Finding collaborators with shared ambitions

Danish womenswear brand GANNI has set itself the ambitious target of cutting its carbon footprint by 50% by 2027. With a significant portion of its greenhouse gas emissions coming down to its raw materials, the brand has specified that it is committed to decreasing its dependence on synthetics – particularly recycled polyester sourced from bottles – which constituted approximately 13.6% of its carbon footprint at the material level in 2022.

After carrying out extensive market research, GANNI was able to refine its objective. “While recycled PET bottle fibers offer substantial opportunity within plastics and polyester, we were keen to explore solutions within true textile-to-textile recycling,” said Julie Verdich, the brand’s Material Innovation Lead. This led them to actively pursue partnerships that could open the door to innovative solutions – like Ambercycle’s cycora®.

cycora® is a regenerative polyester made from post-consumer and post-industrial textile waste. Powered by molecular regeneration technology, cycora® transforms textile waste into virgin-grade materials. The innovative fiber gave GANNI the opportunity to reduce its reliance on both virgin materials and recycled PET bottle fibers, while also ramping up its commitment to addressing environmental impacts at the raw material level.

As an early-stage innovator, Ambercycle was keen to find committed brand partners to integrate cycora® into a product portfolio at scale while educating their end customers on the importance of circularity. From the early days, the company has identified these two pillars as crucial components in building a truly circular economy. After approaching GANNI on a trip to Denmark, they began forging a long-term vision for their strategic partnership.

“While recycled PET bottle fibers offer substantial opportunity within plastics and polyester, we were keen to explore solutions within true textile-to-textile recycling.”

Overcoming the obstacles of early-stage innovation  

Thanks to their collaborative resourcefulness, Ambercycle and GANNI have now launched a sports jersey using cycora® as part of the GANNI Fabrics of the Future Collection. This launch marks the beginning of other releases too.

For GANNI, integrating cycora® required a problem-solving mentality to overcome obstacles not present with more widely used commercial fibers. “Navigating the landscape of innovation comes with challenges related to scaling and availability,” explains Verdich.

In the early days of their partnership, GANNI came up against challenges with the diversity of fabrications and applications feasible, as well as finding limited types of yarn available at the scale needed. “Overcoming this obstacle has required us to forge close partnerships with our supply chain, ensuring that we can meet minimum order quantities (MOQs) while adhering to tight timelines,” added Nava Esmailizadeh, Ambercycle’s Head of Brand.

GANNI stressed the importance of kickstarting collaborations in early stages, to “not only build demand but also provide innovators with the necessary support to scale their production and meet the MOQs required for large-scale manufacturing.”

As it continues to scale, GANNI is also working to raise the recycled content included in its products. So far, it has successfully increased it from 25% to 30%, with plans to reach 70% in the future.

Strengthening partnerships across the supply network

The sports jersey’s launch has been a key milestone in cementing the partnership between GANNI and Ambercycle.

“Once a material is proven with a product launch, we experience closer alignment with the material partner, fostering an environment that allows for seamless progression in the material development,” explains Verdich, expanding on GANNI’s position. “This alignment streamlines the process, making it more straightforward to navigate the subsequent stages of material refinement and innovation.”

From Ambercycle’s perspective, having brand buy-in is key to strengthening partnerships with other stakeholders, thereby ensuring that cycora® is smoothly integrated into the supply chain. The company claims that support from GANNI has been “essential in leveraging mill partners to assist in this process.”

The partners also emphasize the importance of collaborating closely with the whole supply network – especially when it comes to handling innovative materials on a smaller scale. “Their insights help us understand how to support the success of material innovations, and how to effectively collaborate with them,” added Verdich, speaking to the invaluable expertise of its supply chain partners.

“Once a material is proven with a product launch, we experience closer alignment with the material partner, fostering an environment that allows for seamless progression in the material development.”

Embracing the process of continual improvement

In forming this collaboration, GANNI and Ambercycle committed to working together through the steps needed to reach their shared vision, without waiting for policies or conditions to be perfect first.

As Esmailizadeh puts it, “embracing the idea that innovation is an iterative process is key to fostering a culture of continuous improvement and innovation. It’s important to align on a clear vision of where we want to go and stay committed to taking the incremental steps to turn that vision into reality”.

Both partners are calling on others in the industry to take on this mindset of continual improvement toward systems change, made possible through collective action.

