The Hirdaramani Group in partnership with the Ellen MacArthur Foundation held an education session on the Circular Economy on August 27 at the Hilton Colombo residencies.
The Hirdaramani Group is working on producing products that are mono-material. Monomaterial products are those produced with one material. This allows the product to easily decompose.
Hirdaramani Head of Design, Piyumi Perera said that LEVI’s had introduced a mono-material product. Pointing at her jeans she said “Every bit of this garment is disposable. Our designers are working on a product to offer seasonally to our customers that is disposable.
Leader Make Fashion Circular team, Francois Souchet said that the apparel industry leaks a lot of plastics into the environment.
He said,“there are lots of tiny bits of plastic that wash off when you put in the washing machine. These particles are too small to get filtered at any point in the water filtration system.
They all wash up in the ocean. We found microplastics in the deepest parts of the ocean. We find microplastics even in German beer, we find it everywhere.”
Souchet added “The industry is contributing 8 percent of global emissions. For a business as usual scenario by 2025, it would be 25 percent of carbon, a quarter of carbon emission by the fashion industry.”
Hirdaramani Manager of Environmental Sustainability, Demith Gooneratne, “We have built the world’s first custom-built green facility. Even now it is carbon neutral. What we have learned from the facility is to improve all of our facilities. 3 of our older facilities are now LEED Platinum and LEED Gold. All the facilities we have built since then have been LEED-certified. We have joined the sustainable apparel coalition.”
Research Analyst at Make Fashion Circular team, Lukas Fuchs described the linear economy as one in which virgin raw material is used and discarded.
He said “this is what we call the linear take, make, dispose economy. We take raw materials off the ground; we make a product out of it, we use the product and all too often the product ends up in landfill incineration all too quickly. The use rate of clothing has gone down by over 40 percent for the last 15 years. This linear economy is getting faster and faster and producing more waste.”
“It started in the 1950s when products became more abundant. It enabled us to have a throwaway style of living. This is one of the symptoms of the linear economy.”
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