it’s about making what we already own last longer,” said FXRY’s founder and CEO, Calley Dawson. “If brands pull back from take-back and repair programs, more consumers will turn to independent solutions like ours.”

As these mandates shift, the 25-year industry veteran sees the future of efforts like circularity and take-back programs depending less on compliance and more on whether the

BUDGET CUTS MIGHT MAKE SUSTAINABILITY MORE DIFFICULT, BUT, IN MY MIND, IT’S NO REASON TO SLOW.” Rob Behnke, Fair Indigo

H

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brand sees sincere value in them. Sure, some will focus on the short-term and scale back, but others will see the long-term value and stay the course.

“Without regulatory pressure, the responsibility shifts to consumers to demand accountability,” Dawson continued. “This shift could make voluntary ESG commitments an even stronger competitive differentiator. If a brand abandons its sustainability initiatives the moment they’re no longer required, it signals that they were just a marketing play. But the companies that stay committed— regardless of policy—will stand out, proving that sustainability isn’t just a buzzword but a core business value.”

Dawson said this only reinforces the value that her company offers.

“For companies serious about sustainability, now is the time to prove it,” Dawson said.

“The lack of regulation isn’t an excuse to slow down—it’s an opportunity to lead.”

PLAYERS THROUGHOUT THE VALUE CHAIN WEIGH IN ON THE STATE OF THE INDUSTRY

Do you see the current climate as a setback or an opportunity for innovation in ESG strategies?

For the industry as a whole, I’m optimistic about the adaptations necessary to overcome the newfound costs of doing traditional drop-shipping or other overseas manufacturing business. Despite it being a massive money maker, fast fashion is a trend that needs a reality check and being forced to raise the prices to the point that consumers no longer see the value in these cheap goods will hopefully be cause for change in the direction of quality, not quantity.

Anthony Bolognese

owner of custom suit atelier

Capitol Hill Clothiers

The changing political climate under a Trump government offers both a problem and an opportunity. Brands that depend on government incentives for sustainability may face difficulties due to possible deregulation and rollbacks of climate policies. But it also spurs innovation, encouraging businesses to embrace self-regulated ESG frameworks, make investments circularly and investigate AI-powered efficiency solutions to cut expenses and waste.

Albert Varkki

co-founder of luxury leather goods brand Von Baer

While these cuts pose challenges, they also present an opportunity to rethink and innovate our ESG strategies. For instance, we are exploring partnerships with private organizations and NGOs to fill gaps left by reduced federal support. We are also investing in inhouse training programs to compensate for potential cuts to workforce development budgets.

Peter Martinez

co-founder of fashion brand Leather Skin Shop

Involving consumers in the “DOGE” process by offering practical, pragmatic “smart buying” methods—supported by new technologies and the opportunity to create lifetime environmental CO2e impact records—can be a powerful way to new profitable approaches to ESG. In other words, we can channel the frustration of progressives eager to act on their aspirations and beliefs, including those related to climate and ESG, but still lack channels. By doing so, we can effectively capitalize on this momentum.

Tatiana Alexa founder and CEO of impact shopping company Sangrove

Can ESG-focused brands and retailers still attract capital or will financial incentives fade?

ESG-focused companies are wellpositioned to attract capital because sustainability is becoming integral to consumer choice, operational efficiency, and risk management. Financial incentives persist through market demand and cost savings—even without strict regulatory pressure.

Chris Hughes head of mobile innovation and privacy at advertising platform MobileFuse

Do you anticipate consumer attitudes shifting in response to weakened ESG regulations?

Consumers who care about sustainability won’t suddenly stop caring due to the relaxation of regulations. Those beliefs are deeply held, if anything, it could spur some to push brands harder than they are now, especially if they see a rolling back on commitments. Or, abandon those brands entirely in favor of those who can evidence their ESG commitments.

Suzanne Lee founder and CEO of Biofabricate

How will federal budget cuts affect sustainability efforts?

Budget cuts could make keeping up with our sustainability goals more difficult. If funding for environmental programs is reduced, there may be less oversight on chemical use and waste disposal, making it harder to ensure our suppliers follow regulations. Cuts to programs that support sustainable farming and tracking systems could also make tracing where our leather comes from tougher. Since we rely on transparency, this could be a big setback. Without government incentives or grants, switching to greener tanning methods—like vegetable tanning or chromium-free alternatives—could become more expensive.

John Smith vice president of design at leatherwear brand Poshele

What can ESG leaders do to maintain momentum despite political shifts?

While weakened regulations might pose challenges, consumer demand and business innovation can drive the continued evolution and success of resale, circularity and take-back programs. If it’s a core principle of your business, and you are focused on ESG, the shaking out of competition will allow diligent brands to attract more market share and ultimately be more accretive in this space.

Stephen Preuss co-founder and CEO of used electronics retail franchise PayMore

ESG leaders can maintain momentum by focusing on gains that can be made at a state level that will have national implications. While there may be a shift away from ESG priorities on a federal level, many states continue to uphold and advance ESG policies.

Sedina Banks partner at full-service law firm Greenberg Glusker

We can improve how we communicate. Many ESG leaders do complex, technical work, but those details are not always the most interesting or relevant to the average person. Every single person needs clean air, clean water, and an environment that can produce food to sustain us. We want to live our lives and take care of our families. And many people appreciate different aspects of nature. Leaders would do well to remind people how sustainability work supports all of our lives and leave behind some of the jargon and acronyms.

Jane Abernethy chief sustainability officer at furniture manufacturing firm Humanscale

Can voluntary ESG commitments become a competitive differentiator rather than a regulatory necessity?

Ask management and long-term business resilience should not be isolated but integrated into standard business best practices. With proper assessments and prioritization, integrated risk governance becomes a lens through which mitigation and adaptation measures can be identified and implemented. In a complementary way, independent of regulatory requirements, sustainable resource management efforts can lead to operational efficiency and cost savings. The integration of these risk and resource management best practices is good for the bottom line, often leading to eager investors and access to a lower cost of capital.

Jessica Kochik manager of carbon advising at sustainability consulting firm Engie Impact

HHONG KONG, the “nerve center” of Asian supply chain, has long been a hub where East meets West; where buyers meet suppliers. It has therefore nurtured a full offer of trade services conveniently within reach. With major end-user markets such as the EU and U.S. rising ESG requirements against their apparel imports, how well is the city coping with the new landscape?

Existing and impending ESG regulations are adding much reporting duty, requiring sourcing offices to stay closer to their suppliers to guide them on due diligence standards and to oversee their implementation. Hong Kong, situated at the heart of Asia with access to half of the world’s population within a 5-hour flight, naturally has a strategic role to play.

“Our largest clients in Asia recognize the urgency of compliance—but their ambitions may also be motivated by competition,” said JP Stevenson, the Hong Kong-based head of market development at EiQ, an ESG assessment, advisory and inspection solution by LRQA. “The most forward-thinking companies are embedding data and technology into their sourcing programs, not just to comply or because doing so is more efficient, but to compete with and surpass Western market leaders.”

Yet ESG is more than keeping tractable data sets. Hong Kong is leaning into its rich textile legacy to deliver innovative breakthroughs.

Under the motto that sustainability begins with design, Hong Kong is shaping the

HONG KONG: POWERING A SUSTAINABLE FUTURE OF FASHION

HONG KONG IS RETHINKING THE FUTURE’S SUPPLY CHAIN, AND WELCOMES GLOBAL COMPANIES TO PLACE THEIR SOURCING HUB THERE.

ecosystem to be eco-minded and eco-compliant. Hong Kong is also addressing garment’s end-of-life treatment. The Hong Kong-based, Asia-focused NGO Redress sets to redeploy material offcuts from High Street brands to the region’s young and hopeful designers.

Change is driving from the private sector too. The one-of-itskind textile-tech incubator The Mills Fabrica has set up a dual operation in both Hong Kong and London, comprising programs that include an innovation lab, co-working and event space for fashion shows, plus a venture fund that invests in advanced materials.

Going one step further, Hong Kong is looking at the industry’s future concerns. Hong Kong Research Institute of Textile and Apparel (HKRITA) is dedicated to the overall technological advancement of the industry. For instance, the patented Green Machine, codeveloped with H&M Foundation, is the world-first application of hydrothermal treatment to separate blended yarns at scale without

compromising the inputs. Another project, “Acousweep,” uses sound waves and a specially shaped chamber to trap and recover microplastic fibers in wastewater facilities. In terms of projects in the pipeline, HKRITA is developing new materials from food waste (bacterial cellulose fermented from kombucha to produce regenerated cellulose fibers and leather-like film), and employing sorting and identifying AI to improve postconsumer garment recycling.

In September 2024, the research institute launched “Open Lab”— with tests on the shortest supply chain possible, from hydroponic cotton cultivation, yarn processing and garment knitting. These are all under one roof at Advanced Manufacturing Centre, operated by Hong Kong Science and Technology Park.

HKRITA is continuously calling for partnerships. Jake Koh, CEO of HKRITA, said, “HKRITA welcomes companies from around the world to collaborate with us on research projects, with government

Open Lab, one of HKRITA’s sustainability initiatives, features the Green Machine and a farm-to-garment production line.

funding available to support these initiatives. Let’s combine our expertise and vision to drive meaningful impact for both the industry and the environment.”

Overall, the networks and opportunities available in Hong Kong create the full ecosystem required for a multi-national supply chain management hub, with technological innovation providing solutions to the issues keeping sourcing directors awake around the world.

“With a strong foundation of professionals with decades of experience, the companies in Hong Kong are recruiting new talent with degrees in material science, digital design or sustainability to join their teams to adapt to changing regulations and consumer demands,” said Angelica Leung, head of consumer products, InvestHK. “We have dedicated colleagues who have specialist knowledge and are connected on the ground to key companies, academia and associations within the industry. We help create useful connections within the industry and bring in companies from around the world to grow and succeed in Hong Kong.” ■

WHAT’S NEXT FOR SB 707?

While a good first step, many feel the legislation leaves more questions than answers. by Kate

Nishimura

california passed landmark legislation in 2024, becoming the first state in the nation to establish an Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) program to keep apparel and home textiles out of landfills, extending their useful life by funneling them into channels for resale, reuse and recycling. c But there’s a reason that the Responsible Textile Recovery Act, otherwise known as SB 707, is the first of its kind: textiles (unlike plastic bottles, the most commonly recycled product in the consumer market) are a vast and diverse category made from fibers of all kinds. There’s no magic mechanism to transform discarded clothing—made from natural and synthetic fibers in a near-limitless array of blends—into shiny, saleable new goods.

Nor does there exist a viable infrastructure for collecting, sorting and funneling the vast accumulation of textile waste across the Golden State into the correct channels for reuse or recycling—not yet, at least. The legislation puts the onus on “producers”—the parties responsible for putting the products out into the California market—to establish a Producer Responsibility Organization (PRO) that they will pay into to fund these activities.

Often a pioneer in the passage of changemaking environmental legislation, California has done it again with SB 707. But industry insiders, including the circularity upstarts and recycling bodies that have been working behind the scenes to move the effort forward, still have questions about how it will all play out.

One of the primary concerns about the legislation is that advanced recycling, which relies on chemical or hydrothermal processes, for example, isn’t explicitly recognized as

an acceptable channel for recycling in the bill’s text, which lifts some of the language surrounding acceptable forms of recycling from SB 54, California’s EPR for plastic waste. The thinking on the part of bill authors and regulators is that too little is known about the ecological ramifications of these processes.

“Since it’s well-accepted industry wide that advanced recycling technologies are pivotal for improving recycling rates and a key solution to circularity challenges, Virginia-based textileto-textile recycling firm Circ finds it deeply concerning that SB 707 excludes advanced recycling technologies as an acceptable channel for textile recycling,” Dolly VellankiSeijger, sourcing and public affairs manager at Circ, told Sourcing Journal.

“This exclusion oversimplifies the complexity of recycling technologies and their unique contributions—treating all methods as equivalent is not conducive to the progress the textile industry needs,” she said.

With about 30 percent of global textile waste made from polycotton blends—and most of that waste diverted into downcycling channels, not efforts to create new textiles—that’s a problem, she said. Circ’s particular proprietary process separates cellulosic content like cotton from synthetic content like polyester in order to create new materials that can be plugged right back into fashion production.

“In other parts of the world, where sustainability legislation is more mature, advanced recycling has been embraced as a key solution to circularity challenges, which highlights California’s missed opportunity to lead with forward-thinking regulation,” Vellanki-Seijger said. “By narrowly defining acceptable recycling channels, SB 707 hinders the development and scaling of technologies that could significantly improve recycling rates and the availability of high-quality recycled materials.”