“By uniting with other brands, we harness the power of collaboration, enabling Ambercycle and others to secure investment, scale their operations, and thrive in their mission for positive change,” added Verdich. “Through strategic partnerships with forward-thinking companies such as Ambercycle, we aspire to see these innovative solutions expand to a degree where they can effectively support brands like ours in achieving our sustainability objectives.”

The post Bringing Textile-to-Textile Recycled Polyester to Market with Ambercycle and GANNI appeared first on Textile Exchange.

Coming together to fill knowledge gaps

Nylon makes up a substantial portion of lululemon’s material portfolio, presenting a vital opportunity for the brand to address its environmental impacts at the product level.

That’s why, in 2021, the athletic apparel brand started working with Geno – a material innovation company that devises innovative ways to produce materials otherwise made from fossil fuels. Together, the pair set out to create a plant-based nylon-6 that could replace its petroleum-based counterpart, delivering the same feel and quality.

“Our goal was to develop novel technology from lab scale to commercial readiness,” explains Lisa Kennedy, SVP of Strategic Partnerships at Geno. And that’s exactly what they did. In 2023, Geno’s plant-based nylon made its first consumer-facing appearance in a collection for lululemon.

The companies found that their respective areas of expertise could form a mutually beneficial partnership, mixing Geno’s knowledge of the production of monomers with lululemon’s expertise in making nylon garments.

“True collaboration is realized when a developmental or commercial hurdle occurs in either company’s area of expertise and the partners work together to find innovative ways to close the gap,” adds Lisa Kennedy, SVP of Strategic Partnerships speaking to the value of filling respective knowledge gaps through partnership.

“True collaboration is realized when a developmental or commercial hurdle occurs in either company’s area of expertise and the partners work together to find innovative ways to close the gap.”

Fostering collaboration in a complex supply chain

To help bring the plant-based nylon-6 to commercial scale, Geno teamed up with Aquafil, the Italian company behind ECONYL® recycled nylon. Together, they created the building blocks for biobased nylon-6 and converted them into nylon-6 polymer for use in serval applications, including textile fibers.

Since Geno’s polymer is functionally similar to conventional nylon-6, it can be used as a drop-in replacement in large-volume material markets. For lululemon, this enabled the company to maintain consistency with its existing vendors, supply chain, and most importantly, its current products.

Speaking to the importance of integrating innovative raw materials into existing supply chains, Patty Stapp, Senior Vice President, Global Raw Materials at lululemon says “Ultimately, the key to changing a system lies in establishing meaningful and strategic relationships with your supply chain partners.”  

“If you want your innovation partners to succeed, it’s essential to assist them in cultivating long-term relationships within your supply chain, leveraging partners you already know and trust.”

Understanding the impacts of plant-based feedstocks

While taking the plant-based nylon-6 polymer to finished product may have been a smooth transition, one of the key challenges for Geno is to make sure the plant-based feedstock used to create nylon-6 is sustainably sourced. This is a continuous learning process, and as for any land-based raw material, this means understanding how it is grown, and how it might impact climate and nature.

For Geno, the production of plant-based nylon 6 remains in the pre-commercial phase and the company is not yet procuring and sourcing its own sugar-based feedstocks at a large scale. However, this is something it is actively working towards. In the meantime, it has taken measures such as international sugar label audits to understand the potential environmental and social risks of different feedstocks like corn and sugar beet, and then creating a strategy to account for these risks.

For lululemon, the aim is to apply lessons it has previously learned from cotton, especially regarding the importance of farm-level visibility and working to understand farmers’ needs, priorities, and regional nuances.

A further common challenge with producing materials from plant-based feedstocks is that they don’t always fit neatly into existing standards, test methods, and terminology. This has led the partners to work towards laying these foundations themselves.

As noted by Stapp: “When we produce a garment from recycled polyester, there are established practices for discussing and making claims about it.” But to scale innovative solutions like biobased nylon at large, there needs to be a collective industry effort to develop appropriate traceability mechanisms and sustainable certification criteria.

“Ultimately, the key to changing a system lies in establishing meaningful and strategic relationships with your supply chain partners.”

Laying the groundwork for widespread adoption

Both Geno and lululemon are taking a long-term outlook when it comes to supply chain resiliency to make sure that their efforts can facilitate widespread industry transformation.

Beyond the initial application of biobased nylon, the two companies share a long-term vision of creating meaningful change in the nylon market at large. Geno describes the partners’ approach as “committed to long-term impact, while still sprinting for short-term progress.”

