texfash: Your pilot project appears to begin from the premise that sustainability cannot be treated simply as an efficiency exercise. At what point did you realise that the existing industrial model itself needed to be questioned?
Asha Singhal: The fashion industry has spent a decade optimising a broken system. Cleaner dyes, better sorting, more efficient factories. But what becomes clear very quickly is that you can optimise every step of a linear system and still end up with materials that have nowhere to go except a landfill or an incinerator.
There has been significant progress with some solutions, like fibre-to-fibre recycling. But there is a critical issue: the waste streams of blended fibres and low-grade polyesters are simply incompatible with the recycling infrastructure that exists. This leaves a huge gap.
So, what does a system that handles the reality of textile waste look like?
That is when ecological thinking comes in. Circularity, sustainability, and regeneration are not concepts we invented. They are inherently part of the way nature works, and the way nature achieves them is through decomposition: a function that is entirely missing from our industrial systems. We need to understand how to bring them back as feedstock for other industries, and to reimagine waste as untapped resource streams and nutrients rather than something to be discarded, burnt, or landfilled.
Fashion production depends heavily on standardisation and control. Biological systems operate through adaptation and interdependence. Where did those two approaches prove hardest to reconcile?
Asha Singhal: Nature uses a small, safe subset of elements to create everything from beetle shells to soft organs. At the end of their life, all of it returns to the earth as materials that can be decomposed and transformed into valuable resources. Our industrial systems, by contrast, rely on a large number of additives, toxins, and harmful chemicals to achieve functions like durability and waterproofing at the expense of human and environmental health.
The challenge is less about standardisation and control in isolation, and more about how we move away from the take-make-waste model on which our current system was designed.
Addressing that requires, first, rethinking what goes into materials at the production stage. And second—which is what we are doing at the Nature of Fashion—us bringing decomposition back into the conversation around circularity to accommodate adaptation and interdependence.
In practical terms, this means designing decomposition processes around feedstock variability. Every biological process we are working with—enzymatic hydrolysis, bacterial fermentation, microbial bioremediation - performs differently depending on what it receives.
A bale of collected textiles might contain cotton blended with elastane, polyester fused with nylon, and chemically-treated workwear alongside fast fashion. In the Netherlands pilot, enzymatic hydrolysis efficiency varied significantly depending on textile type and origin. In Germany, PHB yields from bacterial fermentation were more stable when processing B2B workwear than highly variable post-consumer fast fashion.
The industrial instinct is to resolve textile waste by pre-sorting and standardising feedstock more aggressively. But that pushes complexity upstream without resolving it. We’ve shown that the more durable solution is a modular, multi-pathway one. It is more resilient than any single optimised process, precisely because it routes different fractions of a mixed waste stream to whichever technology handles them best.
That is closer to how decomposition works in nature: a cascade of specialised actors, each processing a different fraction, feeding outputs forward to the next.
Biomimicry is often spoken about in terms of materials or aesthetics. In your work, how much of the challenge lay instead in changing the way problems were framed in the first place?
Asha Singhal: The deep foundation of biomimicry is in solving for function. It starts with a human design challenge and asks: what is the function we are trying to achieve? From there, it looks for champions in nature, organisms, processes, and ecosystems that are already solving that challenge. The step that follows is copying the strategies nature has developed into our own design. The fact that the aesthetics often happen to look good is usually a bonus.
The project operates at the systems level of the fashion industry, which means the original question was: what would fashion look like if it operated like a natural ecosystem? That question is what served as the foundation of the Nature of Fashion report in 2021.
The industry is reaching a reckoning around the global challenge of waste that results from the current take-make-waste model. But biologically, the answer to this problem is already there. Every material that has ever existed in a functioning ecosystem was broken down and reassembled into something else. Decomposition is not an endpoint. It is the mechanism through which matter becomes available for the next cycle.
And so, that’s why we believe fashion’s waste crisis is not primarily a recycling technology problem, it is the absence of a decomposer layer. There is no industrial equivalent of the fungi, bacteria, and organisms that process dead matter back into nutrients.
Once the problem is framed that way, the design challenge changes entirely: we are not looking for a better recycling technology, we are looking to add a missing function to the system. Getting that shift to land, especially in industry settings where “circular economy” has already been defined in a particular way, is a constant and important part of the work.
Biomimicry requires companies to study natural systems for instruction rather than merely for raw material extraction. Do you think fashion businesses are prepared for that change in thinking?
Asha Singhal: Readiness varies enormously. There are innovators and fashion designers who have been working with living systems as models for years and need no convincing. Others are working in regenerative design and have had meaningful encounters with nature as a source of solutions. But the broader industry, particularly brands operating at scale, still tends toward a transactional relationship with sustainability and nature. The way the system is set up, it rewards solutions that slot into existing supply chains and reporting frameworks.
Biomimicry, when it is done seriously, asks something more fundamental, starting from what biological systems do well and designing from there, rather than asking nature to fit into a system that was designed without it.
While this is a big ask, the truth is that we are also stepping into an era where people are seeking innovative answers to the immense challenges of a warming world. And nature offers real answers to that predicament. What we observe is that the appetite for a different kind of thinking is growing, driven in part by incoming regulation.
Extended Producer Responsibility schemes in Europe are beginning to make the cost of unmanaged waste visible to brands that have historically been insulated from it. When the end-of-life problem can no longer be externalised, the interest in what can actually handle complex waste becomes real.
