The organisation is working on an initiative called the CanopyStyle campaign, which collaborates with over 500 global fashion brands to eliminate the use of wood-derived viscose in fabrics, steering them toward more sustainable alternatives…
Non-profit environmental organisation Canopy, which works to protect forests, species, and climate by collaborating with the forestry industry, businesses, and communities was founded in 1999 by Nicole Rycroft. Canopy focuses on ensuring the sustainability of the world’s ancient and most endangered forests. Its efforts include encouraging the fashion, packaging, and publishing industries to adopt eco-friendly alternatives to wood-based products, such as using recycled materials or innovative textiles made from agricultural residues. More notably, the organisation is working on an initiative called the CanopyStyle campaign, which collaborates with over 500 global fashion brands to eliminate the use of wood derived viscose in fabrics, steering them toward more sustainable alternatives. Alongside protecting forests, Canopy hopes to protect biodiversity, reduce carbon emissions, and promote sustainable business practices.
In an exclusive conversation with IMAGES Business of Fashion’s Kajal Ahuja, Canopy Founder, Nicole Rycroft talks about the organisation’s unique approach, which combines environmental advocacy with business collaboration, and in doing so has gained recognition and widespread support from global brands.
Tell us about Canopy’s mission to transform supply chains and what are the key milestones in this mission?
Canopy is a solutions-driven, not for profit organisation working to protect forests and reduce carbon footprint through transforming supply chains that currently drive deforestation and forest degradation. We work with 980 large corporate customers of the forest products industry which include companies like Walmart, H&M and LVMH – companies which use a lot of forest-based textiles or paper based packaging for their production.
Our focus, as we work with brands is paper packaging, wood based textile viscose and Lyocell supply chains. The first thing we do is to ensure that the companies we work with no longer source from the world’s most sensitive, high carbon, high biodiversity value forests. But that’s a fairly low bar to set that we’re just not destroying these most critical planetary life support systems. A large part of our work now, especially within the fashion space, is to really try and accelerate the transition to commercial scale production of these game changing, low carbonous, more circular, next generation solutions.
We help them transition to circular fabrics made from textile waste and paper from agricultural residues like straw leftover after the food grain harvest rather than mowing down 400 year old trees and disturbing a vibrant forest ecosystem to make t-shirts and packaging them. This system will work well in India since 100 million tonnes of agricultural residue is burnt here every year.
We hope to work with companies in India which can add economic value to farming communities, to those involved in the waste aggregation and diversion system, and then integrate back into the system to provide the ȃ bre for next season’s clothing and packaging and in doing so help keep take the pressure oǹ forests so that they can be standing.
Why is India a critical focus for canopy? And how do you plan to achieve this particular goal and how does the country fit into your global strategy?
As a society we’re grappling with two existential crises – the climate crisis and a precipitous loss of biodiversity. Both of those require us to actually fundamentally change the production systems and supply chains that form the foundation of our economy and our societies. What’s really exciting for India is that it is extraordinarily well positioned, in particular within the fashion and textile sectors, to be an early global leader in low carbon circular materials. There’s so much textile waste available here that can be repurposed back into upcycled production systems. Even if a percentage of the hundred thousand tons of agricultural residue can be repurposed and turned into man-made cellular viscose fiber, it will help alleviate the pressure on forest ecosystems.
The EU on the other hand is a very important value-added market. Export markets like Europe are facing a growing body of regulations which will close them oǹ to any textile or any produced product, packaging product that originates from high carbon or from biodiversity value forests.
This is where a door of opportunity opens for India wherein it positions itself to be a preferred low-carbon materials sourcing region for markets like the EU. So India very proactively pivots from what has been quite a conventional linear extractive production system to a fundamentally more circular lower carbon.
The problem of sustainable clothing in India is that it this too expensive for the mass market to consume. How do alternate fabrics then cater to a value conscious consumer market?
The first focus for the CanopyStyle initiative has been making sure that we remove really high risk forest fiber from the supply chain. For example, 71% of global viscose producers now have a ‘green shirt’ in Canopy’s annual Hot Button Rating. This rating is rigorous – only given when 28 different criteria are met including completing a third-party audit that actually verifies where they’re sourcing their fibre from. So as a very first step, this viscose is available for Indian brands to adopt into fashion without there being any additional cost – and that’s just the starting point.