To scale to a commercial level, establishing commercial off-take partners and securing investment is key. lululemon has been supporting Geno through funding application processes, with a view for commercial supply to be available for its use in the near term.

Ultimately, the companies see industry collaboration as vital to enabling the adoption of more sustainable alternatives for synthetic materials like nylon. “We want to share our learnings, failures, and lessons along the way to shorten the learning curve for other companies,” summarizes Sasha Calder, Geno’s VP of Impact.

The post Scaling Biobased Nylon with Geno and lululemon appeared first on Textile Exchange.

Harnessing existing connections to scale innovative materials 

Swiss sportswear brand On has given itself the goal of reducing its Scope 3 greenhouse gas emissions by 55% by 2030. For a company that is heavily reliant on the performance characteristics of synthetic materials, this meant moving away from petrol-based chemicals and toward circular solutions. 

That’s where LanzaTech – a tech company setting out to build a circular carbon economy by repurposing waste carbon emissions as the feedstock for raw materials – came in. With a shared vision to prove that it is commercially viable to create products from carbon that would otherwise be released into the atmosphere, On and LanzaTech were both prepared to explore unknown avenues to make it happen.  

The two companies first teamed up in 2019 to produce an EVA (Ethylene vinyl acetate) foam made from waste carbon for On’s sneakers. After three years of problem-solving with multiple value chain partners and the successful proof of concept of On’s CleanCloud® foam later, the pair built on this success to tackle another of the key fossil fuel-derived materials in the sportswear supply chain: polyester. 

“LanzaTech is known as a leader, so it was a natural partner to choose,” explained a spokesperson for On. “We learned that innovation projects get done much faster if we collaborate with existing partners with the same mindset.” 

“We learned that innovation projects get done much faster if we collaborate with existing partners with the same mindset.”

Integrating “drop in” solutions into the supply chain

After discussions began in 2022, On released its first apparel collection made with CleanCloud® polyester from LanzaTech’s CarbonSmart^TM technology in late 2023. In this solution, captured carbon emissions are turned into monoethylene glycol to replace 30% of conventional, virgin PET (polyethylene terephthalate), while the rest of the feedstock comes from purified terephthalic acid (PTA). 

Producing CarbonSmart^TM polyester is a multi-step process, involving a range of actors along the way. Through a commercial-scale process, LanzaTech captures carbon emissions from industrial processes and ferments them into CarbonSmart^TM ethanol. It then works with India Glycols Limited to convert the ethanol into monoethylene glycol (MEG), which is subsequently supplied to Far Eastern New Century, which turns it into PET.  

Given the complexity of the process, what allowed On to move from proposal to production so quickly this time?  Making the most of existing relationships.

Far Eastern New Century was already a listed supplier of On’s yarns and textiles, and LanzaTech had a pre-existing partnership with Far Eastern New Century making CarbonSmart^TM polyester. Compared to the EVA foam project, this allowed the company to significantly reduce research and development and move quickly into the prototype and production phases.

The process was also made more straightforward by the fact that CarbonSmart^TM MEG has the same material properties as fossil-based MEG, allowing it to function as a “drop-in” solution.

Taking a holistic approach to impact measurement

Beyond establishing CarbonSmart^TM polyester as a commercially available solution, an equally important challenge was to understand its impact and see exactly how it can contribute to climate goals. “Carbon capture and utilization is a broad world, and the impact highly depends on feedstock source, technology, region, and infrastructure,” notes Kristen Allison, LanzaTech’s Global Business Development Director. 

LanzaTech invested in externally verified Life Cycle Assessments (LCAs), which enabled the company to understand the emissions savings of CleanCloud® polyester made with CarbonSmart^TM technology when compared to its conventional counterpart. It also allowed the company to pinpoint where to focus future efforts to further reduce emissions.

This includes developing solutions for PTA – an area in which LanzaTech is now actively working. “The carbon footprint of the PET will be further improved once we can combine CarbonSmart^TM MEG with renewable PTA technologies to address 100% of the PET content,” explained Allison. In addition, LanzaTech is working on a direct pathway to produce MEG without making ethanol first. 

Both companies also acknowledge the need to look at impact measurement holistically beyond LCA data and address sustainability from multiple angles. In practice, this means that beyond improving the carbon footprint of downstream materials, LanzaTech isn’t losing sight of its broader vision to create a circular carbon economy where emissions that would otherwise contribute to global warming are transformed into new raw materials that can be used instead of virgin fossil resources.

