By now, we should all know that we have much to learn from natural ecosystems when it comes to living in dynamic balance and harmony with the world around us. Drawing on this, in 2020, The Biomimicry Institute released a report titled, ‘Nature of Fashion: Moving towards a regenerative system’.
By turning to nature for solutions, author, biologist, and co-founder of The Biomimicry Institute, Janine Benyus, explores what the future of fashion could look like if it functioned like an ecosystem.
Nature has a particular system that maintains balance and harmony in life – when an organism dies, decomposers break it down as nutrients for the soil that allows new life to grow. The Biomimicry Institute is calling on the fashion industry to adopt this cycle of life into its functioning too.
Biomimicry is a school of thought that encourages a way of being that emulates nature’s regenerative strategies. This led to the more well-known economic system, circularity.
The fashion industry, as it currently stands and has operated for the past 80 years, uses an extractive, or linear, system. Synthetic fabrics are the most widely used material in garments and are made from fossil fuels, which are not regenerative. Instead, when a synthetic garment is discarded it ends up in landfills where it takes several decades to break down and releases toxic microfibres that accumulate in the earth. In this way, waste does not feed back into the system to create new products. Instead, it remains in the system and becomes pollution.
But can’t plastic be recycled?
Yes it can. But it cannot be recycled indefinitely. And, we do still need to be cautious of using plastic and should avoid single-use plastic, and synthetic fast fashion. According to the Ellen McArthur Foundation, microplastics released into water systems could lead to, by weight, more plastic than fish in the oceans by 2050.
So, what can we do?
In order to transition to a circular economy, the report suggests that we turn to nature. In following nature’s regenerative strategies, the fashion industry can eliminate waste by designing for disposal. The good news is, we’re already halfway there: textiles are carbon-based.
“For the fashion industry, embracing decomposition to retrieve building blocks compatible with natural primary production may be the inspiration for the innovative new solutions we so desperately need.”
Following the cycle of life, clothing needs to link decomposers to primary production. This, according to the report, can be achieved in two steps. First, the degradation product does not necessarily have to have the same starting point. For example, a shirt does not need to become a new shirt.
Secondly, the material has to be regenerative. Renewable materials can safely re-enter the lifecycle without creating waste, by using biodegradable fibres which are cultivated using regenerative agriculture. Regenerative agriculture means farming with a greater diversity of animals and crops within an area that helps promote healthy, arable soil and sequester carbon that reduces the excess carbon dioxide in our atmosphere.
By taking transformative action and moving away from extractive practices to decentralised, regional production and embracing different technologies – such as fermentation and gasification – for the production of fibres, the report suggests we can create a fashion industry that works in harmony with nature.
“The more our world functions like the natural world, the more likely we are to endure on this home that is ours, but not ours alone,” says Janine.
About the Biomimicry Institute:
The Biomimicry Institute is a not-for-profit organization, founded in 2006, that empowers people to seek nature-inspired solutions for a healthy planet. To advance the solution process, the Institute offers AskNature.org, a free online tool that contains strategies found in nature and examples of ways they are used in design.