However, since most of the innovators are not at a commercial scale at this point, there is a price premium. That’s the work that we are now trying to do with our brand partners, with producers like Birla, to work out how we optimise production, what are the obstacles, where the additional costing coming from, etc.
There are brands abroad which are selling clothes made of 100% recycled textile-based lyocell – for example, there is a Mara Hoffman dress which uses this and sells for $1200. However, there are other more value-conscious brands like Zara which sell similar clothes, made with 50% of that same material and 50% low-risk fibre, which sells at a much lower price point, to a more price-conscious consumer.
What we’re really looking to do now is to see how we can accelerate the scaling of these next-generation solutions, from a planetary perspective, we absolutely need and make sure this is not just a luxury thing.
Can you share some examples of successful transformations and supply chains from other regions that could serve an example for India?
What we’re doing in India is very exciting because India has the opportunity to be an early leader in low-carbon material production. You can pioneer a new supply chain. At this point a transition to circular and next-gen materials hasn’t necessarily happened, which is part of the excitement for India. We can’t say Europe’s done it or Brazil or America has done it and India should just copy the model.
There are countries like China which are doing extremely well in the space that we can look to, but they too are at a very early stage. A safety net needs to be in place with grants, subsidies, tax incentives and tax breaks. There need to be enabling conditions that help attract investment into renewables, that help innovators with moving from pilot scale to commercial scale production. A lot of examples can be drawn from the work that has happened in other jurisdictions around enabling and scaling renewable, solar energy and EVs.
What are some of the innovative solutions and technologies Canopy is developing to replace ancient and endangered forest fibres?
We work with innovators, very talented chemists and engineers in the textile space. Some of the technology companies that we work with closely include:
- Circ – They have pioneered technology that returns polycotton waste back to the raw materials from which it was made, so fashion brands can reuse fibers and reduce harm to the Earth in the process.
- Circulose – An award-winning textile-to-textile recycling company based in Sweden, which has the ability to take a blended textile and make the core components for a truly circular polyester and a truly circular, manmade cellulosic fibre.
- Rubi – The Rubi system captures and converts CO2 into pure cellulose pulp using enzymes. This cellulose pulp is spun into fibres, yarn, and textile using same processes in the industry.
- Nanollose – A leading research and development company, specialising in the development of plant-free cellulose technologies. Nanollose has developed technology which turns liquid waste into rayon ȃ bre for clothes with minimal environmental impact. Nanollose has partnered with Birla in India on a pilot scale that can take industrial food waste, like coconut water byproduct, and through a microbial cellulosic fermentation process grow a cellulose fibre.
There’s no shortage of really brilliant, elegant solutions. It’s really about understanding which solutions are going to be the strongest applications at commercial scale, from a quality perspective, from a fibre applicability perspective and the dexterity of application, and from a price point perspective, and then figure out how to mobilise the capital that’s needed to scale them as quickly as possible. One of the ways of scaling is that these brilliant innovators partner with existing conventional producers and conventional producers retrofitting their existing facilities to help them scale or scaling by building joint ventures together.
In what way can India position itself as a global leader in this mission? And what role can Indian companies and policymakers play in this transformation?
No single company can do this by themselves, no matter how big they are. This is where we come in. Canopy helps these companies create the right strategy, a pre-competitive space where the purchasing decisions that an individual brand or an individual supplier makes get leveraged with the work that we’re doing. We help them create a 10X impact and in some cases, much more.
In India, we work with companies like Flipkart and Anita Dongre. We are taking on a growing number of customers – brand partners, design partners, retail partners. We also work with value chain leaders and business leaders. These are extremely important because they create the right market incentives and conditions for investment to Ȅ ow in. We hope to work with policy decision-makers since they have a big role to play in helping to enable this transition.
What are the next steps for Canopy in its mission to safeguard forests?
Our global target is to have at least 60 million tons of nextgen products in the market within the next decade. And then within that, we see India as being positioned in a sweet spot. I think the unique set of circumstances that India has – be it the culture of innovation, the ability for entrepreneurism, the fact that there is technical expertise here already – lead to us feeling very excited about expanding our work here.