“Carbon capture and utilization is a broad world, and the impact highly depends on feedstock source, technology, region, and infrastructure.”

Committing to continual improvement going forward 

While LanzaTech has established a commercial supply chain for PET from captured carbon emissions, it is not afraid to admit that additional applications of the technology are a work in progress. For example, LanzaTech is developing a commercial-scale process to recycle textiles and other materials made with CarbonSmart^TM ethanol by coupling a process called gasification with its gas fermentation technology.  

Ultimately, it wants textile waste that cannot be mechanically recycled to be gasified, and the resulting syngas to be fed to the biocatalyst and converted back to MEG (and/or PTA). This means that in a world where PET bottles might not be available as feedstocks for recycled polyester, fashion and apparel companies can operate within a circular system instead. 

For carbon capture technology to reach its full potential, LanzaTech notes that it needs systems on the industry side within which to communicate its sustainability attributes. “The industry needs to develop a framework for certification and traceability for new innovative next-gen materials such as carbon capture technologies,” Allison adds. 

According to On, accelerating and scaling these solutions will rely heavily on building strong relationships with partners that “not only embrace the technology, but are also open to continual innovation and improvements.”  

Ultimately, underpinning the success is the ability of different actors in the supply chain to come together with a mutual understanding. For this to work, “the foundation of open conversations, honesty, and a trust-based relationship is key,” a spokesperson summarizes for On.

The post Using Carbon Capture to Replace Fossil-Based Polyester Feedstocks with LanzaTech and On appeared first on Textile Exchange.

In theory, textile-to-textile recycling has a lot of potential to help create a more sustainable future for the fashion, textile, and apparel industry. On the ground, the processes needed to make it happen are extremely complex. How do we collect unwanted clothes? Who sorts this waste by the type of fiber used? And how do we improve the technology available to turn old garments into new materials?

SuperCircle exists to help make textile-to-textile recycling a working reality. The tech and reverse logistics company does this by connecting the fashion and retail sector to post-consumer textile waste and recycling infrastructure, filling a crucial logistical gap in the circular textile economy.

We spoke the team behind SuperCircle; Chloe Songer, Stuart Ahlum, and Phong Nguyen, to unpick their innovative business model, delving deeper into the practical steps needed to scale recycling solutions and save discarded textiles from ending up in landfill.

What inspired you to approach textile recycling from this angle?  

Prior to launching SuperCircle, we founded Thousand Fell, our circular sneaker brand. In running Thousand Fell, we recognized that while material innovation and recycling technology were mature enough to effectively support circular business models, the sorting, processing, and logistics infrastructure needed for recapturing garments was non-existent. SuperCircle was built to fill this gap and make circularity a reality today. 

“While material innovation and recycling technology were mature enough to effectively support circular business models, the sorting, processing, and logistics infrastructure needed for recapturing garments was non-existent.”

What are your top priorities in terms of barriers to overcome? 

The biggest barrier for SuperCircle is the education gap within the retail industry around what true circularity is, and what a north star for circularity should look like. This education gap is understandable — the circular supply chain is new and it’s complicated, which requires a lot of education and reorientation for brands and sustainability leads. 

We help brands and the retail industry understand this by simplifying our mission to “ending textile waste.” We describe this as keeping textiles out of landfill and away from overwhelmed resale markets in the Majority World.

To meet that mission, we have built SuperCircle to take back any kind of textiles to be recycled. Some of these recycling solutions are higher value and more in line with where we want to see circularity go — namely, with fiber-to-fiber (F2F) and componentry-to-componentry (C2C) recycling.

We also work within the limitations of current garment constructions and material compositions, deploying solutions that, while not as ideal as F2F and C2C recycling, are still better alternatives to landfill and international export. This includes open-loop recycling (downcycling and upcycling), as well as energy recovery when necessary.  

These solutions make for a more responsible and traceable end-of-life solution for a garment. We help brands and the retail industry understand this waste hierarchy and showcase a clear path forward towards garment recapture and fiber-to-fiber recycling. 

“The circular supply chain is new and it’s complicated, which requires a lot of education and reorientation for brands and sustainability leads.”

What is the biggest blocker preventing the industry from recycling old clothes into new ones?

The biggest challenge for fiber-to-fiber recycling (especially with post-consumer garments) is the cultivation of clean material feeds. It requires the identification, collection, sortation, and aggregation of garments into feeds containing the same fibers, such as cotton with cotton, wool with wool, etc. 

