A celebration of Australian innovation and sustainable fashion

AFC Innovation & Sustainability Showcase hosted by Australian Fashion Council (AFC) and Jodie Haydon at Kirribilli House.
10 May 2024

Last night in Sydney, Kirribilli House played host to a different kind of event to usual. Jodie Haydon, partner of the Prime Minister alongside the Australian Fashion Council (AFC) and Minister of Environment and Water, Tanya Plibersek, joined Australian fashion designers, and leaders in the arts to attend a showcase on the eve of Australian Fashion Week of three leading homegrown innovations set to lead Australian fashion toward a more sustainable future.

In a large show of support from government and industry leaders, the heritage residence was the backdrop for highlighting the work of local thought leaders working to find solutions to fashion’s waste problem in an industry that generates 200,000 tonnes of clothes that goes to Australian landfill per year.

Hosted in tandem with the AFC, Haydon spoke in front of designers including Bianca Spender, Bassike’s Mary-Lou Ryan, Carla Zampatti CEO Alex Schuman, Geneveive Smart of Ginger & Smart, P.E. Nation's Pip Edwards, Jac+Jack’s Jacqueline Hunt, Ngali’s Denni Francisco, as well as model and actor Charlee Fraser among others.

“Jodie giving us this amazing opportunity, and she and the team have been amazing to work with, really…gives us that momentum,” says new Australian Fashion Council (AFC) CEO Jaana Quaintance-James, whose appointment was announced in March. She notes the Australian-made innovations are driving forward the evolution of the industry. “We see the tech and innovation piece as being really key to unlocking our local manufacturing potential so that we can be positioned globally for being design-led, sustainable and high-quality and also for circular technology solutions.”

That includes Blocktexx, a Queensland-based clean tech company which pioneered a ground-breaking new way to separate fibres in unwanted blended fabrics at reasonable scale—a long time pain-point for the industry. “By developing innovative solutions and a robust manufacturing industry we will build the resilience, local skills and onshore capability to manage our own textile solutions,” says co-founder Adrian Jones. Taking discarded uniforms and bedsheets, they recover polyester and cellulose ready for re-use, and already work with local labels including Bassike.

That increased circularity—diverting materials otherwise destined for landfill for reuse—and increasing local manufacturing, has been a recent focus for leaders. Last month the government announced the Future Made in Australia Act following the Tanya Plibersek-backed launch of ‘Seamless’ in 2023, a voluntary clothing stewardship scheme which sees designers take responsibility for the full lifecycle of garments.

Some of the designers in attendance, including Bianca Spender and Jacqueline Hunt, have worked with the AFC’s FashTech Labs, showcased on the night, which uses tech to provide a pioneering way to sample clothes digitally—instead of traditional physical samples. “It saves carbon and water and textile waste, but it also saves costs and time,” says Quaintance-James.

Meriel Chamberlin is part of Full Circle Fibres whose project Mud to Marle is part of the showcase. With Deakin University’s Institute for Frontier Materials and textile manufacturer Loomtex, Mud to Marle leverages existing framework to give new life to unwanted low quality wool fibres, proving how end-to-end manufacturing or “growing to sewing.” Creating fabric from the discarded fibres, Chamberlin saw opportunity where others didn’t. “The wool ‘locks’ are shorter than first quality fine merino, but their properties are still awesome, their shorter length is an advantage when combining them with premium cotton,” she says and wants to prove others can do it too. “It’s about using the tools at hand… systems innovation rather than ingredient innovation.”

Chamberlin says there are more ideas out there like this, but funding and resourcing are still roadblocks to faster progress in this space—she’s working toward funding the next stage of spinning mills and commercial equipment which will allow her to supply local designers with fabric, in essence re-shoring spinning often done overseas. “These are the type of ideas that are out there in Australia, if we can support and grow those types of things that have huge potential to have an impact, not just here but overseas.”

Jones too says that while they can process and recover 10,000 tonnes of textile waste per year, the potential for ventures of this kind is immense given the scale of the waste problem. “For meaningful global impact, we need thousands of facilities like ours to be built in the coming years.” They are also in trial phases of converting their product into yarn for re-use in garments.

Each recognise the impact of government support, but as Quaintance-James points out, there’s sometimes a hurdle in mindset. “There's a little bit of ‘we can't’, which we need to tackle,” she says. “And I think that's [what this showcase] is trying to demonstrate is that we can.”

“We need to stop talking down the onshore textile recycling industry, this allows the existing environmental disaster of landfill, incineration, or export to continue,” says Jones. “Australia always has been a leader in innovation. This is the nation that bought the world the pacemaker, ultrasound scanners, the winged keel and even the electric drill but we still have this concern that we are not an innovative country… We need to be proud of what we have done and talk it up not down the whole time.”

“In order to inspire people to change, we need to be really positive and constructive, [and] pragmatic about what the solutions are,” Qaintance-Jones continues. “Yes, we’ve got catwalks and sort of flashy things, but we’re actually a very serious business: we employ 500,000 people. We export more than wine and beer with $30 billion annually in value. We need to stand up and be taken seriously and we need to work with government collaborations to really drive forward the growth of the space…this event really just opens the door a bit, and then it's our opportunity to go and push that door even wider.”