Every year, Aarav Chavda scuba dives at the same Florida reef. The former McKinsey analyst and mechanical engineer has watched as the coral bleached over time and noticed declines in the population of all species except lionfish.
Local and federal authorities around the Atlantic and Caribbean have tried various methods to eradicate lionfish, a beautiful striped and spiny invasive species that has no natural predators in the area and eats many other fish. Chawda came up with a new idea: make it fashionable. Together with two other avid divers, Chawda founded a startup called Inversa and invented a process to turn lionfish skin into supple, attractive leather. Then they added two more invasive species: Burmese pythons from the Florida Everglades and carp from the Mississippi River. They’ve had some success. Many brands, including Piper & Skye and Rex Shoes, use their leather for wallets, footballs, flip-flops, and cool python daggers and sheaths.
Lionfish populations are measured and recorded during the 2021 Lionfish Derby at the Reef Environmental Education Foundation headquarters in Key Largo, Fla. (Patrick Connelly/The Associated Press)
The harmful impacts of the fashion industry (which includes not only luxury fashion brands but also the companies that make the materials that make our clothes and the companies that assemble them) are well known. According to a McKinsey report, the fashion industry is responsible for up to 4 percent of global climate emissions and a significant share of the world’s water pollution. It’s a puzzling and often intractable problem. Humans need clothes to survive. What’s more, we love clothes and feel deep meaning in how we present ourselves to the world.
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“They’re two sides of the same coin,” says Monica Buchan Ng, a sustainability expert at the Centre for Sustainable Fashion at the London College of Fashion.[Clothes] “Fashion can be an incredible creative force for self-expression and identity, but we also know that the way the fashion system currently works is disruption after disruption.”
But the industry’s power also makes it a huge potential tool for innovation and change, and many of the new fabrics are a key part of that change. So far, Chawda says, Inversa has removed 50,000 lionfish, Burmese pythons and carp. In the next few years, the company hopes to have removed tens of millions. “I’m optimistic,” Chawda says. “Because I think consumers care.”
Inversa co-founder Aarav Chavda in 2024. (Photo by Michael Sturhill for The Washington Post)
Fashion tackles sustainability issues
When asked about her favorite innovations in eco-friendly fashion, Julia Marsh, CEO of Sway, a company that makes seaweed-based plastic that big companies like J.Crew use in shipping materials, simply says, “reuse and save.”
It’s true that a cultural change to consume less and increased government regulation are the most effective long-term solutions to reduce the industry’s impact, but evolving the fabrics we use is also an important piece of the puzzle.
Textile waste is an increasingly harmful aspect of fashion’s impact on the planet: people bought nearly twice as much clothing in 2015 as they did in 2000, and most of it ended up in landfills. Fast fashion brands such as Shein produce increasingly cheap clothes that wear out quickly, stimulating consumer demand and adding to a global waste problem.
Many fabrics have negative impacts long before they are discarded. Cheap synthetic fibers like polyester contain microplastics that leach into the planet’s waters with every wash. Cotton is a natural fiber, but it is grown using high levels of pesticides and, in some areas, relies on forced and child labor. As for leather, the animal husbandry needed to make animal leather is not only cruel to the animals, it also causes deforestation, water pollution, and very high carbon emissions. But even “vegan” leather is costly, as it is often made from fossil fuel-derived products such as polyurethane.
An Iranian worker removes animal skins from a washing machine before they are disinfected with environmentally harmful chemicals such as lime, chromium and other enzymes. (Ahshan Polder/AFP/Getty Images)
At the moment, it’s very difficult (and expensive) to buy new clothing that doesn’t have a negative impact on the planet, but as awareness of the problem grows, so do attempted solutions. Over the past decade, governments (especially the European Union) have slowly begun to regulate textile waste, pollution, and emissions. And more people are finding new, more environmentally friendly ways to make clothing. Some of these efforts start with tackling supply chain issues, creating better systems for recycling or reusing old clothes, or inventing dyeing processes that aren’t harmful to waterways. But we’ve also seen some particularly interesting innovations in the area of materials development.
Innovators experiment with biodegradable materials
Uyen Tran grew up in Da Nang, Vietnam, an area with a high concentration of garment factories. Acutely aware of the global reach of fashion manufacturing, she also became aware of the global reach of fashion waste from an early age. She and her family would often shop at thrift stores for designer items that Westerners rejected. “There was a lot of North Face, Ralph Lauren, Nike,” she says. After moving to the US to study at Parsons School of Design and working for some of the brands she first encountered in Vietnamese thrift stores, she became interested in fabric manufacturing methods that avoided such levels of waste.
