It’s easy to get swept away in the current fashion trends, but the truth is that the fashion & textiles industry is a huge contributor to waste that could be avoided in the first place.
According to the United Nations Environment Programme, the fashion industry is responsible for around 10% of global carbon emissions and nearly 20% of wastewater. On top of this, less than 1% of the material used to produce clothing is recycled into new clothing and around 12% is down-cycled into less valuable items (Ellen MacArthur Foundation). How can we change these numbers?
On March 11th at 17:00 CET, we heard from three start-ups on their circular fashion & textile solutions. Following the start-up presentations, the audience had the chance to ask the start-ups questions directly in a live Q&A session, led by our expert moderator Laurent-Frederic Lohmann, Head of Investor Relations at 4P Capital.
In the keynote by Juliane Kahl, Founder & CEO Responsive Fashion Institute, we saw what the future of fashion with AI could look like.
The key takeaways:
- Education is important, as mindset change needs to start at the beginning. We also need traceability, trust, and transparency.
- It’s all about collaboration. Experts, policymakers, designers, and industry leaders must come together in order to change our current situation.
- There are so many creative ways products can be made circular in the fashion and textile sector.
Check out the full Trend Tour below:
Moderation By:
Rachel Johnson
Program Manager
Laurent-Frederic Lohmann
Head of Investor Relations
Keynote By:
Juliane Kahl
Founder & CEO Responsive Fashion Institute
The Start-ups
Victor Durand
Head of Operations
Based In: Paris, France
What They Do: Ever Dye is painting a brighter, cleaner, and more sustainable future for the fashion industry. They’ve cracked the code on two major issues in the dyeing world: synthesizing dyes and attaching them like a pro. Their team has developed not one, but two chemical solutions: a negatively charged pretreatment that sticks to fibers and a positively charged pigment made from vegetal waste and minerals that attaches to the pretreatment. But that’s not all – the magic formula is crafted from organic and inorganic elements, ditching the toxic petroleum-based dyes and going all-natural. Ever Dye takes the most cutting-edge scientific knowledge to create colors that play nice with our environment. But changing the fashion game requires a team effort. That’s why they’re partnering up with industry leaders to assess their product’s performance and drive sustainable fashion design, production, and lifecycle.
Mario Osterwalder
Product Manager
Based In: Berlin, Germany
What They Do: reverse.fashion is a sustainable design agency creating product and system innovation for a circular economy in fashion and textiles. reverse.fashion is developing services for circular design and closed-loop recycling. In addition, they offers consultancy, training and hands-on support to encourage fashion brands to integrate circular design principles, strategies and circular materials into the core of their business, in order to optimize products for future recyclability. reverse.fashion is a spin-off of circular.fashion (a CIRCULAZE Top 21 Start-up 2023), which provides AI-based intelligent textile sorting technology.
Viktoria Kanar
Co-Founder & CEO
Based In: Israel, Europe, and US
What They Do: Re-Fresh Global provides end-to-end solutions for the circular economy through novel textile waste management technologies. They initiate and implement circular economy projects, training, and international cooperation programs to create a business ecosystem for industry, government, and the social sector for circularity and innovation. A team of world-class designers, scientists, and business innovators, Re-Fresh Global is pioneering a fresh approach to textile waste. Where others see waste, they see an opportunity to create new, planet-friendly resources. Their main operations are in Europe, where new regulations phasing out the burning and dumping of discarded textiles by 2025 mean that circular solutions to textile waste are in high demand.