Companies like Circ, which are growing quickly (the company partnered with Zara on a line of recycled apparel, inked a deal with Birla Cellulose to scale production of recycled cellulosic fibers, and recently joined forces with global textile recycling contemporaries Circulose, Syre and Re&Up Recycling Technologies to form the T2T Alliance) will not be recognized under SB 707. This, despite it being one of foremost innovators in the space.

“The legislation risks stalling the progress and creating unnecessary barriers for such technology. Without the necessary regulatory support, it becomes harder to build the infrastructure and systems needed to scale the availability of recycled materials,” the firm’s sourcing and public affairs lead said. That could delay the creation and maturation of the collection systems, processing facilities and partnerships “that are crucial for integrating advanced recycling technologies into the supply chain.”

Circ is advocating for a resolution that categorizes recycling technologies based on their environmental viability, availability, and scalability, she added—instead of limiting acceptable methods to one or two technologies. “California has the opportunity to set an example by embracing a progressive and forward-thinking technological framework that prioritizes environmental impact and scalability,” she said.

“Finding ways to extend the value of textiles is really challenging,” acknowledged Amelia Eleiter, CEO and cofounder of Debrand, which works with brands like Lululemon, Guess and Victoria’s Secret to sort and send used or unsaleable apparel into the right streams for recycling, reuse or downcycling.

The executive believes that a needs assessment—one of the next steps of the legislative process—must take into account the inherent complexity of textiles, so that SB 707 isn’t just a copy-paste version of another law.

“SB 54 has similarities, but it’s also a very different stream of materials, which is mainly single-use mono-material—a very, very different game when it comes to dealing with synthetics and textiles, which are complicated and require more sophisticated recycling solutions,” she said. “Are we going to just get sandwiched together when advanced recycling for packaging is very different than advanced recycling for textiles?”

Moreover, Eleiter worries that SB 707’s clear prioritization of the reuse or resale of discarded textiles doesn’t come with enough guardrails. “Many of the reuse solutions are lacking a transparency that I believe our industry deserves,” she explained. “Where are

we going to resell it? How much domestically, how much internationally? What are the conditions of that resale internationally? Are bales of blended-quality textiles OK, or do we have to discriminate and be transparent about each class of goods, so that we’re not just exporting our waste?”

Should those questions go unanswered, SB 707 runs the risk of promoting the mass shipping of trashed textiles and apparel to locales across the globe, like Africa, Latin America and the Middle East, making the burden someone else’s problem. Eleiter also questions how the law will support U.S. industry and California businesses in particular as they build and scale the solutions and infrastructure needed to handle huge volumes of fabrics and soft goods.

“The biggest risk to us from the very beginning was that this becomes just a downcycling bill,” added Chloe Songer, CEO of Supercircle, a New York-based circular economy company that helps retail brands recycle and repurpose textiles.

Songer believes that the nebulous-yetrestrictive definition of recycling featured in the bill could constrict innovation and the development of technologies that aim to propel the industry forward, leading to unintended and adverse sustainability impacts.

“It could end up…raising taxes on California consumers, raising prices on clothing, and not leading to a great, bestin-class outcome that will hurt trust with recycling over time,” she said.

“The future of the textile recycling space is linked to the future of the packaging recycling industry, and those are two very different industries with very different baggage, no pun intended,” she added. “There’s been a lot of fantastic innovation around advanced recycling—both chemical and different new types of mechanical recycling—over the last seven to 10 years, and a lot of fantastic recycling technologies that are now at the point of commercialization, particularly in the polyester and cotton space.”

Supercircle chief operating officer Stuart Ahlum echoed Songer’s concerns that an ineffective bill could harm the sector’s reputation.

“One headwind that we’re experiencing is that there is a base level of skepticism around recycling,” he said. “That’s fair,” he added, given that what the public knows about recycling is largely based on legacy programs that were created for cans and bottles. “You pop the hood on this thing, and you realize that actually only a very small percentage [of that waste] is actually making it back into those recyclable feeds due to recovery issues, due to funding, due to technologies, and that’s led to this doubt about whether or not it can be done.”

Ahlum worries that reining in innovation could stymie progress. “My concern is that if we don’t fund advanced recycling and recycling innovation, if we don’t actually fund fiber-to-fiber recycling in a true way, we’re essentially going to create this bill that is marketed as a circularity bill, and in practice, isn’t,” he said. “And it’s going to reputationally damage the space writ large.”

But CalRecycle, the branch of the California Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that will act as the regulator for the EPR, doesn’t want the industry to get caught up in the whatifs, especially when there’s much work yet to be done in ironing out the specifics.

“Now that the bill is signed, we’re going to have to do a regulatory period. We’re going to have to write regulations to clarify some of

those ambiguities that are in statute and give further direction to the regulated industry,” Allegra Curiel, deputy director of the Office of Legislative Affairs at CalRecycle, told Sourcing Journal.

The agency will be staging workshops beginning at the end of 2025, wherein it will meet with producers and other stakeholders both in person and virtually to glean feedback. “That will be the first of many opportunities to chime in and give us some reactions to what they see in the bill” through both written and verbal comments, she said. CalRecycle, too, will present some of its preliminary concepts for how the plan could be rolled out.

As for a timeline, formal rulemaking will take place in spring of 2027, meaning that there are two full years for stakeholders to present the merits of advanced recycling and gain more clarity about their roles in the EPR. CalRecycle will solicit PRO applications, to be filed by Jan. 1, 2026, and certify the PRO on March 1 of the same year. “The earliest the date the regulations could become effective is July 1, 2028,” Curiel added.

NOW THAT THE BILL IS SIGNED.... WE’RE GOING TO HAVE TO WRITE REGULATIONS TO CLARIFY SOME OF THOSE AMBIGUITIES THAT ARE IN STATUTE AND GIVE FURTHER DIRECTION TO THE REGULATED INDUSTRY.”

Allegra Curiel, CalRecycle

Candidates for PRO are expected to emerge in the coming months. “This is a very different community, but for SB 54, there’s an organization called Circular Action Alliance, and they are the PRO for plastic packaging for California, Maine, Oregon and Colorado,” Curiel explained. There’s currently no frontrunner for the role of textile PRO, given that the textile-focused EPR is the first in the country.

The unknowns are precisely why CalRecycle is eager for the industry to engage in the process. “We’re building the car as we’re driving down the road—CalRecycle (the regulators) and the folks in the industry are in that same car together, since this is a new material type for CalRecycle to regulate, and this is new for the industry as well,” Curiel added. “There’s going to be a lot of collaboration between the two entities. And we’re going to have a lot of questions for the industry, and the industry is going to have a lot of questions for us. It’s all about facilitating that open dialogue through our regulatory process; that’s going to be super crucial for us to be able to work together.”

When it comes to advanced textile recycling technologies, Curiel said CalRecycle has no intention of writing them off, despite the confusion and consternation the text of the bill has caused.

“In California, especially when we have such ambitious policies, we’re going to have to use creative thinking in order to manage this program,” Curiel said. “We’ll need to work with the companies who are making these technologies available in California. Things are evolving so quickly, there could be a technology that comes out in ’25 that’s going to totally change the landscape, and they want to make sure that they’re a viable option.”

“We’re going to have to do a really deep analysis during the regulatory process, because some of these technologies are new; they’re emerging. When you do regulations, there’s often a balance between creating clear criteria and also not blocking innovation,” she explained.

H There’s no magic mechanism to transform discarded textiles.

WHY HYOSUNG IS FOCUSED ON COLLABORATION, CIRCULARITY AND SUGARCANE

AAS A RANGE OF FORCES from consumer behavior to regulations—shape fashion’s sustainable priorities, brands are divided in their approaches to material selection. Until the industry reaches a consensus on the winning fiber solution, South Korea-based spandex, nylon and polyester manufacturer Hyosung is taking a diversified approach with both recycled and bio-based innovations as an alternative to petroleum-based inputs. “We’ve already witnessed the energy transition, and we’re now seeing the materials transition, helping us move away from fossil fuels to more sustainable, renewable raw materials,” said Simon WhitmarshKnight, global sustainability director – textiles at Hyosung.

Here, Whitmarsh-Knight shares how Hyosung is growing its fiber portfolio and working with partners to propel circularity.

SOURCING JOURNAL: As the largest spandex producer by market share, how is Hyosung taking a prominent role in pushing sustainable material innovation within synthetic fibers?

Simon Whitmarsh-Knight: We are leading by continuously innovating. As a complete sustainable textile solutions provider, we are committed to helping our mill, brand and retail partners meet forthcoming regulations and anticipate consumer demands. Recent events prove sustainability objectives and strategies can change rapidly— whether it is recycled, bio-based, recyclable or something new—so it’s important to provide solutions to meet diverse individual needs. Within our 100 percent recycled spandex, polyester and nylon programs, we’ve added multifunction performance properties such as cooling, warming and natural touch. Additionally, we launched a Global Recycled Standard (GRS)-Certified, 100 percent post-consumer recycled nylon made from discarded fishing nets.

Speaking of circularity investments, how has your textile division ramped up the use of recycled materials over the last year?

S.W.K: Sales of our Recycled Claim Standard (RCS)-certified 100 percent recycled spandex are growing rapidly. When blended with recycled polyester or nylon, this can provide a 100 percent recycled fabric story, which resonates with consumers and EU regulations. In addition to our own recycled fiber platforms, we are also collaborating with other material science companies to help scale the use of these technologies. Following our ongoing collaboration with Ambercycle, we recently partnered with Loop™ and sustainable fashion brand Pleatsmama to produce 100 percent recycled drawn textured yarn for limitededition handbags. The yarn was manufactured using virginquality Loop™ fiber-grade PET produced through the Infinite Loop™ textile-to-textile recycling technology, utilizing low-value mixed polyester textile waste as feedstock. Further collaborations will be announced this year as we help the industry move to more circular business models.

“SUSTAINABILITY OBJECTIVES AND STRATEGIES CAN CHANGE RAPIDLY…SO IT’S IMPORTANT TO PROVIDE SOLUTIONS TO MEET DIVERSE INDIVIDUAL NEEDS.”

SIMON WHITMARSH-KNIGHT global sustainability director, textiles, Hyosung

In addition to recycling, you are focused on bio-based materials. What opportunity do you see in bio-based fibers, and what are your latest moves in this space?

S.W.K: We see significant opportunity. Our regen BIO Spandex has already been adopted by brands such as Pangaia, Icebreaker, Van Harvey and Silver Sea Apparel. We’ve expanded our regen BIO Spandex offering to include yarn options made with a higher content of renewable resources, including new regen BIO + and regen BIO Max. Last spring, we announced our partnership with sustainable materials leader Geno to start construction at our plant in Vietnam to produce BIO BDO derived from sugarcane, a $1 billion investment. This will be the world’s first vertically integrated bio-spandex manufacturing plant, streamlining production, improving efficiency and reducing carbon footprint.

Sustainability is still not a given in sourcing. What are the continuing challenges in making the business case for sustainability?

S.W.K: Currently, the two major challenges are cost and regulations. Often, new technologies—such as textile-to-textile recycling—come with a premium, as we must set up new value systems to secure adoptions, and this is tough for consumers as we’re all feeling the pinch during this volatile, uncertain period. Secondly, integrated regulations and infrastructure investments are needed to make new technologies more widely accessible. Regulations can be confusing and are constantly changing, so until the industry aligns on some key areas, we won’t be able to change fast enough. ■

what makes one plastic container different from another? To the untrained eye, nothing. But the catadores who make up the informal economy of waste pickers in Brazil are far from untrained. c In a capacious concrete warehouse on a steamy summer’s morning in Atremar, a nearly two-decade-old recycling cooperative in the city of Três Pontas in the coffee-growing state of Minas Gerais, roughly a dozen catadores await one of two daily deliveries. The truck, piled high with industrial-strength sacks bursting at their seams, plays a cheerful ditty extolling the virtues of recycling as it backs up into an entryway that opens into the interior. An eclectic bounty of soda cans, margarine tubs, shampoo bottles, pizza boxes and magazines tumbles down a ramp onto a massive table that comfortably fits four people on each of its three unblocked sides. c Pulling on gloves to protect against sharp edges, each man and woman sets to work combing through everything. A glass jar is tossed into a bin, a motor oil jug flies into another. Bottle caps are unscrewed and plastic bags balled up. Items that are unsalvageable—some unbroken Christmas ornaments, a book someone decided wasn’t worth keeping, a toaster that’s easily repaired—are set aside for the little on-site shop. There’s no time to be squeamish about spills or, in a room cooled only by a phalanx of wall-mounted fans, catch one’s breath. Veteran catadores can do this work blindfolded, determining how something should be sorted by touch into as many as 23 categories. At times they resemble restless oversize spiders because surely no human with only two hands can move with so much speed and dexterity.

