With the increasing awareness on the importance of sustainability, several global garment brands, including Hennes & Mauritz (H&M), Walmart and luxury brand Stella McCartney, have started promoting sustainable fashion for reducing the environmental impact of textile and apparel production.
However, recent studies on environmental impacts of textile and apparel production show that textile industry is the second largest polluting sector after oil, and recycling has the potential to reduce 50-65 percent of the industrial production waste.
Trash to Trend, an Estonia-based company that uses recycling design to transform the textile manufacturing industry, in collaboration with Beximco, the biggest fabric and garment producer in Bangladesh, has came up with a solution for radical reduction of textile waste in mass production by introducing upcycled garment collection.
Speaking to fibre2fashion, founder of Trash to Trend, Reet Aus said, “Waste is definitely one of the central issues as waste is ‘work in vain’. Growing or producing and gathering of the textile raw-materials from all over the world; usage of chemicals (pesticides, dyes, etc) and water as well as the work and energy put into the manufacturing of textile and garments are all thrown away and at the same time for new garment, virgin materials are exploited again.”
“The exploitative nature of linear industrious systems cries for better solutions. In the light of growing resource scarcity, upcycling has become not only interesting but important to develop improvements for the system,” she informs.
Talking about the inspiration behind introducing upcycled garment line, she says, “When I realized the impacts of clothing and textile industry on environment, I could not agree with it and started figuring other ways. There are many options for reducing environmental impact but after I found upcycling as a method I have been mostly working with that mainly because upcycling solves many problems and has the biggest influence.”
According to Markus Vihma, head of environment and sustainability at Trash to Trend, wasteful, unnecessary consumption and industrial mass-production degrade the environment. “The textile industry is driven by our consumption and pushed by competition, which results in massive waste production.”
“The faults of the system are very apparent and recycling initiatives are capable to ease that vicious cycle. An upcycled or recycled apparel is just way cooler than virgin apparel if the outcome is the same,” he concludes.