When garments are so often constructed with blended fibers — or the material composition is unknown — this poses a big challenge for building these clean material feeds and enabling fiber-to-fiber recycling. 

Additionally, for the most part, finished garments aren’t viable feedstock for recyclers. They need to be processed: trimmed, shredded, baled, and more, then delivered in bulk in order to be effectively recycled. This processing component is a critical step for fiber-to-fiber recycling that SuperCircle addresses. 

“The biggest challenge for fiber-to-fiber recycling (especially with post-consumer garments) is the cultivation of clean material feeds.”

What do you think is needed within brands and retailers to improve understanding of how circularity works?

For the industry to successfully adopt circular systems and fiber-to-fiber recycling, it needs to build knowledge among its executive teams and decision-makers about circularity, as well as an understanding of the waste hierarchy compared to impact.

We are leaning in to create clarity for retail executive teams and decision-makers around the driving factors for fiber-to-fiber recycling. In practice, this means education and thought leadership that highlights the nuances — and readily available implementation — of circular systems. We’re leading seminars with executive teams, building case studies around profitable circular systems, and showcasing viability through pre-commercial programs.  

SuperCircle is also working to showcase that while recycling is at the end of the waste hierarchy, it has the largest impact. This is in slight conflict with the ideal lifecycle of a garment — reuse, then repair, then resale, and then finally recycling.

The reality of the situation is that most garments — whether due to the product category, quality, price point, or consumer demand — don’t fit within the reuse / repair / resale channels. Recycling is realistically the best solution for the lion’s share of the industry’s product assortment. 

“The reality of the situation is that most garments — whether due to the product category, quality, price point, or consumer demand — don’t fit within the reuse / repair / resale channels.”

For brands looking to get started with textile-to-textile recycling, what first steps do they need to take?

The two most important steps that a brand can take towards textile-to-textile recycling are:

• Designing products that can be recycled. This includes thinking through and mapping the material composition, garment construction, and making decisions up front that make recycling feasible. 
• Incorporating a takeback program from the outset. Textiles, footwear, and accessories aren’t municipally recyclable. Brands need to launch take back programs to recapture their own garments. We don’t believe that a garment isn’t 100% recyclable if there isn’t a viable recycling channel. And this is one place where SuperCircle can help brands. 

To that end, raw material decisions are incredibly important and, fortunately, design leads and production leads are starting to think through these decisions at the outset. They’re steering away from natural / synthetic blends, are using core monofibers like cotton, wool, silk, or biobased polyesters, and are thinking about how a garment can be deconstructed end-of-life. 

These choices allow garments to more effectively be recycled. SuperCircle is also guiding brands through these future assortment decisions with circularity in mind. And while some legacy garments currently in circulation are likely to be eligible only for downcycling – our team is able to provide insights and help design teams determine shifts that can be made for future garments to be eligible for fiber-to-fiber recycling. 

“Raw material decisions are incredibly important and, fortunately, design leads and production leads are starting to think through these decisions at the outset.”

To what extent does circularity require consumers to change their habits?  

To be truly successful, we do need consumers to help end textile waste. The circular economy requires participation – if consumers are given all the tools, incentives, and information they need to participate, then brand-owned circularity programs will succeed. We believe it is about ease and education. Some customers are interested in the easiest way to do something, and some are more interested in learning about how and why. There is no right answer here, and brands need to think about what will help and incentivize their customers to be part of a circularity program. 

On a larger scale, policy can enable this change for consumers. If brands must offer end-of-life solutions for their products through extended producer responsibility legislation, then over time that will naturally shift the consumers perspective and eventual participation in these types of programs. 

“The circular economy requires participation – if consumers are given all the tools, incentives, and information they need to participate, then brand-owned circularity programs will succeed.”

How important is collaboration to you?  

Collaboration is essential to the scaling and the success of circularity programs and extended producer responsibility. Businesses need to tackle different aspects of the problem of textile waste to enable the most holistic solutions. We sit on multiple boards, including the American Circular Textiles group to collaborate on lobbying for federal circularity policy for textiles. 

Collaboration for us also comes in the form of our recycling and sorting partners. There is incredible innovation occurring in this space right now, and we are working together to enable scalable and technology-driven solutions with the brightest minds working on textile recycling right now. 

We also work closely with resale providers to launch and operate 360° circularity programs. While we believe that recycling has the largest impact, we also understand that there are garments that can (and should) be resold first. We want to support those initiatives and work with several incredible partners to support and augment those efforts.

