As Courtney Holm scoured warehouses for fabric to create garments for her sustainable fashion label, she was struck by the enormous scale of excess material in Australia.
I would go out to these different places, and I would see all of this surplus material, Ms Holm said. You go to a bigger factory, or you go to a mill, and you see a warehouse full of it.
After years of wondering how to make this resource available to those who could use it, she thought What if someone digitised everything and put this onto one platform?
When no-one did, Ms Holm applied for a grant from the Victorian government’s Circular Economy Business Innovation Centre, which funds projects that prevent products from going to waste.
Basically that was the kick-starter for us to actually build a platform and to test it to see what people were actually looking for from a buying perspective, as well as the people that are holding the surplus, what were their needs? she told ABC Radio Perth.
That business, Melbourne-based Circular Sourcing, is now so successful that Ms Holm is winding down her fashion label to focus on it full time.
While much of the focus on fashion waste is on the fast-fashion industry and the quantity of clothing that is discarded each year, unused fabric is also a big, although far less visible, problem.
It’s around $210 billion of value that is not being necessarily claimed back from those materials, Ms Holm said.
