Fashion for Good, a global, collaborative and sustainable innovation platform for the fashion industry has now launched a six-month project to test the use of compostable polybags that would allow consumers without access to municipal composting facilities an at-home composting option.
Some 180 billion polybags are produced every year to store, transport and protect apparel and footwear. They are usually made of PE and have a high carbon footprint and low recycling rates across the globe. They mainly wind up being incinerated or landfilled at the end of life.
The Home-Compostable Polybag Project is a collaboration between the Fashion for Good platform with C&A and Levi Strauss & Co. Throughout the duration of the project, bags made from biobased materials from compostable packaging manufacturer Tipa Corp. and from Greenhope will be tested.
“Fashion is one of the main segments where consumers are looking for alternatives to conventional plastic packaging,” explained Daphna Nissenbaum, CEO and co-founder of Tipa Corp.
And Greenhope is ‘ready, willing, and able to support this all the way to its positive conclusion’, said Tommy Tjiptadjaja, CEO and co-founder of Greenhope.
The bags are designed to compost in either home or municipal composting environments. Their performance and the materials they are made from will be benchmarked against conventional plastics in supply chains. In addition, the materials' overall impact and associated costs will be measured.
The present Home-Compostable Polybag Project is the third Fashion for Good polybag project. It follows the Circular Polybag Pilot (completed in 2020) and Reusable Packaging (completed in 2021) projects - also projects seeking to validate alternatives that will help reduce dependence on virgin fossil fuels, reduce the impact of production, and provide a more sustainable end-of-life option.
“As part of our Sustainability Strategy, C&A has set high ambitions in the reduction of consumer-facing plastic by 2028,” said Aleix Busquets Gonzalez, Head of Global Sustainability at C&A.
“This pilot project plays a crucial part in reaching C&A’s plastic reduction goal and contributes significantly to an industry-wide transition.”
“This pilot not only moves us toward achieving our goal of eliminating single-use plastic in consumer-facing packaging by 2030, it also puts into practice the industry collaboration required to solve these ubiquitous challenges in hopes of reducing harmful elements within the apparel supply chain,” added Jeffrey Hogue, Chief Sustainability Officer, at Levi Strauss & Co.