Regenerate retail

Welcome to "Nouveau Monde", sort of a "Nouveau Genre" newsletter to better understand how to make the world better through the lens of retail. This is #3.

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Sustainable news from the world: hello Sweden!

by Phil

Recycling system ’LOOOP’ helps H&M transform unwanted garments into new fashion favorites. How is that possible?

Looop opened to the public in one of H&M’s Drottninggatan stores in Stockholm on October 12 last year. Looop uses a technique that dissembles and assembles old garments into new ones. The garments are cleaned, shredded into fibers and spun into new yarn which is then knitted into new fashion finds. Some sustainably sourced virgin materials need to be added during the process, and we of course work to make this share as small as possible. The system uses no water and no chemicals, thus having a significantly lower environmental impact than when producing garments from scratch.

Now hear this: Looop is created by the non-profit H&M Foundation, together with research partner HKRITA (The Hong Kong Research Institute of Textiles and Apparel) and Hong Kong-based yarn spinner Novetex Textiles. Amazing, right?

More information: https://www2.hm.com/en_gb/life/culture/inside-h-m/meet-the-machine-turning-old-into-new.html

Will cheese crackers save the world ?

by Anthony

We know that our global food system is responsible for about 25% of the greenhouse gas emissions worldwide.

So, when a small startup raises and says that it wants to tackle this problem, we have to look at it twice. 

Meet Julia Collins, she has founded a company named PlanetFWD which produces and sells the Moonshot crackers and she says that these are part of the solution.

Julia Collins with her Moonshot snacks

Why does she thinks so ? Her crackers are produced from regenerative agriculture. If you don’t know what this is, I recommend to watch the documentary Kiss the ground on Netflix.  Regenerative agriculture is kind of new in our landscape, especially in the US, where most farms were intensive and were destroying the soils.

Regenerative agriculture has many types of practices such as permaculture or agroecology and some of its principles are : no intrants, no-till planting or work holistically so that carbon stays in the soil instead of going in the atmosphere. 

And for her crackers, Julia Collins only uses products coming from these farms, as well as working on the packaging, the supply chain (and a little offsetting...) to be able to say that Moonshot is climate positive. 

What might be interesting too is that if you look deeper, Moonshot only is the emerged part of PlanetFWD’s iceberg. Julia Collins is also on a mission to digitalize the whole agriculture system : she realized when looking for suppliers for her crackers that there was no data about agricultural practices, how each ingredient was produced and what was its impact on CO2. So, she decided to build it and to propose a regenerative ingredients platform to CPG brands who didn’t have that knowledge.

If she manages to get CPG brands in the dance, this could be a great shift for them and start to have an impact on the farming system, and maybe on CO2 emissions.

In Europe, we don’t really hear about regenerative agriculture yet. We have the Biological label which ensures that no chemical intrants have been used and we tend to hear a few permaculture practices but they don’t have the focus PlanetFWD wants to give to its mission : use  agriculture to reduce CO2 emissions. Who will be the first brand to be carbon regenerative ? Well, maybe it won’t come from where we thought : the luxury group Kering just went into the dance and want to transform 1 million hectares of land into regenerative agriculture before 2025. That could be a start !

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Bonus track