Circuvate: New Years Update, 2024 Industry Outlook

To all our followers, readers, friends and clients, we wish you a Happy New Year 2024.

Update On Newsletter and Content in 2024

Firstly, some may have been wondering what happened to the ‘Circuvate Newsletter‘, which we previously published monthly via our email list and LinkedIn channel. Unfortunately, due to the high volume of work this last year we had to take a step back from content and marketing activities to focus on the core consulting work. Luckily, there are more and more other channels covering sustainable innovation news, so hopefully this is not too much of a loss for our readers. Regardless, we hope to get to more content this year, but the exact form and posting schedule is still to be decided. Earlier this year, we published two introductory articles on Life Cycle Assessment which may be of interest to some readers.

Retrospective 2023

In 2023 Circuvate continued to go from strength to strength, and we have had the chance to work on a variety of interesting, engaging and important projects. We continued to work with sustainable innovators in the material space doing preliminary life-cycle assessments (LCAs) of emerging technologies. We concluded an EU-funded project looking into the circularity of bio-based synthetics fibres. We expanded our co-operation with major brands and emerging innovators, authoring a number of reports and conducting research on a wide range of topics. Some of the topics we have dealt with in 2023 have included:

-       Footwear circularity and recycling

-       Bio-based and alternative leathers

-       Biosynthetic fibres

-       Alternative natural/bast fibres

-       Agri-waste technologies

-       Textile fibre-to-fibre recycling

-       Carbon accounting software solutions

-       Novel cellulose and pulping technologies

What’s next for 2024?

At Circuvate, we hope to continue expanding our LCA offering for sustainable innovators, whilst building on our research and reports offering in the sustainable materials and innovation space. Given a continued positive outlook, Circuvate will be potentially looking to hire, first with interns, later in 2024. We are seeing an increasing interest from investment firms and hope to focus more in this area on the coming year, too. In general, Circuvate’s consulting niche, combining the technical and the scientific, with sustainability and circularity expertise, continues to see a high demand from the industry.

Industry Outlook 2024

What does the industry look like in 2024? In general, 2024 could be considered a ‘crunch year’, a year where the industry really gets into gear to implement sustainable innovations in the supply chain. But this is no easy task, as many will testify. The range of expertise that is required, as well as internal and external stakeholders to get on board and aligned, is daunting. Some innovations may struggle to push their innovations into the market with the speed that is desired.

We see an increasingly diverging trend in sustainable materials strategies. More and more, the choice is depicted as two pathways, between the biological cycle (bio-based materials, biodegradation) and the technical cycle (i.e. recycling and circularity), and in many cases it may be difficult to justify one pathway over the other. Formulating and justifying a coherent material strategy continues to be a challenge. Furthermore, we expect decarbonisation of the supply chain to come more to the forefront in 2024 as a major lever for brands carbon reduction strategies.

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is more and more becoming part of the ‘standard’ checklist for the evaluation of sustainable innovations by major brands. The ability for emerging innovators to display the ‘sustainability case’ of their product or technology is becoming as important as validating the ‘business case’. However, more generally, the lack of robust and complete data in the textiles and materials space is frequently being highlighted as a problem. Additionally, we continue to see many EU-based brands and other stakeholders aligning around the PEF framework (and the PEFCR rules for Apparel) for their LCA requirements, even if this methodology is not yet mandated by legislation. This also influences the choice of methodologies for LCAs for emerging innovators who are based in, or targeting, this market.

The new EU ‘greenwashing’ directives (and other similar legislations and green marketing rulings across the world) will continue to have a stark effect, meaning that companies generally start to become more cautious in their green marketing, even starting to hide major initiatives and moves for fear of being criticised (known as ‘green hushing’). We also see a developing trend of major brands starting to become more organised in their sustainable innovation activities, demanding more evidence and data from their suppliers and generally taking a more cautious, evidence-based approach.

In the investment arena, there may be a light cooling on investment interest as scale of challenge becomes clear, and the market becomes more saturated with sustainable innovations than previous years. There are early indications of a general cooling in investment in the green tech spaces, which could expand to materials, textiles, fashion and apparel innovations. We also see investors and investment groups seeking out more outside expertise and being more critical of sustainable innovations, as the field widens and more investors seeks to understand the space, meaning innovators need to be on top of their game when it comes to articulating the potential of their technologies in comparison to their competitors.

Dr. Ashley Holding

Principal Consultant

Circuvate