The post Making Textile-to-Textile Recycling a Reality with SuperCircle appeared first on Textile Exchange.

The Best Practice series sees Textile Exchange tap industry insiders to share their expertise on specialist subjects, highlighting the actions taken from the perspective of those at the forefront of these conversations.

For this edition, we speak to PANGAIA about building a brand with regenerative and innovative materials at its foundation, and what scaling these fibers sustainably looks like on the ground.

Founded in 2018, PANGAIA is both a fashion label and a materials science company. As a collective of scientists, designers, technologists, and creatives, its hybrid business model is founded on interdisciplinary collaboration, paving the way for what it calls an Earth Positive future.

The company’s approach is holistic and multifaceted, looking at ways of improving materials and systems of production at multiple levels. This ranges from investing in lower-impact, regenerative, and circular methods to creating a suite of revolutionary, patented fibers and materials. In doing so, its goal is to become net-zero by 2040 across Scopes 1-3.

Speaking with Textile Exchange, the PANGAIA Collective explained that it is “focused on investing in the future and finding problem-solving material innovations.” As such, it tackles the negative impacts of production at the raw material source, seeking to transform the industry from the start of the supply chain.

“PANGAIA is focused on investing in the future and finding problem-solving material innovations.”

When it comes to sourcing familiar materials such as cotton, PANGAIA is working to evolve existing systems and drive forward production models that not only reduce negative environmental and social impacts, but also give back more than they take from nature.

While its goal is for all virgin cotton to be grown using regenerative farming by 2026, the company’s In Conversion Cotton Capsule range represents the beginning of this journey, supporting farmers as they shift to practices that restore soil health and biodiversity. The emphasis on “in conversion” shows that this is an ongoing process, and switching to regenerative agriculture needn’t mean disrupting production or changing suppliers.

Along with this transparency also comes the recognition that terms like “regenerative” need clear definitions – without which, “buzzwords can become misleading and actually set back efforts,” according to PANGAIA. Seeing as best practices and desired outcomes vary greatly depending on the context, the company notes that “the very concept of regenerative systems means that a holistic approach must be taken, grounded in the needs and knowledge of direct practitioners such as farmers and growers, rather than prescribing a single set of requirements or practices.”

“The very concept of regenerative systems means that a holistic approach must be taken, grounded in the needs and knowledge of direct practitioners such as farmers and growers.”

Aside from committing to more responsible sourcing practices, PANGAIA takes a disruptive approach by developing pioneering alternative materials. Its team of scientists and partner laboratories has created an extensive range of bio-based solutions, with eight new materials launched in 2021. These include FLWRDWN, an alternative to feathers and synthetic down made from wildflowers, FRUTFIBER, designed to replace cotton by combining bamboo lyocell with pineapple and banana leaf – both by-products of the food industry – and PLNTFIBER, which uses plants such as Himalayan nettle, bamboo, eucalyptus, and seaweed.

It’s clear that biomimicry is key to the company’s creative strategy. Its designs are driven by what the company calls “high-tech naturalism”, which looks to harness systems already existing in nature (for example, carbon, agricultural waste, or microorganisms) to create something entirely new.

This fusion of nature and technology is especially evident in products developed in the PANGAIA Lab, launched in 2021. This is home to revolutionary fibers such as Brewed Protein, a bio-based alternative to animal fibers like wool or cashmere, created through a fermentation process using microbes.

Since the company invents ground-breaking alternatives, this in turn has also prompted it to become a leader in developing systems for data collection and analysis; conducting life cycle assessments on all its materials.

“We need many industries and partners to champion adoption of more responsible practices, production, and consumption on a global scale.”

Despite spearheading a hybrid business model that not only leads the way with responsible sourcing but also invests in tech start-ups, early-stage research, and life cycle assessments, the company still recognizes that there’s a long way to go. PANGAIA expressed that “we need many industries and partners to champion the adoption of more responsible practices, production, and consumption on a global scale.”

Of course, not all brands have capacity to invest in materials science to the level of PANGAIA, but all brands can match its commitment to climate-positive action. To achieve this, the inevitable process of refining a sustainability roadmap is something to be embraced – not avoided.

Aside from bringing environmental benefits, diversifying fibers also has the potential to reinforce a more resilient supply chain. PANGAIA’s efforts should serve to galvanize other industry actors to instigate a just transition toward more responsible raw materials sourcing, production, and innovation.

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