Whether separating your recycling or repurposing textile waste, practicality and convenience are key to finding solutions that people will actually use.
The three finalists in Ebay’s Circular Fashion Fund have all created unique and viable solutions to help the fashion industry achieve the goal of becoming circular by 2030.
Australians offload 200,000 tonnes of textile landfill each year. One of the primary drivers is the ‘hauls’ of poor-quality garments that are lucky to last a season if not a night, and which consumers end up offloading. Oftentimes, these garments can’t be recycled due to the petrochemicals and other materials added to the construction.
For the fashion industry to reach complete circularity, both the supply chain and consumer behaviour need to change.
As the winner of Ebay’s Circular Fashion Fund this year, textile recycling provider Dempstah received a $100,000 prize, while Rcycl and The Very Good Bra were each awarded $50,000 to support their circular business solutions.
A shortlist of seven finalists pitched ideas to the judging panel of industry experts across fashion, academia, logistics and sustainability, including Australian Fashion Council (AFC) and Seamless project director Danielle Kent, Sendle founder and CEO James Chin Moody, director of the University of Technology Sydney and TAFE NSW’s centre of excellence in sustainable fashion and textiles Dr Lisa Lake and Ebay Australia’s head of fashion Brooke Eichhorn.
Ebay Australia’s fashion lead Anne-Marie Cheney believes the three finalists will drive positive change within the fashion industry.
“Circularity is the future of the fashion industry and we all have a part to play in making that transition,” Cheney said.
With Australians purchasing an average of 56 items of new clothing a year, older garments inevitably end up in a pile to be discarded – but how?
Rather than a ‘chuck-out’ pile, Rcycl (pronounced ‘recycle’) founder Belinda Paul refers to unwanted garments as the ‘Rcycl’ pile.
She has created a three-step solution to help consumers responsibly dispose of tattered clothing.
Consumers can purchase Rcycl’s fully compostable return satchels at participating retailers, fill them with clothes that are not good enough for a charity bin and send them back to the business via Sendle.
Rcycl, through its recycling partners, sorts the garments by fibre type. They are then shredded, spun into yarn and woven into new fabric.
The business is currently focusing on the accessibility of its solution, which was launched at Melbourne Fashion Week in 2022. Three years prior, in 2019, Paul was evacuated from her home after horrific bushfires. Having worked in and been exposed to the problem of textile waste within the retail and fashion industry, Paul made it her mission to apply her expert knowledge to the daunting issue that of pollution, which is contributing to global warming.
“If something is too hard, people don’t invest in it. And so Rcycl is meant for that. It’s meant to be used in an accessible fashion, habitually and rotationally,” Paul told Inside Retail.
“The challenge is bringing something into that space to make it comfortable, easily digestible and easily understood. So it can be easily utilised, and therefore we get the greatest impact,” Paul elaborated.
Dempstah is another organisation tackling the problem of textile waste.
Founded by Guy Dempster, who has worked in the fashion and textile trade for over a decade, including with designers in New York and Sydney, and with manufacturers across southern China and Hong Kong, Dempstah is building Australia’s first waterless fibre recovery mill in Tasmania.
Dempster was first exposed to this innovative technology when his former employer in Hong Kong opened a small-scale mill. Now, he aims to replicate the concept locally.
Currently, Dempstah recycles textile waste into yarn in collaboration with a network of international and local textile mills. The next phase will allow this process to be done in a water-free way locally at scale. This aligns with Dempstah’s mission to ensure waste traceability via a fibre recovery mill in North West Tasmania.
Dempstah sells spun yarn directly to consumers online and through Sydney-based circular fashion brand Citizen Wolf, which uses the product in its knitwear production. Secondly, the recovered fibres are sold to manufacturers, which can be used as an alternative to traditional synthetic fibre fill-in garments, homewares and furniture.
The Very Good Bra is a completely compostable bra and in the words of its founder Stephanie Devine “the world’s first and still the only 100 per cent plastic-free and wire-free bras in up to 34 proper bra sizes”.
Devine didn’t set out to create this world first, but when she was diagnosed with breast cancer, she was unable to find a wireless bra made from 100 per cent natural materials and proper bra sizes to see her through treatment.
“The only ones were maternity bras and I’d just been told I’d never be able to have kids after chemo, so it felt very wrong and it weirdly stuck with me,” Devine told Inside Retail.
“Cut to 10 years later, Trump was elected president and women were burning their bras in the street. At the same time, the poor people in Dehli were burning rubbish to keep warm and dying from the toxic fumes,” said Devine.
“These events crystallised my idea to get going and design a botanically circular bra that would leave no trace at the end of life if buried or burnt,” Devine continued.
In 2018, she created a Kickstarter campaign, which reached its funding goal in 48 hours, and a year later, in 2019, she was able to demonstrate that the very first product had completely decomposed in a worm farm.
“Over time as I’ve learned more my aim has become bigger than saving the earth one bra at a time. The Very Good Bra has become an instrument of consumer education, advocacy and a driver of broader industry change,” Devine said.
The three finalists’ innovations all have a role to play in making the fashion industry circular.
Each industry-disrupting founder understands the importance of collaboration to communicate the overall goal and achieve positive change.
Dempstah recently collaborated with Salvos Stores and the City of Sydney to collect 500kg of post-consumer waste and transform it into 5-ply cotton and wool blend yarn.
Rcycl partnered with Mirvac on a national campaign that offered bulk textile recycling within its shopping centres last year, and Paul said “it was a huge success”..
The Very Good Bra’s fulfilment partner is the social enterprise Avenue Co-working, a venture that provides meaningful employment opportunities for individuals with disabilities who may not otherwise find work.
Eager to hit the ground running and collaborate, Dempster believes there is ample room for the three finalists to work together and praised each of their achievements.
“Belinda is doing such tricky work being directly public-facing, trying to figure out how to make it easy for people to give that textile waste to us? How do we sort that waste effectively?” Dempstah said.
“I appreciate and love Stephanie and The Very Good Bra because biodegradability is also incredibly crucial and recycling does require energy and resources.”
“We need a big landscape of different players trying things that know they can’t all be perfect, but we’re all experimenting and learning as we go,” he concluded.
The post Three innovative Aussie businesses tackling textile waste destined for Dempstah appeared first on Inside Retail Australia.
