🌱 World Circular Textiles Day: A 3 Phase Plan, and Bedstraw & Madder's Regenerative Business Model
Featuring Faith in Nature, Levh, DL1981, Virón, Strong Roots and more...
Happy Tuesday!
This week we cover:
Circular textiles by 2050? World Circular Textiles Day has a plan.
Bedstraw & Madder: Intimates With Integrity
In case you missed it: 🌱 Want to be more like Virón by reducing your virgin materials? OceanWorks can help.
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> Good News Last Week
🎯 Strong Roots launched the climate footprint scores on their packaging at the Plant Based World Expo, as the first frozen plant-based brand to display scores on the front of packs.
🎯 Lick is now a certified B Corporation. They achieved a score of 101.5 through partnering with charities including 4ocean PBC, charity:water & One Tree Planted, and collaborating directly with their community of decorators.
⭐️ Faith in Nature announced their Company Director role is to be given to Nature. Their new governance system which allows a non-human entity to be represented on the board by a responsible human, who is legally bound to speak on behalf of the natural world, follows their mantra that “nature is the boss.”
⭐️ Danone partnered with TGTG to launch the Date Label Campaign in Sainsbury’ stores. As part of National Recycling Week, the ‘look, Smell, Taste, Don’t Waste’ campaign targeted shoppers to increase awareness on the difference between use-by and best before date labels.
⭐️ Sainsbury’s introduced ‘Sainsfreeze,’ the UK’s first walk-in freezer concept store in collaboration with WRAP. Freezing fresh food items in innovative ways, the store gives freezer tips for commonly wasted items including meat, herbs, milk and baked goods, with the aim to help customers reduce food waste.
⭐️ Tesco launched a trial to ditch the cardboard packaging from branded toothpaste, with an estimated reduction in 680 tonnes of cardboard annually. This follows the removal of cardboard boxes for their Tesco own-brand toothpaste in November 2021, which saves over 55 tonnes of cardboard annually.
⭐️ Mars revealed the launch of their new jars, made from 15% recycled plastic. Eliminating an estimated 300 tonnes of virgin plastic annually, the new packaging is part of Mars’ pledge to reach 100% recyclable packaging by 2025.
⭐️ Sainsbury’s announced that they are ditching plastic and switching to aluminium for their home brand coffee pod range. Educating consumers to empty, rinse and kerbside recycle the pods, the now fully recyclable range will help save over 10 million pieces of plastic annually and the cardboard packaging has also been reduced by 20%.
⭐️ Beam Suntory are to invest more than $400 million to expand the production at their Booker Noe Distillery, where they make Jim Beam. Increasing the capacity by 50%, while simultaneously cutting GHG emissions by 50% through the use of anaerobic digestors which will produce renewable natural gas to power the facility and produce fertiliser available for local farmers.
⭐️ Aldi announced the launch of soft plastic recycling collections for 800 stores nationwide. Expecting to collect up to 1,000 tonnes of soft plastics once the bins are installed by the end of 2022.
⚡️ Young Foodies are now B Corp UK Certified. With a score of 103.6, the community for FMCG challenger brands works with charity partners City Harvest, Add Psalt and FoodCycle; works with brands aligned to B Corp values; and focusses on employee well-being & development.
> Click on each link to read more. Have good news about your brand? Let us know - info@followingthefootprints.com.
> Quick Take
Circular textiles by 2050? World Circular Textiles Day has a plan.
Textile circularity by 2050 - sounds ambitious, but then often the best plans are - and this once certainly has to be. With 60% of textile production going to 80-100 billion pieces of clothing being created every year (2020), yet more than 50% of clothing produced being disposed of in under one year (2020), a re-design of the textile industry is needed more than ever. After all, less than 1% of textiles are circular. This isn’t just a material problem, it’s a huge fossil fuel one too. In 2020, 33 billion barrels of oil per year were being used to produce the energy needed to create these textiles. With polyester, a fossil fuel based fiber, being consistently in the top 2 most popular materials (alongside cotton), we’re a long way down an oily slope of fossil fuel reliance.
Lucky for brands - initiatives like World Circular Textiles Day, which was founded in 2020, have a plan. They’ve got a roadmap to reach textile circularity by 2050:
Phase 1: 2010 to 2025 - Innovation and R&D
Phase 2: 2025 to 2040 - Infrastructure and Rollout
Phase 3: 2040 to 2050 - Expansion and Completion
You can read the details of this vision for the textiles industry in their 2050 Retrospective.
There’s another reason World Circular Textile day exists - to ‘record the progress and chart the momentum of circularity in textiles’ via the World Circular Textiles Day’s Knowledge Hub. Amongst other resources, you’ll also find case studies from brands. Here are four of our favourites:
Levh: Partnering with companies and conservation groups to build a sustainable beachwear brand
Levi’s collaborates with Renewcell to create their most sustainable jean ever
One way your brand can get involved, and support this 2050 roadmap, is by becoming a signatory to World Circular Textiles day - you can do so here. Brand signatories include Reformation, Vivobarefoot, thelittleloop and more. If you’re a passionate individual not working for a consumer goods brand, you can also join as an individual signatory.
With World Circular Textiles day on 8th October, there’s never been a better time to not just think about how to improve your approach to textile circularity, but also how to cement and certify your strategy too.
> Brand Spotlight
Bedstraw & Madder: Intimates With Integrity
The latest in plant-based innovation is not always about food. Today, we’re bringing you Bedstraw & Madder, where knickers meet nature. Winner of the Best Carbon Footprint Initiative at Drapers Sustainable Fashion Awards 2022, the brand is pioneering sustainable fashion through bringing together women’s underwear and natural materials. How? Let’s dig in…
Bedstraw & Madder’s business model is underpinned by ancient wisdom regarding the health benefits of organic and plant-based materials for underwear, given that it is the piece of clothing closest to our skin. Their women’s knickers are 100% compostable, and feature organic, regeneratively grown cotton and plant-based dyes. This alone is no small feat, and their impact so far shows their potential:
70kg of chemicals saved from entering water cycles
470 metres of regeneratively farmed cotton transformed into chemical free clothing
14,000 litres of water saved through rain irrigation.
Bedstraw & Madder is part of the Raddis®System: a holistic food & fibre system, growing fully traceable regenerative organic-in-conversion & organic cotton with smallholder farmers in Southern India, while also working in partnership with Oshadi Collective and Fibershed.
Working with these local farmers has a direct positive environmental impact, as the farming and growing of their cotton directly sequesters atmospheric carbon back into the soil (2.5 tonnes so far!). As a result, this means:
Empowering Tribal Farmers
Restoring soil quality using a multi–crop ecosystem,
Removing pesticides and reducing water use
Bedstraw & Madder’s business model and products shows us that brands need to do more than just ‘doing less bad for the environment’ - they have the potential to be actively good, creating additionality and being restorative through regenerative models of production.
Support Bedstraw & Madder via their shop:
> In case you missed it
🌱 Want to be more like Virón by reducing your virgin materials? OceanWorks can help.
Featuring Little Freddies, Mattel, The Sak, Sperry and more...
> Follow up with…
Article: The secret world beneath our feet is mind-blowing – and the key to our planet’s future
Resource: The Sustainable Fashion Glossary
Tool Kit: Fashion Futures 2030 Toolkits