It all started with a desire to break recycled polyester out of its black box. by

VEJA: BUILDING FROM

Jasmin Malik Chua

Whoever says this is unskilled work is either ignorant or lying. c Around here, clear bottles made from polyethylene terephthalate, or PET, like the ones labeled Coca-Cola, are “gold,” as Evelini Castro, a hearty woman with a booming voice and an abiding love for Paul McCartney, bellows in English several times. Colored or opaque bottles—7-Up, Sprite—not so much. Tetrapaks, the type of mixed plastic-and-paper packaging that milk sometimes comes in, are almost certainly dross. While the catadores will still sort and bale them using a machine that crushes everything into tidy cubes, their market value is as low as their demand. c It’s the “gold,” as Castro puts it, that gets people paid and keeps the lights on. It’s also what has a high likelihood of ending up in a Veja shoe. c Veja, which means “look” in Portuguese, is sometimes known as Paris’ favorite sneaker, even though the shoes are almost entirely constructed in Brazil. (A European outpost in Portugal is also beginning to take shape.) The material inputs—save for leather, which comes from Uruguay, away from potential cattle-ranching-driven deforestation in the Amazon—are sourced in the South American nation. Its organic cotton is grown by 1,600 small-scale farmers across seven northeast states and its natural rubber obtained from more than 20 cooperatives in the Amazon region. Its polyester, derived from recycled plastic bottles, hails from 13 catadore-owned hubs in Minas Gerais, including Atremar. An equitable economic approach at every stage of the supply chain is what makes Veja’s shoes 30 percent more expensive than those cobbled in East Asia, it says. But this

FROM THE GROUND UP

H Veja is sometimes known as Paris’ favorite sneaker.

has also made it a soul-crushingly hip—and morally superior—status symbol for only those in the know to know about.

For the most part, anyway. When Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex donned a pair of Veja’s V-10 shoes at the 2018 Invictus Games in Sydney, Australia, the ensuing attention nearly crashed its website. “Who is this Meghan Markle?” Sébastien Kopp, who founded the brand with his childhood pal François-Ghislain Morillion circa 2004—the two disagree on the precise year—demanded to know. Ultimately, he didn’t care. Veja doesn’t woo celebrities with freebies, dole out discounts or fritter away cash on advertising. All that money goes back into the supply chain because that’s the Veja way.

Veja has almost always used polyester made from recycled plastic bottles, even though most of it was blended with virgin materials for reasons of strength or elasticity. The majority of this, which was purchased, as it were, whole cloth from China, went into the lining of its casual model, but without the same visibility or oversight other materials received.

It was a couple of years ago when Veja decided it wanted to break recycled polyester out of its black box. Traceability was one reason, said Olivia Lyster, the brand’s sourcing supervisor. So was having more control over the manufacturing process and therefore its impact. But there was also the fact that Veja wanted to replicate the work it was already doing in its other supply chains, like rubber and cotton, where it was paying fair trade prices and making a social difference. Because that, too, is the Veja way.

“That’s when we decided: we’re going to set up a PET supply chain,” Lyster said. “But because traceability is a very obscure sector, it’s very difficult to find out where and who people’s suppliers are. It’s difficult to get back to the plastic bottle. So that was the first and really the biggest innovation.”

But Veja had a second trick up its sleeve. Working with Dini Têxtil, a manufacturer in São Paulo, it managed to develop a textile derived from 100 percent recycled plastic bottles—something it wasn’t sure it could do and still retain the performance characteristics a shoe required. The fabric, which became known as Eleva, clads a single pair of shoes in the equivalent of four plastic bottles.

By now most people have a rough idea of how the bulk of recycled polyester is made: PET bottles are collected, sanitized and any labels and remaining caps separated out. The clean plastic is shredded into flakes, then melted down at high heat to create “little balls of plastic,” as Lyster puts it. Finally, the pellets are liquified, dyed and extruded through a showerhead-like device to create long, skinny strands of fiber that can be woven into fabric.

From the time Patagonia worked with Polartec to use this process to create the first recycled synthetic fleece in the early ’90s, this was the environmentally virtuous thing to do. And indeed, many a brand from the late noughties onward have hinged their entire sustainability strategy on the use of the so-called rPET, which they touted as a way to reduce the world’s reliance on virgin fossil fuels while taking a bite out of plastic pollution that was clogging up landfills and poisoning marine life.

But the reality that has emerged into view in recent years is less simple. Clothing made this way cannot be recycled into clothing again, at least not at a scale that makes practical and economic sense, meaning that a Dasani

bottle’s reincarnation into a pair of harem pants only marks a brief respite before it ends up relegated to the trash heap or in a hapless turtle’s stomach. Hijacking PET to appeal to the trendsetter also snatches it from a truly circular process: turning it into another bottle. It also doesn’t address problems that continue to plague virgin polyester: Its inability to biodegrade, for one, and microplastic generation for another. Plus, there’s also the possibility that people might use it as an excuse to overconsume, whether it’s bottles or apparel—or footwear, for that matter.

This is something Lyster has been thinking a lot about.

“It’s true; ideally, we wouldn’t be using polyester,” she said. “But there’s no other material that has the characteristics that polyester does. And so it’s been, ‘OK, if we use this material, how can we make it the absolute best it can possibly be?’”

And Brazil, it must be said, goes through its share of plastic bottles. While the stuff from the faucet is typically treated, most people stick to bottled water because they prefer the taste or to avoid potential contamination.

The country, according to the World Wildlife Fund, pumps out roughly 500 billion singleuse plastic items every year, making it the largest producer—and polluter—of plastic in Latin America. Sea Shepherd Brazil and the Oceanographic Institute of the University of São Paulo estimate that 90 percent of the garbage on Brazil’s beaches is plastic, with single-use items making up 61 percent of that total. This is despite the fact that its PET recycling sector is operating at only 70 percent of its total installed capacity.

All of which is to say, without other forms of intervention, there’s plenty more where those plastic bottles came from but more investment is needed.

The 800,000 catadores who roam Brazil’s streets looking to recover resources are a living infrastructure that Brasilia’s Institute for Applied Economic Research says collects nearly 90 percent of the nation’s recycled material. They’ve filled a gaping hole that a lack of formal infrastructure for collecting, sorting and reusing materials has left behind. Without them—the people who rummage through public bins and knock on doors to ask for recycling—Brazil’s war against waste would be lost.

It’s also a sector with a high degree of vulnerability, in part because it’s

such an inclusive one. “A lot of people have disabilities—for example, learning difficulties—or who may not be able to find other jobs or get income in other ways like people who are single mothers and have young children, so they work only half of the time,” Lyster said. Even so, she added, very little of the value of the materials stays with them.

Here’s how PET bottle collection typically works in Brazil: After enough bales are generated, usually by a cooperative that aggregates the waste to achieve the required volumes, they’re sold to an intermediary who purchases them for cheap. The middleman then, in turn, peddles these to different factories at a higher price that leaves him a comfortable cut. Factories don’t like working with the cooperatives or more loosely organized catadores because they think they’re “too chaotic,” though there’s also a degree of prejudice and perhaps snobbishness, Lyster said. That Veja wanted to shorten the chain was met with surprise, derision and even anger.

“It’s very rare for a company to care, to want to know the people that are in the supply

BECAUSE TRACEABILITY IS A VERY OBSCURE SECTOR, IT’S VERY DIFFICULT TO FIND OUT WHERE AND WHO PEOPLE’S SUPPLIERS ARE.” Olivia Lyster, Veja

chain directly, which is why I think a lot of companies are interested in certification because it’s kind of a shortcut that allows you to know where your stuff is coming from without having to do the hard work of really knowing your supply chain,” she said. “For the factories, they’d never had anyone come in and say ‘We want to buy directly from cooperatives.’ And so they were a bit like, ‘It’s just not done in this sector. You guys don’t know what you’re talking about. You don’t know anything about recycling.’ Which was fair enough.”

Kopp and Morillion would be the first to tell you they didn’t know anything about sneaker production when they founded Veja. They were just tired of the “blah blah blah” they kept hearing from the companies they worked with that were “speaking a lot but not doing lots,” Kopp said. “And so we said, ‘If we don’t try to do something different, who will?’ So we said, ‘Let’s build something out of nothing.’ And then we said, ‘What if we do a real product, something that we’re wearing every day, something that is a symbol? That would be completely deconstructed, torn apart and rebuilt with ecological materials with fair trade?’”

With 5,000 euros apiece, the duo picked a country they both loved—Brazil—and started looking for organic cotton growers, spending months in the fields with their shaky Portuguese. Then, with the vague idea that sneakers in the ’40s and ’50s used rubber, Kopp and Morillion decided to explore the material next, leading them to ford rivers to reach remote villages of rubber tappers in the Amazon. From the start, the goal was to pay producers the prices they deserved, not what the commodity markets decided. That became the Veja way.

“So we started from nothing,” Kopp said. “With a production of 5,000 pairs, we bought 2 tons of organic cotton at a special price with a special contract, and so on. And we delivered the shoes. And one week later, there were no shoes anymore in the stores. So all the

E Catadores sort through waste for valuable textiles.

F Fabric ready to be used for new sneakers.

stores—we had 20 clients at the time—were calling us, saying ‘Yes, we want more shoes.’ And then we said, ‘You have to wait six months because it’s going to be a second production and we don’t have enough organic cotton.’ So we started with 5,000, which became 11,000, which became 20,000, etc. And Veja grew and grew naturally.”

Today, Veja is a 600-employee-strong company that makes roughly 4 million pairs of sneakers a year. (Roughly 400,000 of these, or more than 90 percent of the shoes that utilize recycled polyester, are now lined with Eleva.) Veja cares less about certifications than about knowing the people involved. Because when you’re on a first-name basis with the cotton grower, rubber tapper or plastic bottle picker—when you know the names of their children and their pets—that’s already more due diligence than the vast majority of businesses do.

Lyster, together with Luciana Batista Pereira, head of Veja’s cotton sourcing, also refused to be daunted, even in what turned out to be a male-dominated industry. “We were like two crazy women, saying, ‘We want to buy from cooperatives,’” she laughed. They ended up speaking to Valgroup, a plastic production giant that snaps up a good proportion of the country’s bales. Valgroup said no. Then no again. And again. And again. Finally, the company relented.

Castro, who dreams of seeing Paul McCartney in a pair of Vejas she helped make, and Luenia Maria Silva de Oliveira are the leaders of Rede Sul e Sudoeste de Minas Gerais, a network that the 13 catadore cooperatives formed 10 years ago. They are also catadores themselves. At their first meeting with Veja, Lyster and Pereira confessed that they didn’t know anything about recycling, only that they wanted to purchase plastic bottles from the people who picked them. Castro and de Oliveria, both warm and motherly presences, embraced the two immediately.

“Together, we started to think about what do the logistics look like? What does a fair price look like in the contract? How can we get the plastic bottles from the cooperative to the factory and all the different details? And they were instrumental in doing that with us,” Lyster said. “So they really are our partners in this product. And what that involved was a lot of visiting and a lot of talking to people.”

Catadores who sell through an intermediary can expect to garner 1-2 Brazilian reais (18-35 cents) for every kilogram of clear plastic bottles. Without the middleman, the factory gives them 3-4 Brazilian reais (53-70 cents), depending on the market rate, which fluctuates according to seasonal demand. On top of that, Veja pays a bonus of 7 reais ($1.23) per kilogram, which is divided between the network and the cooperative (20 percent each) and the catadores (60 percent).

In the three years since Veja started the initiative, it has purchased 100 metric tons, or the equivalent of 6 million plastic bottles, a year, at what is essentially three to four times the market price. The cooperatives can use the money to purchase additional sheds and trucks or strengthen their security systems. For many catadores, the extra cash has been life-changing, allowing someone to pay for a child’s education or save up for a house or car. At Atremar, a catadore can eke out 1,500 reais ($263) per month, on par with the legal minimum wage. One says she dreams of visiting Disneyland one day.

“This isn’t charity,” Lyster said. “These people are the crux of recycling in Brazil.

