The Surprising Future Of (Sustainable) Fashion

We may not think one pair of leggings or one t-shirt or cotton dresses that we buy make a difference in the planet or the economy, but they do, according to innovative women leaders in the fashion supply chain at The Earth Day Women’s Summit last week at EarthX2025.

How can they tell? Some items are labeled. Some of the products sold by LuluLemon, or the parkas and fleece jackets sold by Craig Hoppers in the UK are labeled as CO2 Renew, for example, because they are made from captured CO2 through a process developed by LanzaTech, their Chief Science Officer Zara Summers, Ph.D. explained at the Summit. Summers previously led the ExxonMobil biosciences division for 10 years.

“It’s ask yourself, what am I buying today? Is there an alternative that, where this carbon has a second life?” she suggested.

The United Nations says the garment industry is the second highest CO2-emitting industry, and that garments make up 7% of our landfills and put 500,000 tons of microplastics into the oceans each year.

Turning all those emissions into fiber for clothing

Summers explained that the LanzaTech process, oversimplified, is leveraging microbes that turn CO2 into ethanol. That ethanol can become sustainable aviation fuel, for example. “It’s actually a building block of everything that petroleum is used for today,” she said.

She added that they can make “pretty much any synthetic fiber that you can get from fossil, we have a path to create.” Then she showed the audience two pieces of clothing she says they made from captured CO2. “This running shirt started off as a carbon emission from a steel mill in China. And so we’re able to, instead of pumping that carbon monoxide and dioxide directly into the atmosphere, we pump it into our massive, kind of like a brewery, but cooler, huge, huge 500,000 liter tanks of living, breathing, spinning out ethanol microbes. And so we harness that.” They also partnered with REI on products.

The other clothing is a pair of fuchsia-purple leggings by Athleta of Lululemon (pictured above), which she said were also made from captured CO2. She added that Lululemon has a stated goal of having ~25% of the polyester they use in these leggings “to be from emissions produced ethanol.” She said it’s “a massive step change.”

In the garment industry, 80% of the workers are women. Summers said that she and her team visit the factories using their products because, “we follow through the whole supply chain.”

Tracking fiber to rack

“They (manufacturers and retailers) need to know the people in their supply chains and know where their cotton’s coming from,” Alison Ward, CEO of CottonConnect said in a session at the Summit about food, fashion and agriculture in the face of the climate crisis. “We’ve started with the farmer and started tracking the cotton from that farmer up in the supply chain.” By using sophisticated tracking systems, they can tell which farm cotton is sourced from in the CottonConnect network. “We work with people like Primark, Carrefour, big French retailer across Europe and Asia, really. How do we hold them account in their supply chains?”

Now they have a QR code, too. “So when the farmer sells their cotton, that QR code scans that and it goes up into our tracking system,” adding that at this point, “the equivalent of 1.7 billion t-shirts are being traced through our system.”

CottonConnect is a global organization that trains small-scale farmers in regenerative and sustainable agricultural techniques and technologies, especially female farmers in India, Bangladesh, China, Egypt, Peru and Pakistan. They also create partnerships with fashion brands to help those farmers bring their cotton to market.

In addition, “now there’s some really clever techs through a couple of companies. There’s one which is an isotope test. So you can test the soil in the village, and then the isotope tells you that that cotton is from that soil in that village.”

“There’s also a DNA marker that you can spray on the cotton and then it goes through all of the washers and all of the different processing, and you can tell that that is the unique DNA marker that was sprayed at a particular point in the supply chain. So technology’s really leaping forward,” Ward explained.

Cotton makes up about 25% of global textile production, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and brands are being pressured by consumers – 85% of whom are women – to use more sustainable and ethical business practices. Even in today’s economy, a 2024 study by PwC found that a majority of consumers are willing to pay more for sustainably-produced products. “But right now, just 30% of the world’s cotton is classed as ‘sustainable’,” according to CottonConnect.

Paying attention to these steps on the manufacturing side, and buying aligned with our values, are ways we as consumers drive the market.