Beyond “Better Fibres”: Root Causes and Pathways
Reflections from the Fibres & Materials Knowledge Circle-II, 2025
Fashion’s fibre and material choices sit where land, labour, energy, economy, culture and waste all meet. Yet public debate still tends to flatten this into simple slogans: choose better materials, go circular, pick preferred fibres. Helpful for awareness, yes – but these frames can also hide the political and economic forces that shape fibre systems and determine who carries the risks.
As part of UCRF’s fourth Action Season, the Fibres & Materials Knowledge Circle was coordinated by Amy Boote, Jennifer Inaba, Vinit Jain and Nandita Shivakumar, with the support of the wider board, as a space for participants to share, explore and reflect on research and lived experiences grounded in the UCRF Manifesto. This initiative also supports our ongoing commitment to foster critical dialogue and build an activist knowledge ecology. Instead of asking “Which fibre is best?”, the Fibres & Materials Knowledge Circle set out to go deeper:
· What are the root causes of harm in current fibre and material systems?
· How are those harms distributed – across geographies, communities and species?
· What kinds of solution pathways could move us towards sufficiency and justice, not just greener versions of the status quo?
How we held the conversation
We structured the Circle as a three-step process:
Written reflections
Earlier in the season, we invited contributions from within and beyond the UCRF membership via a Google Form. Respondents were asked to share experiences and dilemmas across four lenses: academic & research, workers & grassroots, design & industry/practice, and policy & activism.
A 90-minute synthesis session (4 December 2025)
Six invited speakers—Rocío Cota, Tuba Gezer-Arli, Vinit Jain, Emil Pettersen, Kirsten Scott and Nandita Shivakumar—shared short inputs, followed by discussion with other participants. Rather than seeking consensus, we tried to map root causes, tensions and possible pathways together.
This synthesis blog post
What follows brings together the main patterns from both the written responses and the live session.
What we heard about root causes
Despite coming from very different positions, contributors kept circling back to a small set of underlying problems.
A fibre debate that hides the growth logic
Most mainstream debate is framed as natural vs synthetic, recycled vs virgin, or fibre hierarchies built around preferred versus implicitly less acceptable materials. These distinctions can be useful, but they largely leave untouched a fashion system organised around:
· ever-increasing volumes of garments
· squeezed prices and speed
· externalised environmental and social damage
Even genuinely “better” materials risk becoming add-ons to the same growth engine. The problem is not only what fibres we use, but how many garments, under what conditions, and for whose benefit.
Implication: fibre strategies that do not confront overproduction and profit logics will keep running into hard limits.
Structural lock-ins in design, sourcing and assembly
From design and Tier-1 manufacturing perspectives, root causes showed up as lock-ins built into products and sourcing plans:
· Blends and elastane almost everywhere, including hidden stretch in linings, waistbands and threads.
· Layered constructions—laminations, foams, bonding, mixed trims—and heavy “performance” finishes that never appear on the label but make disassembly, recycling and wastewater treatment much harder.
· Dark, saturated colour palettes that hinder sorting and narrow recycling routes.
By the time these choices reach the cutting room, factories are juggling many different materials at once and producing tiny, mixed streams of cutting waste. It is challenging to turn these streams into meaningful fibre-to-fibre or next-use routes, no matter how strong the rhetoric of circularity.
Implication: product and sourcing decisions upstream are quietly deciding what is (and is not) possible in terms of waste, recycling and worker health downstream.
Tools and narratives that miss the full picture
Several contributors highlighted both the value and the limits of tools like Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). LCAs can clarify some choices, but often:
· rely on averages and narrow system boundaries
· struggle to represent multi-functional landscapes and cultural dimensions
· treat social justice as “out of scope”
At the same time, simplified narratives travel much faster than nuance: “recycled polyester is circular”, “lower footprint = sustainable”, or preferred-fibre lists as ready-made answers. Designers, students and citizens are often told to trust the score, rather than invited to question what it leaves out.
Contributors also described a gap between how materials are presented and how people actually understand them. Many wearers do not know what their clothes are made of; a shiny polyester satin may be assumed to be silk. Wardrobes fill up with textiles that are durable enough to last but not valued enough to be kept, repaired or passed on. This “material overpopulation” weakens our emotional connection to garments and makes caring for them less likely. At the same time, debates about “sustainable textiles” are still largely led by Western institutions and measurement and certification tools that are costly to access and operate, and that often do not align with the realities or priorities of producers and wearers elsewhere.
Implication: a technocratic, number-driven framing can sideline lived experience, power and place, even when we think we are “following the data”.
Who carries the weight of fibre decisions?
From workers & grassroots and policy & activism lenses, fibre systems look like systems that allocate risk:
· Cotton, wool, forestry and petrochemical regions often become sacrifice zones for water stress, pollution and land degradation.
· Textile and garment hubs carry the dust, chemicals, heat, audits and precarity needed to keep materials “cheap” and production speed high.
· Shifts to “better” or certified materials can add more segregation, paperwork and surveillance without better wages or stability.
In other words, some places and people are treated as expendable so that others can enjoy cheap, fast, “sustainable” apparel.
Beyond garment hubs, fibre production itself, in cotton farming, ginning, wool processing and forestry operations, often relies on informal, feminised and poorly protected labour, treated as “pre-industrial” and left outside many due diligence regimes and formal union coverage. Workers in recycling and “waste” streams handle dust, chemical residues and microfibres with little recognition or protection, even as circularity is celebrated elsewhere.
Implication: if fibre strategies deepen this uneven risk along the fibre chain while polishing brand reputations, they are part of the problem, not the solution.
Directions for change: what this suggests
The Circle did not converge on a single fix. Instead, it surfaced directions where work seems both necessary and possible.
