H&M Foundation, the nonprofit arm of the Swedish fashion giant H&M, has launched a new virtual fashion collection featuring ten startups and their sustainable fashion designs. The Billion Dollar Collection also shows the estimated price tag that the selected Global Change Award winners believe they’ll need to scale up and “truly change the fashion industry beyond capsule collections and pilots”.
Ten companies and their sustainable fashion solutions are being showcased at the online Billion Dollar Collection, each of them previous winners of the H&M Foundation’s Global Change Awards since 2015. Beyond showing their innovative designs, from novel biomaterials to traceability technologies, the virtual collection also features the price tag that each company believes they will need to support their scale-up plans to make a real impact on the global fashion industry and its currently outsized contribution to waste and climate change.
Biodegradable and renewable algae-based thread maker Algaeing, for instance, estimates that they will need around US$5 million in support to scale to 15,000 metric tons of textiles, which could help them save as much as 2,700 million litres of polluted water each year – the equivalent of the water used to produce 1 million cotton tees.
