In response to The Minister for Environment and Water, Tanya Plibersek’s announcement to make the Seamless Initiative mandatory across the fashion industry, conscious fashion brand, Sunset Lover has pledged to join the scheme and take it one step further.
“We believe that sustainability should be the standard in our industry, sadly it’s far from it,” Sunset Lover CEO and creative director, Melanie Flintoft said.
Sunset Lover is an Australian resort wear brand with a zero-plastic policy in its fibres and packaging. The brand was nominated by responsible brand and impact strategist, Valentina Zarew to take part in the Transition Advisory Group for the National Product Stewardship Scheme due to outstanding work in textile circularity.
While the brand was not selected, Sunset Lover continues to take part in pilot projects and circular design groups that are urging more small and medium sized enterprises to join.
Taking the Seamless Initiative one step further, Sunset Lover has partnered with Peats Group and Biobin to explore end of life solutions if garments cannot be recycled or resold. The brand is running compost trials and hopes to successfully return textiles back to the earth.
A new Australian standard for textile composting has just been approved. However, this does not consider textile collection in households through the organics bin services. Peats Group pick up and process the green bin waste in South Australia. Through composting trials, Sunset Lover and Peats Group are researching how this can be made possible. The trials will be testing a broad range of fashion items that are changeable every season, including different fabrics, constructions, trims, fusing, elastic, zips and labelling.
The parameter of the standard is prohibitive to any fashion brands as textile products require testing to achieve compostable certification. This excludes fashion brands as it would not be possible to test every design, each season, to certify that it is compostable.
Sunset Lover is proposing the trial of a different approach using Oeko-tex (chemical testing standard) and physical composting tests to ensure fabrics and garments do not leave anything harmful behind.