TômTex produces a 100% bio-based fabric called chitosan, made from shellfish waste. (TômTex)
Curiosity led her to research chitin, a natural polymer that can be extracted from shrimp shells, a renewable, waste-free product that can be ethically sourced from Vietnam’s fishing industry. She turned it into a liquid and flattened it to create a shiny material that looks and functions like synthetic leather or leather. Tran’s company, TômTex, also produces a second fabric made from chitin found in mushrooms. Chitin is a material that sustainable fabric innovators often favor because it grows quickly and has a low environmental impact. TômTex has partnered with luxury brands like Dauphinette and Peter Do to showcase innovative, fashionable, and fully biodegradable fabrics. “Waste is something that humans create,” Tran says. “For me, if I make something, it should biodegrade and go back into the soil as nutrients, so that animals can eat it and trees can grow.”
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The next step for TômTex is to go from small-batch capsule collections to commercialization—scaling up production so that TômTex can replace much of the materials traditionally produced and make a real impact. That requires big investments. “Brands who want to spend don’t have $20 million,” Tran says. “You need that much money to build a factory.” As she works to secure venture capital, she’s working to build relationships with brands as a way to gain recognition.
Other sustainable textile startups are seeking funding as well. Their innovations range from fairly simple, like adding sustainably grown nettle fibre to cotton blends, as in the case of fashion company Pangaia, to the incredibly complex, like bioengineering processes that could take years to develop.
“We’re on the cutting edge of new biomaterials that have a lower carbon footprint, use much less water and chemicals, and, depending on how they’re treated, could potentially biodegrade naturally at the end of their life,” says Suzanne Lee, founder of Biofabricate, a consulting firm that helps companies work with these types of materials.
TômTex workers handle several raw materials, including natural liquid coloring, mushrooms and shellfish waste. (Amber Nguyen/TômTex)
Some companies are seeing big success: Spiber, a Japanese company that is one of the most successful fiber biotech companies, said it has raised about $64 million to help mass-produce its plant-based, spider-silk-inspired fibers.
Other companies are struggling. “What you find with these advanced materials is that they always show a lot of promise in the lab at first,” says Dan Widmeyer, CEO of BoltThreads, which recently had to suspend production of its mushroom-based leather substitute, Milo, because of funding issues. “Can you replicate it at scale, can you meet the quality specifications that customers actually need, and can you meet the timelines and deliverables? Can you fund it at that scale? It’s those kinds of things that kill all of that.”
Innovation and finance come together
Earlier this year, Renewcel, a well-regarded Swedish textile recycling company, declared bankruptcy, sending shock waves through this small, collaborative world. Renewcel, which developed a process to turn used clothing into new cotton, raised $10.6 million and opened its first factory in 2022. The company has partnerships with many big-name brands, including H&M, which agreed to use 18,000 tonnes of the company’s fabric, Circulose, in 2025. But orders were still not enough to support production, and the company also faced quality issues that slowed it down.
Li believes the shock of Renewcell’s failure could motivate brands to steadily increase investment in other similar products. “These products aren’t going to be successful on their own, so we really need to help them if we want them to happen,” he said.
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Meanwhile, sustainable fabric companies are working to promote themselves. Finnish company Spinova extracts cellulose from wood pulp and turns it into a biodegradable fiber. Brands like Marimekko and Adidas use it in their clothes, and the company is expanding production. “I think what’s really most impactful is when brands can show the actual product and say, look, this is the real thing,” says CEO Tuomas Oijala. “It works, it meets a need for consumers, and it’s good value for money.”
The Burmese pythons are believed to have come to South Florida as pets in the 1980s, then been released by owners who grew tired of feeding them live food such as rats. (Miami Herald/Tribune News Service)
For Inversa’s founders, the next step is reaching more consumers, and they’re optimistic that their story will resonate. “When you say to consumers, ‘Buy this and you’re a sustainable person,’ I think you need to have some guilt, some karma, some acknowledgement of what you’ve done,” Chavda says. “If you just say, ‘This wallet saved animals,’ or ‘It’s saving coral reefs,’ you ignore that whole part.”
Inversa has already begun exploring what other exotic species it could use in its fabrics, and is continuing to build relationships with local fishing organisations, governments and environmental NGOs to ensure it sources exotic species in the most harmless way possible.
Chavda, meanwhile, believes that the sustainable textile industry is on the verge of making real, lasting change. “We’re all doing it in different ways, but whether it’s fibre made from seaweed or polyester spun in a different way that’s biodegradable, we’re all trying to do the same thing: make the planet a better place,” Chavda says.
About this story
Edited by Bronwen Latimer. Copy edited by Jeremy Lang. Design and development by Audrey Balbuena. Design editor by Betty Chavarria. Photo editor by Haley Hamblin. Project development by Evan Bretos and Hope Corrigan. Project editor by Marianne Chiamin Liu.
