People’s decisions are critical to establishing the rules of a healthy economy. In the case of sustainability, I agree with Pucker that precompetitive collaboration is the only way to achieve a circular future. I’ve come to believe that people, not strictly business models or innovations, are what change industries.
I approach fashion’s sustainability problem as a biochemist trained in molecular neuroscience and economic development and as someone who works at the intersection of fashion, technology, and business. Financial incentives, human behaviors, and the material science of the planet’s resources are all factors of sustainability. More than a decade ago, I founded Descience, a research platform that brings together scientists and fashion designers to cocreate products. In my time at both Descience and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), I have witnessed the commitment of people in fashion to use alternative materials, adopt sustainable manufacturing practices and new consumer ownership models, and invest across the industry’s value chain. I am an optimistic proponent of the circular economy because of the efforts of these people.
The circular economy is rooted in the idea that we can create value from waste. What is truly limiting us from achieving this? I believe there are two interrelated reasons: people’s fixed, linear mindset and the dearth of circular systems for them to participate in, which are necessary to liberate them from this mindset.
The fashion industry has timidly approached circularity, individually investing in, exploring, and executing relatively small-volume plans, rather than establishing formal collaborations aimed at bringing meaningful levels of scale and efficiency to circular initiatives. For example, fashion supply chains are often shared across multiple brands but managed independently by the brands. This arrangement makes it incredibly challenging to set up both the infrastructure needed to efficiently recycle waste and the streamlined secondary markets to recapture value. People working within these supply chains need to collaborate to determine where and how their evolving business models can contribute to circularity.
In recent years, more fashion CEOs have begun to explore collective action with active brand competitors (e.g., The Fashion Pact, a global coalition of fashion companies and their suppliers committed to mitigating climate change) and entrepreneurs (e.g., Fashion for Good, an organization that connects brands, retailers, manufacturers, and funders to prospective sustainable innovations). But a well-defined, multistakeholder collaboration across brands, investors, and universities to develop a strong pipeline to circularity has yet to exist. Instead, CEOs remain knitted to the profitability of upcoming collections, rather than to the future financial and environmental sustainability of the fashion industry.
Like Pucker, I believe in the need for collaboration. I serve as coleader of the MIT Fabric Innovation Hub, the university’s network of faculty, students, and thought leaders in the textile industry working to develop technologies to create a more circular supply chain. Last year, we convened a conference of experts from 15 footwear brands with academics, venture capitalists, local government officials, and nonprofits to discuss how to make the industry more sustainable. In conversation, the brand representatives realized they shared the same challenges, including developing sustainable materials, investing in circular infrastructure, and driving consumer participation.
Our findings from the conference, published in The Footwear Manifesto, align with Pucker’s argument that the combination of the siloed approach to investing, the strict intellectual property rules, and the lack of collaboration prevents the industry from accelerating circularity. A profitable circular economy relies on scale. When companies act alone, no matter the size, there is insufficient scale to justify investments in building circular infrastructure, experimenting to create more sustainable materials, adopting environmentally friendly manufacturing processes, and reshaping consumer behaviors.
For collaboration to be possible and desirable to stakeholders, we first need patient capital—capital willing to wait for a longer term to receive returns—to allow for sufficient runway to develop and scale new tech. At the same time, brands need to do their part by driving the adoption of those same technologies to ensure that the investment eventually pays off. Additionally, banks, governments, and suppliers should collaborate to build the infrastructure required to commit to a new set of regulations. Industry players, financial institutions, governments, and philanthropists must find ways to deploy capital to support both supply-chain partners’ needs and to create circular communities that enable the fashion industry to maximize material value and minimize waste.
Pucker mentions that other industries have achieved cross-sector collaboration, but the fashion industry lacks the collective-action spaces to fully embrace circularity. After the MIT conference, creating this space became my priority, and I have been working to found The Footwear Collective (TFC), established by the nonprofit EarthDNA in 2023. TFC is a platform where precompetitive collaborations—such as one to define sustainability metrics to hold the industry accountable—can drive scalable progress toward achieving a sustainable future.
As citizens, we must recognize that our planet’s resources are finite. I agree with Pucker: The linear economy is a consequence of people’s decisions to optimize supply chains for growth and profit. Organizations don’t run themselves. Rather, people operate and drive change. And as contributors to the linear economy, we have an opportunity to work together to define the rules of collaboration, share knowledge, and collectively invest to replace it with a circular economy that benefits people and the planet.
Read more stories by Yuly Fuentes-Medel.