Lack Of Data Makes Investment In The F2F Industry Risky.
Do you know what blew my mind this week? Like, really blew it. Blown in a way that I haven't experienced in years.
I realised that our data gap within production volumes makes investment into any fibre to fibre recycling doomed to fail.
On Tuesday this week I was invited by Adele Gingell, Head of Positive Impact at Finisterre, and Venetia La Manna, fair fashion campaigner and influencer, to an evening with The OR Foundation. The founder of The OR, Liz Ricketts, very accurately described the problem we have with this data gap.
Now, if you haven't heard of The OR Foundation before, they are an organisation who support designers and retailers within Kantamanto market, which is the largest second hand remanufacturing and distribution centre in the world. If you work in the creation, or sale, of new apparel, you should check out their website, because your products are handled by them at some point.
Liz pointed out, that if we don't know how many garments we produce, we can't have a plan to effectively manage them. And so they have created a campaign called Speak Volumes, which aims to get brands to list their volumes. Finisterre were one of the first to do so, off the back of their customers calling for it. H&M also released their production volumes this year. With new financial reporting standards coming in across both the UK and the EU over the next few years, brands are going to have to report on this eventually. The OR are giving brands an opportunity to do so as part of a sustainability strategy, through their campaign, first. If your customers are mainly Millennials and Gen Z, given the data we have on their buying habits, I would strongly urge you to consider getting on board with the Speak Volumes campaign to get you some brownie points in advance of mandatory reporting! You can't retroactively get good will on this!
When Liz explained the impact of the data gap on them and the businesses they support, I realised the problem was also going to impact investments in the fibre-to-fibre recycling space. And that if we don't get a grip on this, we will not have a F2F industry that isn't propped up by the packaging industry. Meaning the only recycled fibres we'd be getting would be polyester (PET) ones.
Could you imagine any other industry, or product, that would get millions in investment when they couldn't tell you how many products they have access to? If you don't know how much raw material you can get, you don't know how much you will get out. So you can't tell how much money you can make. Let's not forget that Renewcell went bankrupt because they couldn't generate the volumes they said they could (yes, sales also feeds into that, which I'll address shortly).
*We also don't accurately know the weight of textiles either. So while only the the garment production stage in textiles is where we use pieces over weight, we still wouldn't be able to know how much weight we have access to without knowing the pieces. My career really started after 2008 financial crash. This was a period where we stripped weight out of fabric in anyway we could. This doesn't happen a lot now because you couldn't take anymore weight out before becoming an Emperor's New Clothes scenario! So we need the data in both forms.
And this brings us to the pinch point we have between businesses in Kantamanto, and F2F recyclers. They both need good quality, uncontaminated, products. F2F is a great solution to cutting room floor waste. But when it comes to the best end of life solution for garments, in an ideal world they're heading to Kantamanto first, before heading into a recycling route. (This, incidentally, is why I think we need to do away with our current methodology for LCAs, but that's for another newsletter, we'd be here all day otherwise!). This creates a problem for the possibility of resale of recycled goods, which is already impacted by the fact that second hand and remanufactured only has one HS code. Which is something I did not know until Tuesday. Making it really difficult to extend the life of any apparel product. Take Sodra, the Swedish pulp maker, as an example, they raised millions to recycle post consumer waste into MMCFs. It was discovered, a few years later, that they were making virgin fibres, not recycled ones, because they couldn't get the feedstocks. While today they do have access to those by recycling hotel bedsheets (not quite what investors were told initially), they still have some issues in getting the products to market (again, that's another newsletter in itself).
Waste is a product of creating anything tangible. Even the designers remaking products in Kantamanto create waste. But we can't accurately understand, or plan for, that waste if we first don't know how much we make. If you think about it, we know exactly how much we waste we create on the cutting room floor (or your manufacturer's do), because there is a fee build into that for responsible disposal. (If you're factory is not responsibly disposing of said waste, you need to be reviewing an open costing with them. Because that's an indication you could be paying too little for your products. Reducing the weight of fabrics is a corner cutting exercise for cost, illegal waste disposal is caused by the same thing).
One of my first newsletters was about waste, and how we don't measure it accurately enough. I've put it up on my website, as this newsletter has grown significantly since then! If we don't want to be in a WALL-E situation in the next 10 years, we desperately need to get a grip on our waste crisis. And that starts with accurately reporting on how much we generate in the first place. And we have that information to hand already.
Do Contact Us if you don't have a waste strategy in place, or you want to review it. This can be built into material roadmaps really effectively for future product creation. But we also need to deal with historical stuff at the same time. Remembering that early adopters get to market it! And do get in touch with The OR to report your volumes, #SpeakVolumes.
