Category: Events

Construction in Norway is the most waste-heavy sector, accounting for a hefty percentage of the waste in 2019 (Statistics Norway, 2021). In the last 10 years, 27% of Norwegian companies that went bankrupt were within construction.

To keep up with growth, construction companies need to insure themselves against a disruption in the supply chain. This roundtable will discuss how companies can collaborate with startups to find ideas and solutions to plan today for an alternative supply of tomorrow.

On average, we buy 60% more clothing than we did 15 years ago — but we keep each item only half as long. And it’s also estimated that nearly 60% of all clothing ends up being burned or in landfills within only one year of being made.

The transition to circular economy is a must for the apparel industry to both reach the environmental goals and to stay profitable in a world with growing resource scarcity and risks in the global value chains. So it is time to develop new business models for the industry in parallel with advancing the structural and behavioural changes.

Today, the charity sector accounts for the majority of textile collection and sorting in a cost-effective way, while also creating great societal value. So would it be possible for the charity sector to operate as an enabler for circular change in the fashion industry? And how could increased collaboration with commercial actors create new value for the charity actors?

We wanted to explore these opportunities, needs, obstacles and potential collaborations between commercial and non-profit actors in a series of workshops. Our goal is to find new forms of collaboration and speed up the transition towards circular economy. For the first workshop, we invited charity organizations from Sweden, Stockholm Stadsmission, Red Cross Sweden, Björk & Frihet, Myrorna, Erikshjälpen and Brödet och Fiskarna, to co-create this topic with us.

One crucial reminder from the session was that the demand for secondhand garments is too low. And therefore it would be interesting to explore services and large scale behavioural changes to increase the demand. Out of the clothes that the charities collect, a large amount is exported abroad for second hand sales including an uncertain fate (possibly even ending up in landfills). An area which we find interesting to explore further, is how we can capture and create value for the collected garments within the Nordic region.

We continue advancing the ideas from the first session and invite companies of all sizes to join the charity organizations in the next workshop in August. The focus will be on how can we in  collaboration with clothing manufacturers, non-profit actors, automated sorting facilities and the municipalities create an efficient, qualitative and large-scale sorting of textiles in the Nordic countries, in order to minimize the preparation of textiles for export and maximize recovery and value creation activities at home?

If you are working on creating a more circular fashion industry, contact us to work together on this and stay tuned for updates about the next event! 

Recycling plastic is a good thing, but stopping the cycle and the plastic waste before it starts, is better. Globally, we generate 300 million tons of plastic waste every year, of which about 50% is for single-use purposes. To cut down the use of single-use items, we need to disrupt the current standards when it comes to our throwaway culture. 

It all starts with small actions, habits and purchase decisions, like swapping out single-use disposable items for more durable and reusable goods, but to make a radical and systemic change, the whole ecosystem is needed. Customers are ready but are the companies?

NextGen Cup, Repack and Kamupak are great examples of companies that have piloted reusable solutions and are leading the way in engaging the ecosystem to make the systemic change. They share their insights on what it takes to scale reusable solutions and what kind of partners do you need. And the important question is, how can you be part of advancing reusable solutions?