Lifecycles of Bio-Based Materials: Insights from the HEREWEAR sample collection

The role of designers is pivotal in a shift to circular fashion systems, but often material knowledge is difficult to access and innovation is hard to rationalise or contextualise. We therefore need to create tools to better understand the field of emergent biobased materials and their potential for a decarbonised, circular fashion sector.

The EU-funded HEREWEAR project explores systemic innovation for biobased, local, circular fashion systems as an alternative to current global and fossil-based approaches. This paper presents insights from the creation of a biobased material collection in the early stages of the project. Analysing the collection alongside literature and interviews with experts, produced a map representing the range of options for feedstocks, transformation processes, and end of life for biobased materials.

The biobased material lifecycle map aims to support designers in choosing the appropriate materials for their designs and then implementing adequate circular design strategies for this material. It is already being used with stakeholders inside and outside the project to produce scenarios for biobased, local, and circular fashion that represent systemic understanding of the potential of these materials.