They’re providing a service to society by dealing with all of our materials. And they’re providing a service to the environment by making sure that things that can be recycled don’t go to landfill. And so it’s a very concrete service that they’re providing. It just tends to be something that’s not given much value by society. We’re just trying to give value to what they’re doing.”

The last thing Veja says it wants to do is to make the catadores dependent on it, although to an extent they are now because it’s the only company shelling out higher prices. But Veja is a shoe company, not an NGO. Part of the bonus is allocated to cooperatives so they can build autonomy and capacity, so that if Veja disappears one day, they’re not left twisting in the wind.

“Because if the cooperative is strong enough to function by itself, it can find other markets and negotiate prices for themselves,” Lyster said. “A happy moment for us would be for them to start negotiating prices with us because it means that they don’t see us as a donor; they see us as a trade partner.”

At Valgroup’s sprawling facility in Poços de Caldas, a two-and-a-half-hour drive past rolling hills and open skies from Três Pontas, photography is forbidden in all but one area: the open-air storage area where bales of plastic bottles are trucked and stacked near-daily. They loom like buildings some 15 feet above the ground, a city upon themselves. The floor is littered with flattened pieces of plastic that have escaped their former confines and then ground into the dirt by so many footfalls. Across similar setups in Brazil, Mexico and Spain, Valgroup recycles an annual 100,000 metric tons of PET per year, or the equivalent of 4.8 billion bottles.

But recycled PET makes up less than onequarter of Valgroup’s production. It’s mostly in the business of churning out virgin plastic, even though it’s trying to mitigate some of that impact by ramping up its use of wind and solar power, which now make up half its energy sources. Recycling PET, too, isn’t without its hazards. The pyrolysis process that liquefies plastic at temperatures close to 290 degrees Celsius (554 degrees Fahrenheit) can unfurl

I HOPE

PLASTIC BOTTLES

DISAPPEAR FROM THE WORLD ASAP.”

— François-Ghislain Morillion, Veja

toxic byproducts, such as antimony, benzene or toluene. The company says it conducts extensive testing, followed by “cleansing” that removes problematic substances and treats the wastewater afterward.

For now, bales purchased directly from cooperatives only make up a sliver of Valgroup’s accounts. But the experience so far has been a revelation, said Eduardo Berkovitz, its institutional relations and compliance director, adding “Valgroup will continue to source directly from the cooperatives even if Veja says it has enough.”

Morillion goes by “Ghislain” in France but the more flamboyant “Francois” in Brazil, which can confuse people who think he is two separate people. In a sunny boardroom in São Paulo, he says he doesn’t see Veja using polyester, recycled or not, forever. For the most part, he sees recycled PET as a transitional material until something better comes along. Until then, Veja will continue its efforts to encourage people to hold on to their kicks longer through its repair and resale business. Since 2020, it has refurbished more than 35,000 pairs of shoes at “repair stations” in Bordeaux and Paris in France, Berlin in Germany, Madrid in Spain and New York City in the United States. Eventually, Veja hopes to crack textile-to-textile recycling for footwear.

“I hope plastic bottles disappear from the world ASAP,” he said. “At one point, we were already trying to get rid of polyester. And we still are, and testing new materials and developing new alternatives.” If the Eleva project lasts 10 years, helping and promoting the catadores, “that’s good enough,” he added. “And if plastic bottles are then forbidden, which I hope they will,” then perhaps the catadores will be onto better things by then.

At Atremar, the catadores are free agents, as free to come and go as Reciclita, a slinky orangeand-white tabby who is the cooperative’s mascot and inspiration. (His name is derived from the word “recycle” in the local Portuguese.) On average, they work from 7 in the morning to 5 in the evening, alternating between street collection and table sorting. Each one can lay their hands on 4,000 kilograms of materials every day, only 40 percent of which might be the “gold” that is PET. It’s hard, backbreaking and sometimes dangerous work: One catadore was jabbed by a suspicious needle and required six months of shots. All of them frequently experience that carelessness that people throw things “away,” not knowing that “away” leads to places like Atremar, with broken crockery, dead animals, feces and obvious garbage a regular sight among the recyclables. It’s a disrespect they’re familiar with, complete with the flinging of epithets like “horse” (because of the carts they pull) and “garbage people.”

Sometimes, however, the silence is even worse.

“Most companies don’t even want to talk to us,” Castro, who also serves as Rede Sul e Sudoeste de Minas Gerais’s financial director, said through a translator. “But Veja sat and ate with us. Only Veja is different.”

A key difference is engagement that is relational rather than transactional. It’s not only the money but also the recognition of the catadores’ work that’s important, she said. And now, with the passage of time, a model that no one thought would work has proven successive, which also makes it replicable. The naysayers have also been repudiated. Valgroup now says that the cooperatives deliver the “most beautiful,” meaning the cleanest, bales. This is a particular source of pride for the catadores.

“Things only work when we work together,” Castro said.

HOW POLARTEC INNOVATION DELIVERS INCREASINGLY SUSTAINABLE SOLUTIONS

CCREDITED WITH PIONEERING

the world’s first fleece made with recycled content, Polartec®, a global leader in textile innovation, offers over 200 fabric styles made from 50 to 100 percent PCR plastic bottles. Polartec is also behind many of the unique, high-quality fabric technologies that are revolutionizing outdoor adventure. Here, Ramesh Kesh, senior vice president at Milliken & Company and business manager at Polartec, discusses how Polartec is leading the charge toward a greener future.

SOURCING JOURNAL:

With the Beyond Begins Today campaign, Polartec actively enters the conversation around sustainability by showcasing its continuous efforts since decades. What is the driving force behind this initiative?

Ramesh Kesh: From creating the first synthetic fleece to inventing the world’s first fleece made from recycled plastic bottles, innovation and sustainability have been part of our DNA for more than 30 years. Beyond Begins Today is about pushing past what’s been done and creating new solutions that go beyond expectations. The initiative highlights our commitment to people and planet—making products that protect their wellbeing by reducing waste, reducing microfiber shedding, eliminating PFAS finishes, sourcing recycled and plant-based materials and creating durable performance fabrics that last for generations.

Polartec has committed with Milliken & Company to achieving net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. How are you contributing to this goal?

R.K.: Polartec is fully aligned with Milliken & Company in our efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and minimize our reliance on fossil fuels. One important way we are achieving this is through material innovation. For example,

“THE FUTURE OF FABRIC INNOVATION IS BEING WRITTEN TODAY— BEYOND EXPECTATIONS, BEYOND LIMITATIONS AND BEYOND WHAT WE THOUGHT POSSIBLE.”

RAMESH KESH , business manager, Polartec

we’ve replaced fossil-fuel-derived nylons with Biolon™, a renewable, plant-based nylon alternative that reduces carbon emissions by up to 50 percent compared to virgin Nylon 6,6. We are taking this initiative a step further to completely replace the fossil fuel-based building blocks. Another way is to promote recycled and recyclable products, along with natural fibers. Polartec has kept over 2.5 billion plastic bottles out of landfills, using them to create our high-performance fleece and other fabrics.

Microfiber pollution is a major concern in the textile industry. How does Polartec address this issue without compromising durability?

R.K.: Microfiber shedding is a main source of the microplastic pollution found in oceans and waterways, which is why we developed Shed Less, a breakthrough technology that

reduces fiber fragment shedding by up to 85 percent on average during home laundering, according to AATCC 212 2021 testing. With Shed Less we’ve optimized the yarn construction, knitting techniques and finishing processes to lock fibers into place. This ensures the fabric remains soft, breathable and long-lasting while, at the same time, shedding fewer microfibers into the environment. Shed Less technology has already been integrated into our Polartec 200 and Micro Series fleeces, which are industry standards for warmth and comfort, and will be applied to other fabrics in the future.

Why did Polartec develop high-performance alternatives for waterproofing without PFAS chemicals?

R.K.: The significant environmental and health concerns surrounding the

chemicals used in many durable water repellent (DWR) finishes, membranes and fabrics drove us to develop a non-PFAS alternative that could provide comparable or superior waterproof performance. Starting from January 2023, well ahead of industry mandates, we eliminated PFAS-based treatments on all our fabrics. Polartec® Power Shield™ RPM and Polartec® Power Shield™ Pro membranes are prime examples of fabrics that use non-PFAS DWR and layers while maintaining stretch, breathability and durability. These products are developed with circularity in mind and can be chemically recycled back to the monomers. We are first in the industry to have shells that are circular enabled.

Looking ahead, what’s next for Polartec in terms of sustainable innovation?

R.K.: Having already proven that you don’t need to compromise performance to protect the planet, Polartec will continue to evolve our materials and textile treatments to achieve even better results. We share Milliken & Company’s ambitious sustainability goals, from concrete water and energy savings to net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. The future of fabric innovation is being written today—beyond expectations, beyond limitations and beyond what we thought possible. ■

olar c o i ld is a r io abric olog ad i 00% r c cl d pol ib r co

a d d sig d or g -i si r o a c r pro c or r i g a s s ai abl c i d.

B o r ro c o .

olar o r S ld .

TEXTILE-TOTEXTILE RECYCLERS BAND TOGETHER

Circ, Circulose, Re&Up Recycling Technologies and Syre have formed a new industry association to ensure that recyclers have a role in shaping policy. by

Jasmin Malik Chua

“big news,” Peter Majeranowski, president of Circ, wrote on LinkedIn on Wednesday. “The T2T Alliance is here.”

T2T is an acronym for textile-to-textile, which is to say, textile-to-textile recycling. Circ aside, members of the new industry association include Circulose (née Renewcell), Syre, and Sanko’s Re&Up Recycling Technologies. They are among the biggest names that are trying to render obsolete the widely quoted Ellen MacArthur Foundation statistic that only 1 percent of clothing produced is recycled into new clothing. The technologies they tout promise nextgeneration versions of lyocell, polyester and cotton that don’t rely on deforestation, agriculture or fossil fuels.

This isn’t about competition, said Luke Henning, Circ’s chief business officer. Circ, Circulose, Re&Up and Syre might “operate in the same space, but no single company can solve this challenge,” he wrote on the social media platform, referring to the mounting piles of textile waste that are either incinerated or landfilled, often in the Global South. “Creating a viable system for textile-to-textile recycling will take alignment across the industry. The priority now is making sure the foundation is solid—policies that drive action rather than just compliance, frameworks that move the needle.”

Circ, which is headquartered in Virginia, knows all about collaboration. It was only in January that the company linked arms with innovation platform Fashion for Good and forestry nonprofit Canopy to launch a consortium known as Fiber Club. The idea behind this, Circ said, is to scale and fasttrack the adoption of its recycled lyocell and polyester through a four-step process that includes sampling, pilot collections and longterm offtake agreements. So far, brands and manufacturers such as Arvind, Bestseller, Birla Cellulose, Eileen Fisher, Everlane and Zalando have signed up.

Circ and Re&Up are also members of American Circular Textiles, a U.S.-focused lobbying group that includes textile-to-textile recyclers Evrnu and Reju, along with resale and rental companies such as ThredUp, The RealReal, Rent the Runway and Vestiaire Collective. Executives from the organization recently took a trip to Capitol Hill to push for stronger textile circularity and manufacturing policies, including incentives for nearshoring and de minimis reform.

The T2T Alliance will take more of a Euro-centric stance by ensuring that textileto-textile recyclers play a role in shaping European Union policy. It’ll advocate for textile-to-textile recycled content and recyclability as central requirements of the

EU’s proposed ecodesign for sustainable products regulation, argue for flexible verification methods for tracing recycled materials and seek a closed-loop approach that includes post-industrial, pre-consumer and post-consumer waste.

The organization will also debunk misconceptions, such as what it says is the assumption that allowing post-industrial waste to fulfill recycled content targets would make overproduction more attractive.

“We’ll be working directly with EU institutions, contributing to public consultations, and making sure policies aren’t just well-intentioned—they actually work in the real world,” Majeranowski said. “This is about working together to remove barriers,

THE PRIORITY NOW IS MAKING SURE THE FOUNDATION IS SOLID—POLICIES THAT DRIVE ACTION RATHER THAN JUST COMPLIANCE, FRAMEWORKS THAT MOVE THE NEEDLE.” Luke Henning, Circ

set the right foundation and make sure textile-to-textile recycling actually delivers on its potential.”

