How to Design for Circularity in Mind: Think Like Bacon

If there was one takeaway from the SJ x Rivet sustainability conference in Los Angeles last week, it’s to be like the pig.

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It’s like the old joke about eggs and bacon, Amelia Eleiter, co-founder and CEO of textile reuse and recycling firm Debrand , said at the closing panel on designing for circularity. “The chicken is involved and the pig is committed,” she said.

Like all good stories, Debrand’s started on a beach after one too many beers. Eleiter was surfacing from a surf session in southern Sri Lanka when her friend—and now business partner—Wes Baker spotted something on her leg.

“I thought it was seaweed but it was a wrapper from a pop bottle with a brand name on it,” she said. “And we realized that one day this was going to matter. There’s literally waste floating in our ocean that we can identify back to its original manufacturer.”

Eleiter and Baker started Debrand, which they bill as a “next-life logistics” platform for castoff clothing and footwear, as a way not only to challenge brands to be more accountable for what they produce but also to subvert the linear—and in Eleiter’s words, “shortsighted”—take-make-dispose model of consumption. That requires different forms of sorting technology to make sure textile waste achieves its highest and best use. It also requires commitment.

“We’ve learned that if we can engage the whole ecosystem—this whole industry—and have the designers speak to the recyclers and speak to the sorters, we can build and construct materials and more specifically products in a way that we can un-design them so that we can reuse them and then recycle them,” she said. “Design today for tomorrow, essentially.”

It’s also imperative that brands consider not just the beginning and end of a garment’s life cycle but also the “murky middle part” that is consumer use, said Jessie Kosak, a former fashion designer who now teaches at the Arizona State University Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising. Figuring out how to keep an item out of the landfill is important, she said, but so is designing “emphatically” for “emotional durability” so that people want to hang on to their purchases for longer.

“Really thinking about how something will ultimately be used is what’s going to help curb this big problem of overproduction,” she said. “Production models still rely on forecasting; we’ve gotten very good at predicting what people are going to want to buy, but they rely on past sales. And just because someone bought something doesn’t mean that they wore it often and doesn’t mean that they’re necessarily going to go out and buy something similar.”

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Turning a “competitive little loop” into a “big, nice closed loop that’s super efficient” is going to bring more value to the consumer because they love their clothes and want to keep wearing them, Kosak said. It’s also going to deliver more value to brands because they’re able to build a more loyal customer base. But the biggest winner is the planet because resources are being leveraged to their fullest extent.

For some companies, arriving at that “aha” moment is half the battle. It’s part of the reason online retailer Frank and Oak took a “pretty hard” pivot from a “pseudo-fast fashion” men’s wear purveyor to a broader marketplace that made sustainability a focus, said Elisabeth de Gramont, head of impact at Frank and Oak and chief brand officer at Unified Commerce Group, its parent company. Even so, progress has been a series of mental shifts, prodded along by existing guidelines such as the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s Jean Redesign that eschews unnecessary elements like rivets.

“Where I really challenged the design team is to think [about] not just about replacing one fabric, or saying, ‘You know, let’s use organic cotton instead of conventional cotton,’” she said. “It’s really thinking about, what is this? What happens to this product when the customer is done with it? So how do you make it more durable? How do you make it something that someone wants to wear for a longer time?”

But one thing Frank and Oak hasn’t yet figured out is how to teach or incentivize customers to deal with its products responsibly at the end of their lives. De Gramont told Eleiter she would be following up with her on that off-stage.

“Maybe we designed a pair of denim jeans using a blend of hemp [and] recycled cotton. We use organic cotton. We don’t have rivets. We are using processes that use a lot less chemicals, water, etc., but then is it still going to end up in a landfill?” she said. That’s sort of the consumer piece and the partner piece at the end of life that is still an area of big curiosity and interest and research for us, but I don’t think anyone has cracked yet.”

Eleiter said that since innovation—with a heavy helping of globalization—got the industry into “this mess” of having too much clothing, it’s up to innovation to get it out. What this includes is being able to sort and identify textile waste through machine learning and near-infrared technologies.

“Even if we design products with circularity in mind, that are meant to last, that do have intention behind them…beyond that, once we actually get our hands on those goods, we have to be able to identify [them] quickly and efficiently in order to know what [they are] and extend [their] value,” she said. “I mean, innovation is a commitment, right? And it starts with intent.”

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