Our thinking

ECOALF

8 October, 2021

Navigating the world of sustainable clothing can be tricky, with long supply chains and competing claims making it almost impossible to know how green your fashion really is. That’s why this week’s goods is designed to help you get to slow fashion, faster…  

Launched in 2013, ECOALF has developed over 400 recycled fabrics using waste materials – including plastic bottles from the bottom of the ocean, tyres, post-consumer cotton and coffee grains. The garments are high-quality and timeless pieces you can keep for a very long time.  

And now these slow fashion pioneers have gone one step further, equipping every individual item of clothing with a QR code to help you discover at a glance where it comes from, how it’s made and its environmental impact. 

The results are impressive. Using pre-existing materials saves on energy usage, greenhouse gas emissions and water (replacing a kilogram of new cotton with its recycled equivalent saves about 765 litres of water). And since 2015, ECOALF has also been working on Upcycling the Oceans: an ambitious project with over 3000 fishermen that has rescued over 700 tonnes of waste from our oceans to be turned into clothing. 

So if you are considering buying new, we suggest investing in good quality, long-lasting clothes, and ECOALF is up there on our list. Yes, these come with a price tag, but considering that the one sweater will might outlive fifteen of your fast fashion sweaters… we will let you do the maths! And if you want to learn more about ECOALF, you can listen to its CEO and founder Javier Goyeneche speaking to our very own CEO Giles Gibbons right here. 

By Marie Guérinet