Dennis Nobelius, CEO of Syre, which is backed by H&M Group’s sizeable coffers, cited the Ellen MacArthur Foundation figure as a reason to act now. Geopolitical turmoil and the glut of cheap clothing is pushing Europe’s textile sorting and recycling sector on what some have characterized as the “brink of collapse.” A recent deal between the European Parliament and Council to enact rules requiring large fashion businesses to pay to clean up their garment waste, is a rare bright spot that can “greatly influence the acceleration of circularity in the sector and empower textile-to-textile recycling as a future standard solution,” he said.

But frameworks are important, Henning said. Environmental campaigners, for instance, have criticized the EU’s zero waste framework for lacking ambition and tangible targets. Without seeking direct input from the companies developing the solutions, the world’s largest single market runs the risk of well-meaning regulations failing to translate into positive real-world impacts, he added.

“The T2T Alliance exists to advocate for policies that support real circularity— ones that require recycled content, ensure recyclability is built into design and recognize the full scope of textile waste, from postindustrial to post-consumer,” he said.

“Regulations need to be practical, scalable, and structured to help brands and recyclers meet sustainability targets in a way that works.”

H Four of the world’s most prominent recyclers have joined forces to lobby on the industry’s behalf.

WILL REJU FINALLY CRACK THE CODE

By 2034,

the “materials regeneration” firm plans to be a $2 billion business with 20 “megafactories.” by

patrik frisk was nearly halfway up the elephant when one of his employees expressed doubts about whether it was a terribly good idea to do so.

Frisk is the CEO of Reju, a self-proclaimed “materials regeneration” company that opened its first operating unit in Germany in October, just 12 months after the company hung out its shingle in France.

It was in a sun-drenched East Frankfurt office, a short stroll from the textile-totextile recycling plant known as Regeneration Hub Zero, that the former Under Armour chief found himself perched gleefully, if also somewhat precariously, on an assemblage of brightly colored clothing shaped to resemble a 3-foot-tall pachyderm.

“You’re part of a new industrial revolution,” Frisk declared before he was asked, most insistently, to dismount. But he had made his point: The surrounding area was once part of a post-World War II boom in polymer research. Now it was time to break new ground again.

The elephant is a physical manifestation of what Reju refers to as the “elephant in the room,” a turn of phrase that has also been used to refer to the 80-200 billion items of apparel that are churned out each year. Not that Frisk isn’t concerned about that, too. He cited a recent Textile Exchange report that found that global fiber production ticked up 7 percent from 116 million metric tons in 2022 to 124 million metric tons in 2023. By most accounts, more than 90 percent of that ends up in a landfill or incinerator.

“If you think about the amount of waste right now, it would be close to over 100 million tons a year,” he added.

But Reju is talking about a different kind of beast.

“The elephant in the room is the fact that without the industry working together, we’re not going to get there,” Frisk said, feet planted back on the carpet. “We like to have the elephant in the room when we have our meetings because we want to make sure that we’re keeping ourselves open to collaboration—because we think it’s really important to realize that this isn’t work that any one company or person can do by themselves.”

What that work involves is taking the world’s growing glut of textile waste and recapturing its fiber content, beginning with polyester, for spinning into new yarn that provides the same performance with better chemistry and—ideally with the help of brands and suppliers—less microplastic shedding.

By 2034, less than a decade away, it plans to be a $2 billion company, with an estimated 20 “megafactories,” each one 50 times the capacity of Regeneration Hub Zero’s 1,000-metric-ton demonstration format. These will be strategically deployed around the globe, or “wherever the waste is.”

BARN-RAISING AN ECOSYSTEM

While splashy names are currency in fashion, Reju has so far swerved any mention of specific brands it intends to work with. Instead, it has inked partnerships with Goodwill and WM in the United States and Cibutex and Nouvelles Fibres Textiles in France to deliver the supply of castoffs it needs to the specifications it desires, though Frisk said that the technology has a higher tolerance for contaminants than most. This is a purely strategic move: The systems that underpin the flow of garments today have been designed to move only in one direction. Reju is going the other way.

“The biggest challenge is that nothing exists, right?” Frisk said. “There is no infrastructure upstream and there is no adoption downstream. And as a consequence, you have to build it. And it’s going to take time.”

Not to mention cost. Every step that’s added to the chain—aggregating materials, sorting for maximum value and then by fiber content, the removal of zippers and hardware—drives up the expense. It stands to reason, then, that textile-to-textile recycled polyester will cost much more than its virgin or bottle-to-textile counterparts.

And yet Frisk said he’s optimistic that “it won’t matter so much,” especially since no one’s going to be making a garment out of 100 percent Reju polyester anytime soon.

“When you look at polyester as an ingredient in a fiber, in a yarn, in a fabric, in

Jasmin Malik Chua

a garment, for example, how much it costs in the total value chain is only a few percentage points,” he said. “So when you’re adding a few more percentage points, the impact in the actual end consumer price, even if you were to pass all of that cost on, is actually much lower than people would imagine. And the bigger the brand, the more negligible it would be. So this is much more a question of, ‘Do you really want to do this or not?’”

Though less than 1 percent of old clothing is recycled into new, according to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, figuring out how to do so isn’t the Holy Grail it used to be. These days, there’s no shortage of cups of the covenant that can dissolve out polyester or cotton from blended fabrics, including Ambercycle from Los Angeles, Re&Up in Turkey and Syre from Frisk’s native Sweden. The trick is beefing up whatever technologies or innovations to commercial scale and, from there, into something that can stand up to the onslaught of cheap and ubiquitous synthetics that make up 64 percent of global fiber production.

But doing so would be no small feat. Despite fashion’s oft-ballyhooed sustainability commitments, the uptake of recycled fibers, including polyester from conventional bottleto-textile sources, has either stalled or shrunk. With more politically motivated economic turmoil waiting in the wings, a conservative backlash against so-called “woke capitalism” and environmental preachiness gaining intensity and potential regulatory rowbacks on their way, even major brands that appeal to their consumers’ ethics have been less willing to place big bets that broker no immediate payoff—no matter how out of step with the new climate reality as that might be.

Even so, Frisk thinks innovations that home in on post-consumer textiles, like Reju’s, still have a good shot. Legislation that holds brands responsible for the clothing waste they generate, is still gaining traction in California, the European Union and elsewhere, even though the financial incentives that would buoy Reju’s work aren’t happening as quickly as he’d like. Several countries that once provided a pressure release valve, including Indonesia, Rwanda and Uganda, are cracking down on secondhand clothing imports to protect domestic manufacturing and jobs. And there’s a growing awareness that used plastic bottles are better off as grist for a recycling system that was made to keep them circulating rather than commandeered for clothing with a limited lifespan.

E The textile “elephant” in the room.

H Patrik Frisk

Reju, he said, also has at least one competitive advantage: seven decades’ worth of expertise, courtesy of Zimmer Polymer Technologies, one of the “originators of polyester in the world” and the reason Reju picked Frankfurt for its demonstration facility.

“That company, which is now part of what we do, has built over 1,000 polyester plants through the last 40, 50, years,” Frisk said. “Actually, a third of all the polyester production that exists in the world today is built in a plant that we were involved with at some point or another.”

This is also the part where Reju’s lore gets a little more complicated. Zimmer was acquired in 2015 by Technip, a French engineering company that built onshore, offshore and subsea infrastructure for oil and gas extraction. Two years later, Technip merged with FMC Technologies in Houston to form TechnipFMC, which, in turn, spun out Technip Energies in 2021 to focus on the energy and chemicals sectors, including the construction of factories that liquify natural gas and pump out “green” hydrogen.

It was Technip Energies that teamed up with IBM and Under Armour to establish a new recycling framework, based on a catalytic chemical process that IBM dubbed VolCat, that would materialize into Reju. A benefit of VolCat is that it can “renovate” the molecules that create polyester infinitely, Frisk said. Technip Energies is now the sole owner of both Zimmer and Reju.

Coupled with experts in business development—he rattled off a series of names with pedigrees linking them to Dupont, Patagonia, The North Face, Timberland, Carhartt and, of course, Under Armour—Reju has a “wealth of knowledge and capability to integrate into the supply chain and go-to-market” that outstrips most of its rivals, Frisk said.

Reju will also deliver polyester, not a “building block” precursor to polyester that other companies might offer, like bis(2-hydroxyethyl) terephthalate (BHET), terephthalic acid (PTA) or monoethylene glycol (MEG). Regeneration Hub Zero was established to tweak and validate the process of depolymerizing textile waste into BHET, but the white powder is also being repolymerized into PET pellets at an old Zimmer plant next door until the time comes to integrate the operations.

Making polyester this way emits 50 percent fewer carbon emissions than with virgin inputs, according to life-cycle assessments conducted by Deloitte, said

Antoni Mairata i Payeras, Reju’s chief technology officer. But he’s also banking on a bigger figure based on the belief that because this is only the start of VolCat’s optimization, claims “can only get better.”

‘NOT TRYING TO REINVENT THE WHEEL’

Clothing doesn’t get trucked to the demonstration plant, a four-story containerlike structure painted with blocks of yellow, pink, coral, teal and cobalt—“the colors of all the textiles we’ve collected,” Frisk said—or, at least, not yet. What’s being hauled in during this testing phase is something called white PET, which resembles popcorn, because it’s the depolymerization portion that’s unique to Reju and what needs to be fine-tuned.

“We only do what we need to do, not more than what we need to do,” Payeras said as he gestured to the front of the building. “When we start increasing to the kilotons that we

THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM IS THE FACT THAT WITHOUT THE INDUSTRY WORKING TOGETHER, WE’RE NOT GOING TO GET THERE.” Patrik Frisk, Reju

have in the future, then we’ll also build something that can create this for ourselves.”

Surrounded by miles of piping that bend in every conceivable direction, the gleaming silver reactor at the heart of Regeneration Hub Zero is Reju’s pièce de résistance. Here, heated up to temperatures of up to 250 degrees Celsius (482 degrees Fahrenheit), ethylene glycol and an unnamed volatile catalyst “decompose” the polyester into its constituent monomers, creating a BHET slurry that can be filtered and purified of dyestuffs and other contaminants before it’s cooled, crystallized and dried back into solid form.

But BHET won’t be all that comes out when more mixed ingredients are fed in. Reju is currently seeking partners to help it treat or recapture byproducts that it expects to collect or expel, like elastane, colorants and even polyfluorinated chemicals concealed in certain textile finishes. Cotton is its next priority because it’ll be VolCat’s largest secondary output.

“What we are not trying to do is to reinvent the wheel,” Payeras said. “So if we find someone that can take our waste and revalorize it, then we will partner up. If nobody is able to separate or further process one [stream] or another, then we’ll do it ourselves.”

All this is happening in parallel because while Reju may “have the best technology” for depolymerization, it’s not “pretentious” enough to think it has the best solution for everything else, he added.

“Many people have asked me why Technip is in this business. Why did you create Reju? Why invest in this?” Frisk said back at the office. “And the reason we did that was because we saw that the technology developed by IBM is the fastest, uses less energy and has the highest yield—all the things that make it possible to industrialize this. Other technologies can depolymerize, but the question is how long does it take? How much energy do you need or what kind of yield do you produce? If any of those three are not efficient, it doesn’t matter that you’re able to do it; you’re not going to be able to scale it.”

But “why“ is still a good question. Despite all of this, Technip Energies is still in the business of fossil fuels. It continues to

build or expand refineries that transform crude oil into gasoline, diesel and other petrochemicals. Through Zimmer, it remains a market leader in polymer technologies that create products such as virgin polyester. Liquified natural gas, a product of hydraulic fracking, makes up more than half of its annual revenue, which surpassed 6 billion euros ($6.2 billion) in 2023, the most recent year with full financial results.

Technip Energies’ well-lined purse bodes well for Reju because it hasn’t required external funding, an issue that not only proved to be Renewcell’s undoing—at least before it was bailed out of bankruptcy and resurrected as Circulose—but that also continues to bedevil independent innovators scrounging for lines of capital to stay afloat. At the same time, might there be questions about whether there’s a disconnect between what appear to be opposing ambitions?

“No, I don’t think so,” Frisk said. “Because Reju is also going to have to make polyester, right? And when we need to, we need to do that in the same factory that might be making virgin polyester. I don’t think, for a very, very long time going forward, we’re going to be living in a world where virgin polyester isn’t going to exist. It’s just such a big commodity today. And if Technip’s technology for polyester didn’t exist, we wouldn’t be able to turn what we’re making back into polyester.”

