Bestseller pushes circularity with two projects in Bangladesh

In line with the motto “waste not, wish not,” Danish vogue group Bestseller A/S is helping two projects that are designed to accelerate its approach to a more circular organization model. One is about using the company’s private cutting waste and the different about creating recycling yarns. For both assignments, Bestseller collaborates with suppliers in Bangladesh through its experimental sustainability hub Fashion Forward Lab because that's where a significant area of the group’s total garment production occurs.

Around 400,000 tonnes of development waste is produced in Bangladesh every year, but less than five % of this is currently recycled domestically. The Bestseller Group has got as a result launched a long-standing project for its Selected, Brand It and Vero Moda makes and will work with GMS Composite Knitting, its largest jersey supplier in Bangladesh, to use textile scraps in new selections. The first such collections are expected to be accessible in spring 2022.

“We’re working locally found in Bangladesh with among our big, longstanding suppliers to make sure our production waste is employed within a closed-loop system found in a fully transparent supply chain. In short, this means we are collecting and recycling our very own brands’ cutting waste into new variations,” says Camilla Skjønning Jørgensen, sustainable materials & innovation supervisor at Bestseller, in a news release.

In order to avoid shipping the textile waste products back and forth and thus be easier on the surroundings, Bestseller wants to hold it in the united states where it really is produced. “You want to explore how we will keep the cotton waste in Bangladesh and create workable circularity systems there. Keeping the waste products in Bangladesh, despite having the same supplier, rewards both financial and environmental perspectives, which we benefit immensely,” explains Skjønning Jørgensen.

To develop desirable fresh recycled yarns, Bestseller is collaborating with Bangladeshi recycled natural cotton fibre firm Cyclo whose objective is to responsibly recycle the hundreds of tonnes of cotton textile discarded daily as cutting waste. By eliminating the dyeing process, Cyclo’s mechanical recycling process drastically reduces the volume of water, energy, chemicals and carbon emissions.

“Mechanically recycling fabric scraps to make fibre has been around quite a long time. Even so, this fibre has typically been downcycled and the resulting yarn written off as as well ‘low quality’ for the fashion industry. Our target was to persuade the world that there is a tremendous chance to upcycle these fibres back to trend,“ says Cyclo founder and director Mustafain Munir.

The company has recently successfully made many different final products, which could not have been managed without manufacturer and fibre collaborations as Munir explains: “Collaborations have already been key to your success. Bestseller possesses been at the forefront of sustainability work for some time now and we like dealing with corporations, which are genuinely interested and dynamic in both environmental and economics.”

While the collaboration with Cyclo and GMS Composite Knitting focuses on utilising waste immediately and implementing it directly in future collections, Bestseller joined the Global Fashion Agenda’s Circular Fashion Partnerships (CFP) currently in its initial phase to focus on a even more structural level aswell. The end target is to achieve implementing effective waste material stream structures and also to become “circular by design”.