Start from where, what and how - not just “which fibre”
Contributors reminded us that fibres are never just abstract categories; they are rooted in land, climate, culture and labour.
That suggests a different set of starting questions: not only “Which fibre has the best score?” but where is this happening, what systems is it part of, and how is it produced, used and disposed of?
In practice, this means:
· Treating bioregions and territories as starting points: asking which fibres, animals, plants and colour practices fit specific landscapes and communities.
· Supporting local and Indigenous textile systems as central to just futures, not as nostalgic side-stories.
· Asking hard questions about “circular” schemes that move large volumes of textile and other waste across continents, instead of reducing waste at source and building responsibility and capacity to deal with it where it is actually produced and used.
The aim is not to romanticise smallness or to shut down global trade, but to keep fibre decisions connected to the places and people who carry their consequences, rather than treating “fibre choice” as a placeless technical tweak.
Redesign products and sourcing for coherent material flows
From design and Tier-1 perspectives, a clear message emerged: if we want fibres and materials to move responsibly through the system, we have to stop fragmenting them at the product and sourcing stage.
In practice, this means:
· Simplifying material systems.
Using more standardised core fabrics and carry-over styles so that factories work with coherent volumes, rather than endless micro-runs. Avoiding unnecessary blends wherever possible, and keeping main fabric bodies as simple and mono-material as we can.
· Locating performance more carefully.
When extra stretch or weather resistance is genuinely needed, placing it in modular or replaceable components instead of mixing everything into one inseparable construction.
· Aligning allocation with material coherence.
Allocating materials so that each factory handles fewer material types in larger volumes, making cutting-waste segregation and realistic recycling or next-use pathways technically and economically possible.
The thread running through all of this is clear: design and sourcing decisions should create clear, manageable material flows, not a tangle of small, incompatible streams that no one downstream can work with.
Make the costs of “better” fibres visible – and share them fairly
Workers & grassroots perspectives and industry perspectives converged on a central issue: many “better” or “green” fibre initiatives add work, complexity and risk, and these burdens are often pushed onto those with the least power in the supply chain.
Bringing value, risk and responsibility back into balance means, at minimum:
· Making the extra work created by new specifications—segregation, certification administration, audits, special finishes, take-back schemes—visible and costed in purchase orders, rather than treated as free capacity.
· Setting realistic MOQs and lead times for new materials and processes, so that commercial risk is not simply shifted onto producers, suppliers, workers and their communities.
· Committing not to fund sustainability claims by squeezing FOBs and wages, and explicitly centring labour rights, health and income security in any fibre and materials strategy.
Several suggestions also pointed towards governance: expanding human rights and environmental due diligence beyond Tier 1 to include fibre production and recycling; making transparency from fibre onwards compulsory rather than voluntary; and ensuring that workers’ organisations and unions have a formal voice in shaping fibre transitions, not just acting as data providers for audits.
If the costs and risks of “better” fibres remain hidden and continue to fall on those at the bottom of the chain, we are not redistributing harm or responsibility—only changing the story told about it.
Put sufficiency and value at the heart of fibre strategy
Several contributors argued that any serious fibre and materials strategy has to reckon with sufficiency and value: not only which fibres we use, but how much virgin fibre enters the system and how much real use-value we get from what is already in circulation.
From research, design and lived experience, people noted that:
· Wardrobes full of barely worn clothes signal low value per unit of fibre—land, energy and labour embodied in garments that deliver very little use.
· The faster garments move through our lives, the more virgin fibre is needed to keep the system going, and the weaker our incentives become to repair, adapt, share or resell what already exists.
· When “sustainability” is framed only as a property of new fibres, it can distract from the question of how wisely we are using the fibres we already have.
A sufficiency- and value-focused fibre strategy means, at minimum:
· Reducing virgin fibre inputs overall, not just changing their composition.
· Designing and managing ranges so that each kilogram of fibre delivers much more use and value—through durability, care, repair, redesign, sharing and resale.
· Tracking metrics that connect fibres to use, such as average wears per item, time in active use, virgin fibre actually displaced by recovered inputs, and the share of revenue coming from extending use rather than pushing new material into the system.
Without bringing sufficiency and value into fibre decisions, even very careful material choices will keep colliding with the sheer volume of new fibre flowing through the fashion system each year.
An invitation
This first Fibres & Materials Knowledge Circle was a test of whether we could use UCRF’s activist knowledge ecology to name root causes together, across lenses and locations. It also surfaced tensions—around degrowth and jobs, territorial systems and global trade, recycling and overproduction—that we should not smooth over too quickly.
In future seasons, we hope to explore related areas—such as water and chemicals, climate and energy, labour and wages, overproduction and rebound, waste and end-of-life, consumption and culture, and policy and governance—using the same Knowledge Circle approach: multi-lens, critical, and grounded in the UCRF Manifesto.
We offer this synthesis as an invitation, not a conclusion. As you read, we invite you to ask:
· Which root causes resonate with your work, teaching, organising or policy engagement?
· Where do you see gaps, disagreements or new questions that should be brought into future circles?
· From the position you hold—researcher, worker, activist, designer, policymaker—what could you shift next in how fibres and materials are chosen, used and governed?
If you would like to contribute to future Knowledge Circles, share case studies, or bring in perspectives we have missed, we would be glad to hear from you. You can reach us at info@concernedresearchers.org. The work of changing fibre and material systems will only move if we continue to learn, unsettle and act together.
Guided by our Manifesto, UCRF is committed to amplifying diverse voices and perspectives. Our goal is to foster an activist knowledge ecology and lead critical debates on fashion's systemic challenges. While we do not endorse a single viewpoint, we seek to offer a platform for varied ideas that inspire further dialogue and inquiry.