Some might see Technip Energies’ efforts as greenwashing in the vein of ExxonMobil’s carbon capture project, which never came to pass, or Chevron’s minor spending on alternative energy initiatives. Others could view it as fighting fire with fire or a company fixing a problem it helped create. Only one thing’s for certain—purveyors of virgin polyester have had 90 years to calibrate the fiber for affordability, efficiency and versatility, as Frisk himself notes. It’s insinuated itself so well into the realm of apparel and textiles that it has become nearly impossible to replace. And for Reju and its fellow upstarts in the textile-to-textile recycled polyester space, that legacy is both a gift and a curse.

Now awaiting B Corp certification, which would make it a “for-benefit” company, Reju has big plans of its own. Frisk believes that, in time, the company could seize a market share of roughly 25 percent of textile-to-textile recycled materials. He envisions its future network of “regeneration hubs” doing the work of collecting and processing unwanted garments independently so waste doesn’t have to be shipped across vast distances, defeating the purpose of trying to curb greenhouse gases. If he had his druthers, there would be 100 of these setups. In the immediate term, Reju plans to establish “megafactories” in the United States and elsewhere in Europe to start cranking out 100,000 metric tons of its polyester by 2027.

“Well, let’s get to 20, first,” he said.

Frisk said that wherever Reju heads, so too will the elephant and the reminder it brings to unite a fragmented industry made up of factions that often toil in isolation and without seeing the bigger picture they could be creating. Ultimately what will accelerate the transition, he said, are capacity and cooperation.

“I think we need to remember that for this to work, we need to connect the dots and we need to actually work together,” Frisk added. “Because if we don’t, the chain is going to remain broken. And my message to the industry is, ‘We’re in a little bit of a hurry right now to get this thing going.’”

E A Reju factory.

APRIL 14

DAY 0 (ZERO) SUSTAINABILITY WORKSHOP

APRIL 15-16

EXHIBIT HALL + EXPERT TALKS

OREGON CONVENTION CENTER, PORTLAND, OR

SOURCING with a Conscience

SUSTAINABLE FABRICS REDEFINING ACTIVE LIVING

Discover What’s Next in Performance Fabrics

Join us at Functional Fabric Fair Spring 2025, the leading textile tradeshow in North America, where innovation meets opportunity in outdoor, lifestyle, and activewear design. Experience tomorrow’s trends today and uncover the technologies and textures that will define the Spring 2026/2027 season. Gain early access to groundbreaking products and insider knowledge that will shape the future of our industry.

This trade-only event brings together designers, product developers, buyers, materials managers and many more for exclusive one-on-one conversations with industry leaders, one-of-a-kind special events, and invaluable education and training. Attend Functional Fabric Fair for unparalleled opportunities to enhance your business strategy and stay ahead in the market.

Day 0 Sustainability Workshop

Join us on April 14th, one day before the exhibit hall opens at the Day 0 Sustainability Workshop at Functional Fabric Fair, where industry experts will explore key sustainability topics with a practical, real-world approach. Throughout the day, manufacturers will share insightful case studies, offering tangible examples of sustainability in action. Attendees will engage in dynamic roundtable discussions and interactive activities, gaining valuable knowledge and actionable strategies to implement in their business strategies.

LEARN MORE

NEXT-GEN MATERIALS MAINTAIN MOMENTUM

Sustainability will remain a top priority in procurement. by

Alexandra Harrell

renewcell’s bankruptcy. Syre’s $600 million injection. TômTex named a Time Best Invention of 2024. c Suffice to say, the fashion industry’s material innovation space endured a turbulent 2024. c Not convinced? Next-gen think tank Material Innovation Initiative closed its doors the same week that research firm IDTechEx projected the alternative leather market to spike nearly 40 percent over the next decade. A month later, Mirum maker Natural Fiber Welding restructured operations and furloughed staff just a week before Paris-based lab-grown leather firm Faircraft secured nearly $16 million in Series A funding. While 2024 was shaky for the next-gen market, 2025 sees material innovators standing firm with sustainable solutions for an increasingly indebted industry. c Here are some of the highlights from 2025 so far.

NEXT-GEN LEATHER

At the top of the new year, California-based material innovation company von Holzhausen dropped the Apple Vision Pro Carry Sling: a compact, hands-free “carrying solution” designed exclusively for Apple.

Also in January, Coach and Gen Phoenix shared the stage at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES)in Las Vegas to tease the fruits of their “transformative” partnership. The Tapestry-owned brand signed a three-year agreement with the recycled leather fiber manufacturer and will be launching a new line of Coach Classic bags produced using Gen Phoenix’s leather-scrap-waste turned fully-coated leather material, set to debut later this year and roll out widely in 2026.

Meanwhile, over in Germany, vegan luxury label LuckyNelly showcased the Eden Bag at Gallery Malina in cooperation with Berlin Fashion Week. The purse, which symbolizes reaching a paradise (or Eden) of sustainable luxury, was crafted with a custom version of Rheom Material’s Shorai. The next-gen startup’s biobased leather alternative, extruded as a continuous sheet, was produced in a merlot hue and embossed with a ridged crocodile pattern. Inspired by the Japanese word for “future,” Shorai achieves an 80 percent reduction in carbon footprint compared to synthetic leather. The USDA-certified biobased product is made from natural materials, such as fermentation products, biomass derivatives, minerals and clays. On the runway, Brooklyn-based biomaterials company TômTex partnered with boutique brand Collina Strada on a second season of accessories using its proprietary biodegradable, vegan materials. For FW25, designer Hillary

Taymour reworked classic leather styles into esoteric silhouettes, including a scrunchie bag and dog-muff hand purse.

Ganni incorporated Oleatex, a next-gen leather alternative from its Fabric of the Future program, into the SS25 iteration of the brand’s beloved Bou bag. Derived from olive tree biowaste, Oleatex has a similar lifespan to PU synthetic leather while boasting 90 percent bio-content.

The fabric-forward Danish brand also brought Polybion’s Cesium back to Paris Fashion Week for its continued collaboration with the creator of premium cultivated cellulose. For this season, Polybion provided Ganni with nearly 50 grown-to-order sheets, resulting in around 12 pieces that went through multiple testing rounds and creative exploration until, ultimately, two pieces advanced to the runway: the XXL Hobo Bag in oil green as well as blackberry wine.

E Kai-Isaiah Jamal for Ganni’s “Find Your Bou” campaign.

Allbirds alleges its Moonshot Zero sneaker is the world’s first net-zero carbon shoe.

NEXT-GEN SILK

Spinnova and Ask Scandinavia collaborated on the Nova tote. Made with 30 percent wood-based Spinnova fibers and 70 percent cotton, the bag is naturally dyed the shade amber by Natural Indigo Finland with raw materials derived from the European coffee roaster, Paulig.

Los Angeles label Reformation added Circulose to its material matrix in late January. Working with mills that already have Circulose in supply, the It Girl brand plans to use next-gen cellulosic fiber to help reduce its reliance on resource-intensive materials, specifically silk and traditional viscose. In fact, Circulose was incorporated into a few Ref pieces ahead of the announcement and will continue to grow according to the label, with the goal of introducing Circulose into two or three core fabrications this year in pursuit of Reformation’s Circular 2030 goal.

NEXT-GEN WOOL, DOWN & FUR

Allbirds and Nuyarn teamed on the Moonshot Zero, what the duo is calling the world’s first net-zero carbon shoe. Making the Moonshot— which Allbirds writes as M0.0NSHOT— required maximizing sustainable resources (in this case: carbon-negative, regenerative wool) to “counter” the “more stubborn” parts of the carbon equation.

“Nuyarn’s proprietary spinning technology allowed us to incorporate a high percentage of carbon-negative wool in the yarn, which was essential to achieving its landmark footprint,” said Justin Cleveland, Allbirds’ senior director of materials. “Because Moonshot Zero features an upper and the midsole fully wrapped in

wool, it was crucial to use a robust yarn; Nuyarn checked the box—and then some.”

Japanese biotechnology startup Spiber entered a strategic partnership with Italian mill Botto Giuseppe in late January following the first successful development of 100 percent Brewed Protein yarn.

“We are delighted to start this new collaboration with the development of such a high-tech fiber,” said Silvio Botto Poala, CEO of Botto Giuseppe. “It is a highlight in our sustainability journey.”

This builds off the last October partnership with Burberry on a brewed protein-based scarf, which solidified the British brand as the first luxury player to develop new products with Spiber’s next-gen fiber.

The label teamed with Spiber on the B Shield: a blended scarf woven in Italy. Comprised of 62 percent wool, 30 percent Brewed Protein and 8 percent cashmere, the accessory is inspired by Burberry’s “longstanding” commitment to sustainability.

“We are constantly evolving our fabrics and solutions, from creating a blended scarf to exploring alternative manufacturing processes and groundbreaking agricultural techniques,” said Caroline Laurie, Burberry’s vice president of corporate responsibility. “We pride ourselves on finding new ways to innovate by joining forces with our suppliers and startups. By working at this intersection of creativity and innovation, we are continually challenging ourselves to test and learn.”

NEXT-GEN PLASTIC

The cult of Cycora has made notable recruitments, now counting Ganni as a believer. Per a late-January partnership, the Scandi label signed a four-year offtake agreement with Ambercycle to secure access to the Los Angeles materials science company’s regenerated polyester—effectively becoming the “first progressive luxury brand to integrate the innovative material at scale.”

Per the offtake agreement, Ganni agreed to purchase Cycora before Ambercycle

WE PRIDE OURSELVES ON FINDING NEW WAYS TO INNOVATE BY JOINING FORCES WITH OUR SUPPLIERS AND STARTUPS. BY WORKING AT THIS INTERSECTION OF CREATIVITY AND INNOVATION, WE ARE CONTINUALLY CHALLENGING OURSELVES TO TEST AND LEARN.”

E The von Holzhausen’s Apple Vision Pro Carry Sling is created from Banbū, a durable, plant-based material made from bamboo.

—Caroline Laurie, Burberry

has produced it; effectively ensuring the womenswear brand a steady supply of its regenerated polyester from Ambercycle’s first commercial facility, once up-and-running. While the facility’s whereabouts remain unknown, its commercial operations are expected to kick off in 2026, following the $10 million investment from polyester partner Shinkong Synthetics.

In turn, Ganni promised to increase the amount of Cycora featured in its collections, starting by swapping 20 percent of its annual budget for virgin and recycled polyester with the Ambercycle alternative: upcycled polyester. Fellow leader in ethical luxury, Stella McCartney, also invested in PET by partnering with Balena. The Fashion for Good innovation program participant’s BioCirFlex—a biobased alternative to traditional plastics— will be featured in the designer’s S-Wave Sport trainers for McCartney’s autumn 2025 collection. BioCirFlex is made from sustainable sources, like castor beans and polysaccharides, which biodegrade into renewable biomass when composted in industrial facilities. Alternatively, it can be recycled for continuous use.

“This collaboration represents more than just a partnership; it’s a shared vision of a future where materials are circular, sustainable and high-performance,” David Roubach, Balena’s founder, said. “Stella McCartney has always been a beacon of innovation and responsibility in fashion, and to see Balena’s material—BioCirFlex—integrated into her designs is a milestone I could only have hoped for when we began this journey.”

SIX IN THE MIX

With the fashion industry’s raw materials matrix ever evolving, Sourcing Journal caught up with a wave of sustainability-driven startups on the brink of making an impact.

by Alexandra Harrell

global fiber production surged to a record 124 million metric tons in 2023, according to Textile Exchange’s annual Materials Market report—doubling since 2000. Of that, 75 million metric tons (roughly 60 percent) was synthetic. With textiles accounting for 92 percent of the industry’s total emissions, per the World Resources Institute, navigating fabric’s labyrinth demands a complex approach. c With that in mind, Sourcing Journal connected with six startups poised to shake up the space.

REALLY CLEVER

WHO Really Clever

WHAT Oxford-based Really Clever has developed a patent-granted biochemical process that turns mushroom waste streams into a biomaterial that can be used as a substitute for animal or plastic-derived inputs. The startup’s technology offers brands access to up to 72 million different specifications, allowing the company to meet the necessary industry standards while catering to a brand’s unique needs.

WHERE Oxford and Nottingham, United Kingdom

WHEN Since 2021

WHY Really Clever is entering the industry

foot first: by way of the sneaker market, where price sensitivity, performance demands and scale pose challenges. Operating from its Oxford-based factory, the company aims to replace 10,000-plus metric tons of plasticbased materials by 2030, with key partnerships on the horizon.

