The fashion industry is at a crossroads. With growing awareness of its environmental impact, brands are scrambling to position themselves as "sustainable"—but how much of this is genuine transformation versus clever marketing? We sat down with a leading textile waste expert, Kerli Kant Hvass, to cut through the noise and understand what real sustainability looks like in fashion.
We have a lot of greenwashing taking place in the market. You walk into a shop and see labels saying things like "made from recycled plastic bottles" or "organic cotton"—but there’s a catch: those claims only tell part of the story.
You can have a very low-impact product at the factory gate thanks to efficient processes and reduced use of chemicals, but if that product is used only once or twice and then discarded, its environmental impact becomes extremely high. Real sustainability must be measured across the entire lifecycle, not just the production phase. And that includes how long consumers actually use it.
It sounds great at first—but it’s a one-way street. You're taking one sector’s waste and turning it into another sector’s raw material. But with today's limited and costly recycling technologies, that garment usually can't be recycled again. You're just shifting the waste problem, not solving it.
Yes. Eileen Fisher and Nudie Jeans are both excellent examples.
Eileen Fisher has been ahead of the curve since 2011, operating a circular model. They take back their own garments, clean and sort them, resell what’s reusable, and recycle the rest at the fibre level. Their bold in-store messaging—“we would like our clothes back”—speaks volumes about their commitment to the quality and longevity of their products.
Nudie Jeans takes a different but equally impressive approach. They offer in-store repairs and treat every garment as valuable. They’re quite ‘nerdy’ about their products—their staff can tell you everything about them because they genuinely believe in their durability.
Both brands understand that you must start with a good, durable product to build a successful circular business model. Most brands today simply aren’t designing their clothes to have multiple lives or long-term use.
A significant one. Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) laws are a game-changer. These regulations make brands financially accountable for the entire lifecycle of their products—including end-of-life collection, sorting, reuse, and recycling.
Right now, this phase is underfunded and largely handled by municipalities and charities. France has been a pioneer in EPR for textiles since 2010. While product quality hasn't improved dramatically, the regulation has helped finance textiles collection and recycling research.
The EU is now developing a broader EPR scheme, and countries like Latvia and the Netherlands are beginning to implement their own versions. The logic is simple: if you’re putting a complex, hard-to-recycle product on the market—such as a five-blend garment mixing polyester, wool, and cotton—then it should come with a higher price tag due to its complex and costly end-of-life management.
At present, the system is upside-down. The cheapest clothing is often made from synthetic, blended fibres—difficult to recycle and environmentally harmful. Meanwhile, higher-quality garments made from biodegradable materials cost more. EPR could flip this, making sustainable materials more economically attractive by internalising the true environmental costs of other options.
There have been significant investments in recycling technologies over the past 15 years—particularly around sorting and material separation. While the innovations are promising, scalability remains a challenge due to the complexity of recycling mixed-material garments and the high cost of processing.
Many technology companies are holding back at the moment—waiting for EU regulations to be finalised before deploying solutions at scale. The hope is that legislation will create the market conditions that make these solutions economically viable.
Global EPR with real impact. We must stop overconsuming rich countries from exporting their waste problems to countries without adequate waste management systems—often in Africa and elsewhere.
My dream is the widespread adoption of renewal centres—places where garments are cleaned, refreshed, re-dyed, and repaired to keep them in use for longer. We already have too many clothes. Rather than producing more, we should be investing in secondhand platforms and ways to extend the life of what we already have.
True sustainability in fashion isn't about perfect solutions—it's about systemic change. It requires durable products designed to have multiple lives, regulations that make producers accountable for true costs, technologies that can handle complex recycling challenges, and business models that profit from longevity rather than disposability.
The brands getting it right understand that sustainability isn't a marketing label—it's a fundamental business philosophy that touches every aspect of their operations, from design to disposal.
As consumers, we have a role to play: choosing quality over quantity, supporting second-hand markets, and demanding full transparency from brands—not just on how things are made, but on how long they last and what happens after we’re done with them.
The future of sustainable fashion isn't just about what we make—it's about how long we make it last.
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Kerli Kant Hvass holds an industrial PhD in circular business model innovation within fashion and has worked with circularity in fashion for over 15 years. She has extensive experience from academia and practice in developing circular solutions and business models for start-ups, SMEs, corporations and the non-profit sector in the Nordic and Baltic countries, EU and USA. As a co-founder and consultant at REVALUATE, assistant professor in circular economy at AAU in Denmark and guest lecturer at several universities, she actively works for systemic changes in the textile industry to counteract overproduction and overconsumption. She is also a member of the Wasted Textiles consortium at Oslomet.
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