A: Amsterdam Fashion Week

The average catwalk might not be the greenest place on the planet. But there’s definitely a shade of green to be seen at the catwalks of Amsterdam Fashion Week.

In the past few years, The Green Fashion Competition served as the most prominent sustainable event on the Amsterdam Fashion Week agenda. Started in 2010 as a challenge for international designers to find a balance between the economic, ecological and social impacts of their collection, the competition enabled labels such as OAT Shoes, Elsien Gringhuis and Carrie Perry to present at Amsterdam Fashion Week.

In 2012 the government’s financial support to The Green Fashion Competition has ended, which has led the Amsterdam Fashion Week to look for new ways to incorporate sustainable fashion in its programme. Since 2013, that spot has been found predominantly in Amsterdam Fashion Week’s business programme. European not-for-profit organisation Made-By regularly hosts workshops, for instance to inform fashion brand about ways to make wet processing in their supply chain more sustainable.

Perhaps surprisingly, Amsterdam Fashion Week, which refused a ban on fur in 2012, has also hosted aworkshop by Bont voor Dieren (Fur for Animals, Dutch campaigners against fur). In a much-debated talk show in January 2013, Honest By designer Bruno Pieters and textiles manufacturer Ecological Textiles shared their experiences with sustainable collections and materials. And talked about the pros and cons of furfree fashion.

Meanwhile, sustainable collections that can often be seen on the Amsterdam catwalks include Studio Jux (a slow fashion label that produces its collections in their own factory in Nepal), MLY (a locally producing, artisanal green fashion designer based in Eindhoven), and Winde Rienstra (a finalist of The Green Fashion Competition in 2010). Brands with a green touch include Marga Weimans (who creates her own fabrics), Elise Kim (who embraces craftsmanship in her collections), Tessa Wagenvoort (who designs handprinted textiles), FREDFARROWBRITTAVELONTAN (a designer duo that celebrate handmade knits and artisanal embroideries) and Sophie #1234567+ (a designer collective whose approach to seasonal collections could be called slow).

And there’s a small consolation for eco fashion lovers that are unable to attend the invitation only press events at Amsterdam Fashion Week. The downtown programme, which is open to the public, often includes collection presentations by sustainable fashion brands, such as Shekila Eco Fashion and O My Bag.

B: Bamboo

As bamboo clothing becomes ever more popular, an increasing number of critics openly question its green nature, it seems. Bamboo being a plant that grows quickly without the need for irrigation, pesticides and fertilizers, its fibers have increasingly been promoted as environmentally friendly. Add to that the positive features that we tend to ascribe to a fabric made from plants plus bamboo clothing’s silky feel, and bamboo’s popularity among a green consumer audience becomes understandable. Companies like Green Daddy, Under the sun and Royal Bamboo benefit from this trend.

Perhaps in response to this, critics of bamboo – and they’re not always eco cynics – have become more vocal in citing the downsides. Bamboo fibers are made by dissolving cellulose into chemicals and creating what’s called a viscose solution. And viscose, as everyone will know, is a man-made fiber that does not score well on sustainability. In Made-By’s environmental benchmark, viscose fibers (including bamboo viscose) are classified as E, which means they are the least sustainable option available to clothing producers. What’s more, bamboo is not biodegradable and as the fashion industry often uses bamboo-cotton blends, bamboo clothing is difficult to recycle.

So should we steer clear from bamboo clothing and accuse companies promoting its sustainability of greenwashing? It’s not that simple. There are ways to mechanically produce bamboo fibers for clothing production and these do not use chemical treatments (although the subsequent dyeing processes tend to be far from clean). Because these production methods are relatively expensive, they are less common than viscose, but of course when the market for bamboo fabrics grows these costs may decrease.

In addition, experts agree on one thing when it comes to sustainable fabrics: our planet will benefit from a fashion industry that embraces a diversity of fibers. And that would mean that bamboo could have a considerable role to play in clothing production. That role may be more modest that its current proponents may wish. But then it’s up to us consumers to make greener choices, choosing not only appealing materials like bamboo, but also its sustainable counterparts like hemp and nettle. And let’s face it, don’t these good old fibers deserve a chance in our closets too?

R: Recycling

Discarded cans, plastic bottles, car tyres, fire brigade hoses, TV’s, fake suede car seats. The fashion industry has been able to recycle lots of unlikely products into new must-haves. In many cases, those bags, belts or shoes don’t even look like they were made from waste materials.

What’s more, with rising cotton prices, an increasing number of mainstream brands and discounters (including Puma and H&M) have come to opt for recycled fabrics, such as recycled cotton and recycled polyester. Those are not bad options for the environment, as the re-use of textile waste reduces the need for new fiber production and decreases the use of energy resources. For this reason, the Made-By environmental benchmark on fibers favors materials such as recycled nylon, recycled polyester, recycled cotton and recycled wool alongside sustainable materials such as biocotton, lyocell, organic linen and organic hemp.

Recently, even fashion retailers have come to embrace recycling. Marks & Spencer proclaimed shwopping to be the new shopping. The retailer encourages its customers to donate an old item of clothing to charity every time they come into the store to buy something new. M&S works together with Oxfam to resell, reuse or recycle these donations. The retailer aims to develop a closed loop system that reduces textile waste to a minimum. That would certainly be no luxury as every year, approximately 1 billion clothes in the UK end up as landfill.

Are other retailers likely to follow into the footsteps of the M&S shwopping initiative? Perhaps the introduction of the Swop-box will persuade them to do so. This recycling bin, designed especially for fashion stores, enables consumers to hand in their old clothes in exchange for a discount coupon for a new purchase.

And there are other recycling initiatives in the retail sector. In 2012, Puma claimed to have opened the first sustainable store on earth. The Bangalore shop has been furnished with recycled wood. The building uses recycled steel from old electronics, bicycles, and tiffin boxes, along with porotherm blocks made using waste from the annual desilting of the lakes in Kunigal.