HOW Backed by Hoxton Ventures and Singular VC, Really Clever has raised over 5 million pounds ($6.5 million) across three funding rounds. Since launching, it has built a factory with over a million square feet of annual capacity, achieved price parity with plastic in some materials, and secured a patent. Now the team is gearing up for a Series A to scale biomaterials production.

QUOTE “We’re extremely excited by the prospect that, after more than a decade’s worth of research and development, brands have underscored the potential for

H Really Clever believes the future of sustainable materials is here—and it’s powered by fungi.

E NordicBlue is a spin-out from the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Biosustainability at the Technical University of Denmark.

biomaterials to become an important asset in a broad portfolio of carbon reducing strategies,” co-founder Patrick Baptista Pinto said. “We are confident that with our industrialization strategy, coupled with our GTM plan, Really Clever will become the materials partner of choice for when brands are looking to reduce their reliance on plastic and animal-derived products.”

NORDICBLUE

WHO Ditte Hededam Welner

WHAT NordicBlue develops enzymatic solutions for sustainable textile dyeing, prioritizing the environment, cost efficiency and worker safety. Built on years of research from the Technical University of Denmark, the company is now ready to scale its technology.

WHERE Copenhagen, Denmark

WHEN Since 2024

WHY NordicBlue’s enzymatic method for ecofriendly denim dyeing reduces environmental impact and improves work conditions for textile workers. The company’s vision is to produce denim with a clean conscience.

HOW As a spin-out from the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Biosustainability at the Technical University of Denmark, the H&M Changemaker builds on a patented invention of eco-friendly denim dyeing—which has been under research and development for nearly a decade—and has received multiple grants and recognition for its potential.

QUOTE “Since NordicBlue was born last September, it has been some intense months.

IF

WE WANT TO BE SERIOUS ABOUT REACHING NET-ZERO EMISSIONS BY 2050, WE NEED TO FIND SOLUTIONS THAT KEEP SYNTHETIC PLASTICS IN A LOOP”

Lena Strobl, co-founder, FIberflow

We have scaled our biosolutions, made them more efficient, and learned a lot about the market. We have had a very interesting workshop with Mr. Paolo Leidi, a denim dyeing expert,” founder and CEO Ditte Hededam Welner said. “Notably, we have purchased a lab indigo dyeing range from Master, which will significantly accelerate our R&D. With time, we hope to make it available for use in Denmark by anyone interested in sustainable innovation in denim.”

FIBERFLOW

WHO Lena Strobl and Ludwig Morgenstern

WHAT While companies like Circulose, Lenzing, and Circ turn textile waste into new materials, FiberFlow works to ensure that all waste is usable. Its unique process mechanically separates fiber blends, providing

pure feedstock for recyclers. This helps new clothing re-enter the cycle and could eventually tackle landfill waste.

WHERE Leipzig, Germany

WHEN Since 2023

WHY Current recycling technologies tend to focus on polyester and cotton as well as their blends. While these are the most common fibers, they’re often mixed with spandex, nylon or acrylic, making recycling more complex. Leading processes use chemical, enzymatic or hydrothermal reactions to recover fibers at virgin quality, but these methods work best on one or two materials, struggling with mixed inputs. Recyclers use near-infrared (NIR) light to sort blends, but it has limitations—small amounts of spandex, for example, often go undetected. Garments also contain trims and labels that differ from the main fabric, further complicating recycling. While some polyamide/cotton blends are technically

E FiberFlow’s process helps recover valuable materials, driving the industry closer to a circular textile economy.

recyclable, unprocessable materials in the mix often make them unsuitable for feedstock. FiberFlow offers single-material feedstock, potentially scaling textile recycling from a handful of companies to hundreds.

HOW At present, FiberFlow has received multiple awards as well as a startup grant financed by the German government and the European Union. Currently, the H&M Changemaker is working on its first lab-scaled prototype—including all five separation stages—and is further investigating possible recycling routes for the fiber materials the startup can supply.

QUOTE “Looking at the textile industry the majority of materials used in the past and present are of synthetic origin and if we want to be serious about reaching net-zero emissions by 2050, we need to find solutions that keep these plastics in a loop,” co-founder Lena Strobl said. “With FiberFlow, we want to

enable recycling on a broader scale by mining pure materials from mixed textile waste, get the materials into recycling processes and back into a production and usage loop.”

LOOM

WHO Daisy Harvey

WHAT Loom is an upcycling app that connects users with 100-plus designers to transform their clothes. Upload a photo, and Loom suggests options like dyeing, embroidery, alterations or full redesigns—like turning a leather skirt into a handbag. The UK-based platform also specializes in wedding dress redesigns and recently launched B2B services, helping brands and charities upcycle unsold or damaged stock. Global expansion is planned in the coming years.

WHERE London, United Kingdom

WHEN Since 2022

WHY Loom connects individuals and brands with skilled designers to upcycle unworn clothes into bespoke designs. The techpowered platform wants to make upcycling effortless, reduce textile waste and drive a circular future.

HOW The H&M Changemaker supports small, independent designers and has partnered with Been London and Preloved Biotextile to produce an almost 100 percent circular bag.

QUOTE “Upcycling is the future of fashion. As the industry shifts towards circularity, we need scalable solutions that make it easy to repurpose existing clothes rather than create more waste,” founder Daisy Harvey said. “At Loom, we’re building technology to make upcycling mainstream—empowering individuals and brands to transform their unworn clothes into something new, rather than letting them go to waste.”

E Loom connects individuals and brands with skilled designers to upcycle unworn clothes into bespoke designs.

G Kuura offers the industry a novel textile fiber with a significantly reduced environmental footprint.

METSÄ SPRING

WHO Metsä Group’s Kuura

WHAT Kuura comes from softwood Kraft pulp—notably, not from dissolving pulp— which is commonly used as raw material in the production of manmade cellulosic fibers (MMCFs) like lyocell and viscose.

WHERE Espoo, Uusimaa, Finland

WHEN Since 2018

WHY Kuura would, on an industrial scale, be produced and integrated into Metsä Group’s existing bioproduct mill, which doesn’t need any fossil energy to be one of the most efficient pulp-producing mills around. In practice, the bioproduct mill generates significant amounts of excess renewable energy (the likes of steam or electricity, for example), which would be used to meet the energy demand of producing the Kuura textile fiber.

HOW Metsä Spring is Metsä Group’s innovation company that develops new businesses related to wood-based value chains. A recent life cycle assessment, conducted by Etteplan and reviewed by the Rise Research Institutes of Sweden, found that large-scale production of Kuura would produce far less greenhouse gas emissions than viscose, lyocell and cotton. This production process is currently being tested and developed at a greenfield demo plant in Äänekoski, Finland. The plant’s nominal capacity is approximately one metric ton per day.

QUOTE “Metsä Group aims to introduce a new textile fiber product to the market that would be competitive on many different metrics. Environmental impacts, and in particular the potential to mitigate climate change, is one key metric,” CEO Niklas von Weymarn said. “We are very pleased that our new [LCA] with external experts shows that our chosen concept has great potential. This will give impetus to further development.”

ONCEMORE

WHO Södra’s OnceMore

WHAT OnceMore produces high-quality dissolving pulp from blended textile waste and sustainably sourced Swedish wood. As the first large-scale process for recycling blended fabrics, it enables circularity for MMCF products. One of the few fiber-to-fiber recyclers, OnceMore transforms recycled cotton into premium pulp for viscose, modal and lyocell.

WHERE Växjö, Sweden

WHEN Since 2019

WHY OnceMore urges brands to adopt nextgen materials in daily design, emphasizing the need for hands-on experience. With textile fiber production far outpacing recycled fiber supply, early integration is key to closing the gap.

HOW OnceMore is a part of Södra, Sweden’s largest forest owners’ association that processes forest raw materials into renewable products. Its latest collaboration with Bestseller’s Selected brand includes womenswear and menswear, with every piece made of at least 50 percent OnceMore material.

QUOTE “At OnceMore, we say that we are on a journey. We have a fantastic product on the market right now, but we are not done—we strive to be even better, all the time. We keep a close ear to the market, constantly developing and adjusting. We know that we have a product that is ready to meet the future,” said Åsa Degerman, manager of OnceMore.

INDIA BRANDS EMBRACE CANOPY

The forest preservation initiative has been working with several of the country’s biggest players.

by Mayu Saini

when lovebirds did their first Upcycled edit last fall for Harvey Nichols, they were clear about their goals.

“We don’t call ourselves a fashion brand, but rather a clued-in brand—a lovechild between timelessness and modernity,” Amrita Khanna, co-founder of New Delhi-based Lovebirds told Sourcing Journal.

Along with co-founder Gursi Singh, the brand crafted their lineup from scrap fabrics from their previous collection.

Having celebrated their 10th brand anniversary in November with an extraordinary event under the open skies and extensive lawns of the British High Commissioners residence, Lovebirds, took a step further, as they describe it, to “close the circularity loop,” signing up with global NGO Canopy in December.

Canopy, which drives transformative action to eliminate the use of ancient and endangered forests in textiles and packaging while scaling next-gen solutions, works with more than 1,000 brands and is making a big move in the Indian market.

Canopy has already been working with several of the biggest Indian players: Birla Cellulose, Walmart-owned Flipkart and Myntra, as well as fashion brands like House of Anita Dongre, which has an extensive retail network in India. But there’s been a concerted push to work more closely with the Indian market over the last few months, signing up labels like Lovebirds, Doodlage, Ka-Sha, Paiwand Studio, Sonam Khetan and Urvashi Kaur.

Speaking to Sourcing Journal, Canopy’s founder and executive director Nicole Rycroft said that a focused growth on India is part of the plan. “We are thrilled to partner with these trailblazing brands to turn India’s opportunity into reality,” she said, adding that India “has the potential to be one of the world’s leaders in the production of low carbon, circular nextgen materials.”

“I think there’s a consciousness that the regulatory windows and landscape is changing very quickly and that runs parallel with supply chains already being disrupted by the climate crisis,” she said.

“It’s not that we don’t already have really fantastic Indian partners as part of that broader global community. But I think for us organizationally, we are really orienting

our capacity and focus to be able to do more work with Indian brands, specifically to help them understand the value that there is in in working with Canopy and how we can help them both mitigate risk in their supply chain, as well as help and be at the front of the transition to these lower carbon, more circular materials that fit the purpose for the 21st century,” she said.

She reiterated that Canopy believed that India was “better poised than anyone else to become a global leader in this space— potentially producing more than 10 million tons of next-generation fibers annually, by transforming the huge amount of agricultural residue into low-carbon paper packaging and viscose.

The estimated cost, however, could be a barrier at an estimated $13 billion to $15.6 billion.

“India is an important sourcing country for many global brands. So this transition and opportunity for India to be a leader in low carbon, more circular material production,

and how it can impact the forest, and how it helps sustainability, it was quite a learning process,” said Khanna. “We’ve mostly used recycled fabric to make our packaging bags, and we manage things well in our stores in India. We also have global destinations though, with a vibrant and diverse range of partners in the UK. Sustainable packaging for these too is essential, in which the right price points and sources need to be found. With Canopy we can connect on all these counts.”

Karishma Shahani Khan, founder of Ka-Sha, referred to the fact that the relationship with Canopy could make brands more future ready. “Working with Canopy will help us join forces to achieve mutually aligned goals and support our existing circular system in a more effective way. Their policies will initiate a solid structure, which will enable us to evaluate what we do in a more impactful way and build our network of conscious makers. Their innovation with next-gen materials

I THINK THERE’S A CONSCIOUSNESS THAT THE REGULATORY WINDOWS AND LANDSCAPE IS CHANGING VERY QUICKLY AND THAT RUNS PARALLEL WITH SUPPLY CHAINS ALREADY BEING DISRUPTED BY THE CLIMATE CRISIS.”

is not just for the Indian marketplace. It’s recognizing the importance that India can play and the pace-setting role that it can lead for the global market,” Rycroft observed.

The addition of Doodlage, Lovebirds, Ka-Sha, Paiwand Studio, Sonam Khetan and Urvashi Kaur brings the CanopyStyle initiative to 560 brand partners globally, collectively representing over $1.06 trillion in annual revenues. Brands are able to immediately mitigate their risk of sourcing from ancient and endangered forests by sourcing from viscose producers that attain green shirt status in Canopy’s Hot Button Report—an annual rating of global viscose producers.

Additionally, Pack4Good, Canopy’s initiative to eliminate the use of virgin forest fiber in paper packaging, has now garnered more than 432 committed brands with annual revenues exceeding $240 billion.

