The ReGenesis Protocol is the luxury industry’s latest reminder that if money talks, wealth walks. Or, at least, it considers taking a different approach to achieving climate neutrality than the middle-and-under markets.
Temera, for one, got creative with upcycling production waste.
“Circularity is super challenging and super complex. It’s a really difficult conversation; there are opportunities for waste reduction at each point of the system that exists,” Anne Warren, a special projects team member at the Sustainable Angle and moderator of the panel, said. “There’s also this need for a larger scale systemic change to move away from the liner, take-make-waste model to a more circular model.”
Accelerating Circularity’s first few years were spent trialing textile-to-textile recycling systems. Now, the organization is in the process of scaling the successes of those trials, though challenges persist. On the materials side, those kinks include the aggregation of materials and operating beyond batch levels.
“Right now we’re still doing really bespoke feedstock for each and every recycler but I’m beginning to hear inklings that recyclers are thinking about this from a more systems perspective, which is encouraging,” Sarah Coulter, Accelerating Circularity’s U.S. program director, said. “They want to develop their feedstock that can be used by more than just one mill, which is amazing.”
That said, developing accessible feedstocks presents its own set of snags. Mechanical cotton recycling, for one, is “neglected” in favor of exploring more advanced recycling options, despite the method’s well-established process that yields reliable results.
“I think I am probably not going to shock anyone when I say that market demand is a challenge,” Coulter said. “We need to figure out the economics and what the runway is to get the return on a lean infrastructure investment that we need to make the model work.”
Digging into that market demand, the complexities of circularity can be boiled down to how it’s communicated to not just the fashion industry but the collective consumption community at large.
“The world generates 3.5 million tons of trash, of solid waste, per day. That number is 10 times the amount that we produced a century ago, and that number is expected to increase by 11 times by the end of the century; we have a solid waste emergency on planet Earth,” Tara Maurice, a circular design strategy educator and Coachtopia’s lead circularity R&D, said.
The reason for this crisis, she continued, is because of how we have designed our systems. Those systems generate waste at each step throughout the supply chain and, per Maurice, whoever is generating the waste tends to normalize it.
“But the waste from each step in the process is not communicated along the chain, so at each stage, there’s invisible waste,” she continued. “We are generating enormous amounts of waste in the process of making things, and then we’re generating even more waste as we make things and put them in landfills.”
The solution? Radically reshaping the way these problems are contemplated.
“These are systems-level problems; we have to get people invested and interested in shifting the system,” Maurice said, noting that it’s not about swapping out materials for greener options—it’s not about the input of the material, it’s how the system operates. At least, that’s the approach Coachtopia took. The first step in doing so the Tapestry-owned brand took was locating where this “invisible waste” lives throughout the supply chain via internal audits.
“It’s invisible for a reason; people don’t want you to see it,” Maurice said. “I think it just really starts with, like, we have to radically reshape how we think and we have to get comfortable looking at things that, for a very long time, have been invisible to us.”
Södra’s OnceMore initiative concurred, stating it’s a mindset that needs to change.
“What I think now is the huge gap between the collecting and sorting of textiles—right now everyone is asking me what will happen to the waste, we have a couple of solutions, but we need more,” Åsa Alvhage, OnceMore’s sourcing manager, said. “When it comes to a systems change, I think that we need to go back and treat the symptoms of the waste, because right now it’s a waste management problem, and it should be the other way around.”
From Hyosung’s perspective, the No. 1 spandex manufacturer’s operational output plays a principal part, too.
“We realized that when you’re in the production cycle and you have this raw material, you have the wastage that’s coming off the production—that’s a real cost you then have to problem solve for,” Malvina Hoxha of Hyosung’s marketing team said. “Everybody wants it for cheaper so it’s not about how we get to the bottom. It’s about how do we build more systemic changes that optimize for the better.”
That said—who, exactly, is the invisible waste invisible to? Per Maurice, everyone. Waste operates like Matryoshka dolls: each nesting doll tacks on more waste that the larger matryoshkaparallel is unaware of.
“I don’t think we realize how complex supply chains are, how much visibility we have deep inside of them,” she said. “It’s like, it is a vast amount that we don’t fully appreciate.”