“These brands reflect the soul and future of Indian fashion—craftsmanship, innovation and being on the leading edge of the sustainability transition,” said Nicole Rycroft.

How does this help the smaller brands in their journey?

“For us as a brand it’s been a continuous journey to be more sustainable. When we use certain yarn we don’t know the actual source

will give us the chance to explore newer materials and expand the possibilities of what our work could look like in the future,” she said.

Canopy itself has a long list of opportunities waiting for transformative action, which are ready for implementation.

“In our conversations with Indian brands we found that they are aligned in terms of decarbonization goals, having sustainability programs in place to address the climate change, biodiversity footprint, and to mitigate their supply chain risk. In addition, what we do see is that business leaders are like, ‘We’re not doing this just because it’s the right or the good thing to do. We do it now because it’s a business imperative. This is a strategic business priority for us,’” Rycroft said.

H Leading industry brands are embracing circularity more than ever.

Nicole Rycroft, Canopy

BEYOND POLICY CYCLES

Jaggaer’s vice president of product management outlines why sustainability will remain a top priority in procurement. by Alexandra Lafaurie

the changing political climate in the United States seems to have shifted sustainability lower down the list of priorities with the official exit from the Paris Agreement and a commitment to increase fossil fuel extraction. While this may create uncertainty among businesses wishing to align their efforts with future government sustainability requirements, the underlying drivers of a sustainable future, such as innovation, tapping into cost-efficient renewable energy and consumer demand for ethical practices, show no sign of disappearing.

While there might be a short-term shift in policy, these tend to be cyclical as demonstrated by the United States’ departure from and subsequent rejoining of the Paris Agreement, respectively in 2017 and 2021. The major drivers for sustainable development are by now entrenched in business operations and procurement officers remain under pressure to meet demands related to sustainability goals and mostly to reduce risks in their operations. As a result, businesses cannot afford to deprioritize sustainability, even during periods of regulatory uncertainty.

SCOPE 3 EMISSIONS AND COLLABORATION

The Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program, or GHGRP,(codified at 40 CFR Part 98) mandates reporting of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from large GHG emission sources, fuel and industrial gas suppliers, and CO2 injection sites in the United States. California also has its own GHG reporting requirements, and across the globe not only do more and more businesses need to report their GHG emissions but there is an increased emphasis on the measurement and reporting of Scope 3 emissions.

While Scope 1 and 2 emissions are directly produced by or physically occur at the company, Scope 3 emissions relate to the supply chain and may be created up or down the chain. They are thus harder to monitor without accurate supply chain management systems and excellent supplier visibility. The UN reports that scope 3 emissions usually account for more than 70 percent of a business’ carbon footprint, highlighting the critical role that supplier collaboration plays in achieving environmental goals, as organizations must strengthen their ability

to raise sustainability standards throughout their supply chains.

Digital procurement systems can help increase transparency around these, improving communications with suppliers and targeting high-risk areas for Scope 3 emissions. These tools also enable real-time visibility across the entire supply chain, allowing companies to anticipate and mitigate risks that could hinder the achievement of their GHG targets. The best way to reduce your Scope 3 emissions is to include it as a criterion in the first steps of your sourcing process: compare your suppliers’ emissions before you award them a market.

TECHNOLOGY-ENHANCING TRANSPARENCY AND TRACEABILITY

Comprehensive emissions reduction requires full transparency over the organization’s carbon footprint and technology can play a crucial role in improving transparency and traceability within supply chains. Digital tools offer verifiable tracking mechanisms that make environmental claims more trustworthy and enable supplier-specific measurement of Scope 3 emissions. Additionally, AI and LLM models can analyze large volumes of information to identify potential areas for improvement at all stages within the supply chain, favoring collaborative strategies across the supply chain. This could be the integration of activities such as compiling large data sets on suppliers from publicly available data to create ESG-related scores per suppliers and then communicating these scores with suppliers and applying developments plans.

Digital procurement platforms also allow companies to embed sustainability criteria into sourcing and supplier onboarding processes, ensuring purchasing teams only engage with suppliers that can demonstrate their commitment to the environment. Additionally, AI can be used to suggest and automatically introduce clauses and conditions for contracts to ensure sustainability conditions are met.

AI-powered analytics can help identify potential environmental risks, such as a supplier’s change in policy or a new unethical extraction method early on, allowing businesses to revise sourcing strategies accordingly. It can also help identify labor violations within supplier networks, ensuring ethical labor practices and reducing the risk of reputational damage while machine learning algorithms can enhance governance by monitoring compliance with evolving regulations, helping companies stay ahead of legislative changes.

COMPLIANCE AS A BUSINESS IMPERATIVE

Regulatory compliance remains a major factor driving sustainability initiatives, particularly for businesses engaged in international trade. A growing number of international regulations reinforce the necessity of sustainable supply chain management, compelling businesses to implement robust strategies. As regulatory frameworks evolve, procurement technologies play a vital role in ensuring compliance and supporting sustainability reporting, as they enable integration of checks and balances into procurement processes.

Even beyond regulatory obligations, companies that prioritize sustainability can gain a competitive edge by fostering stronger relationships with consumers, investors and partners. Sustainable practices reduce operational risks, improve efficiency, often reduce costs and align with global market expectations for ethical sourcing and environmental responsibility.

EVEN BEYOND REGULATORY OBLIGATIONS, COMPANIES THAT PRIORITIZE SUSTAINABILITY CAN GAIN A COMPETITIVE EDGE BY FOSTERING STRONGER RELATIONSHIPS WITH CONSUMERS, INVESTORS, AND PARTNERS.

Indeed, regulations might change or become less strict in one area of the world for a period of time. But these sustainable practices in procurement insure much more than being compliant: they contribute to creating a more stable operation, help engage with more reliable suppliers that have stable financial and governance practices and maintain a labor force that is resilient and expert, thanks to their practices. Sustainability is also a huge source of cost reduction. We often think that a more sustainable supplier or product is more expensive, but this is not true. In fact, it might cost less in transport or in after sales service to choose a supplier closer to your operations. Similarly, the design of a product can also gain in innovation with less packaging, lighter material, less water used and thus lower costs.

Despite the cyclical nature of policy changes, sustainability must remain central to supply chain strategy. The continued advancement of technology, coupled with stringent regulatory frameworks, ensures that sustainability is not just a corporate responsibility but a business necessity. By leveraging predictive analytics, enhancing transparency through digital tools and adhering to international compliance standards, businesses can future proof their supply chains and contribute to a more sustainable global economy.

Alexandra Lafaurie, JAGGAER

CARBON EMISSIONS AMID A TARIFF BACKDROP

Ty Colman, co-founder of emissions management software firm Optera, talks carbon mitigation options and the importance of data. by Vicki M. Young

tariffs are adding a new layer to fashion firms’ operating overhead. Now fashion firms will need to balance that with the high costs of investment in sustainability goals.

Ty Colman, co-founder and chief revenue officer of emissions management software firm Optera, shares some thoughts on carbon emissions and what companies should and shouldn’t do to reduce their output.

Sourcing Journal: Fashion consumption is projected to grow over the next five years. This is mostly due to the growth of fastfashion firms, which are projected to be a major contributor of both clean water pollution—from dyeing to finishing production—and textile waste in landfills. From your data points, how are these firms faring in their efforts to lower carbon emissions?

Ty Colman: Fast-fashion companies, despite their growing impact on pollution and textile waste, often fly under the radar when it comes to emissions reporting. Many fall below the revenue thresholds required for mandatory disclosure, and since they’re usually not the biggest or most important suppliers to major retail brands, they face less pressure to track or reduce their carbon footprint. Certainly, there are some exceptions, but from what I’ve seen in the majority of CSR [corporate social responsibility] and ESG [environmental, social, and governance] reports, there’s not much evidence that they’re making serious investments in sustainability on their own, likely because there’s little incentive. But this doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t.

Emissions reduction efforts—such as converting to renewable energy sources—can create long-term cost

savings. And consumers are increasingly demanding transparency and sustainable practices, even from fast-fashion brands. Companies that proactively reduce emissions can differentiate themselves in the crowded market, build stronger brand loyalty, and future-proof their business for the impending transition to a low-carbon economy. While the regulatory pressure may be minimal now, the tide will shift, and those who act early will be better positioned to meet increasing expectations.

SJ: Since U.S. President Donald Trump took office again his administration has threatened to implement a wide range of tariffs. And while some tariffs are on a delayed timing, it would appear that turf wars could be on the horizon. What do you see as shifts in sourcing and the supply chain,

and more importantly, how could this impact carbon emissions and sustainability efforts?

TC: With the ongoing tariff battle, the long-term impact on sustainability remains uncertain. However, rising tariffs will likely increase reported emissions, not necessarily because companies are emitting more but because of how they calculate their carbon footprint. Many fashion and retail brands use spend-based emissions models, meaning their supplier’s emissions are allocated per dollar spent with that supplier. That methodology results in a situation in which, as tariffs push prices higher, reporting companies’ reported emissions will also rise—even if their actual environmental impact doesn’t change.

Some retailers may see these ongoing tariff wars as a reason to explore nearshoring or re-shoring opportunities,

moving production closer to home (for example, moving apparel manufacturing from China to the U.S.). The benefits of this are twofold: avoiding tariffs and reducing carbon output. Companies could reduce transportation emissions while also investing in greener production facilities with more access to renewable energy. However, this transition can’t happen overnight. Moving is costly and complex. At the end of the day, cost and logistics will dictate most supply chain decisions, which is why brands must stay connected with suppliers and improve data collection to manage climate-related risks. Unfortunately, tariffs and other geopolitical tensions will likely forestall dramatic decarbonization progress for many companies.

SJ: Sustainability efforts are expensive to implement. And with the potential of tariffs adding to the cost factor, how can companies balance the dual challenge of rising tariffs and sustainability goals? What should be their priorities?

TC: Given that cost and logistics are the main drivers of supply chain decisions right now, sustainability goals will likely take a backseat as tariffs increase. However, investors and consumers are increasingly demanding sustainable products and business practices. Combined with the cost savings enabled

by renewable energy sources, companies cannot afford to delay decarbonization initiatives for long. To navigate this challenge, companies must prioritize data transparency and engage more closely with suppliers. Organizations need to clearly understand where their suppliers are based and how their operations impact sustainability. By relying on more accurate, supplier-specific emissions data, rather than just spend-based models, businesses can make smarter decisions that strike a balance between cost control and sustainability goals.

SJ: The idea of nearshoring or re-shoring seems like an obvious solution, although for fashion, the infrastructure required would need to be rebuilt from scratch and would take several years. Do you see this as a possibility over time?

TC: Like you mentioned, the infrastructure required for re-shoring or nearshoring, especially for fashion production, isn’t available in many regions. While it’s not out of reach, it’s definitely not a quick fix. Building the necessary infrastructure and transitioning production could take years, and that process could get costly.

On the flip side, moving production closer to home could help reduce shipping emissions, but it could also introduce new challenges. In regions with less efficient energy grids, relying

WHILE THE REGULATORY PRESSURE MAY BE MINIMAL NOW, THE TIDE WILL SHIFT, AND THOSE WHO ACT EARLY WILL BE BETTER POSITIONED TO MEET INCREASING EXPECTATIONS.”

more on local energy sources could offset some of the environmental benefits.

Re-shoring or nearshoring isn’t impossible, it just comes with its own set of pros and cons. For fashion companies thinking about making the shift, it’s essential to ensure that their local operations are both efficient and sustainable. The goal should be to avoid shifting emissions elsewhere—whether through production processes, energy use, or raw material sourcing—so that re-shoring truly contributes to longterm sustainability goals.

SJ: What approaches do you recommend as providing the best bang for the buck, given what you are seeing based on your data points?

TC: I’d recommend going deeper into supplier-specific data. It not only helps with tracking environmental

Ty Colman, Optera

impact, but also supports responsible sourcing and gives better insight into supplier risk and resilience. I’ve never heard a company say, “I wish we didn’t have as much data on our suppliers.” The more you know, the better decisions you can make.

On the flip side, I recommend against relying on spend-based analysis. With inflation and tariffs causing constant price swings, this approach can create a lot of noise and doesn’t give a clear picture of where the real environmental challenges or opportunities are. I’d also be cautious about overwhelming suppliers with disclosure requests without offering guidance or support. Instead, fast fashion companies’ goal should be to help suppliers develop good quality, transparent, and actionable data—information that not only helps them improve their own operations but also strengthens the retailer’s overall sustainability efforts.

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