€1 Million Global Change Award to Reduce Fashion Industry's Environmental Impact

H&M’s Global Change Award aims to identify new ideas to reduce the environmental impact of the fashion industry.

 

This global innovation challenge takes on one of the biggest challenges facing today’s fashion industry – to create fashion for a growing population, while reducing its impact on the environment. H&M are looking to identify new ideas to reduce the environmental impact of waste and support innovative techniques in order to become more environmentally sustainable, in relation to the throwaway culture of fashion.

H&M states that the fashion industry requires large amounts of natural resources, a proportion of which can be reduced, recycled, substituted or eliminated. The Award is a challenge for early-stage innovation within the fashion industry. By catalysing green, ground-breaking, bold, disruptive ideas, the aim is to protect the world’s natural resources by ‚Äòclosing the loop‚Äô for fashion.

According to the funder, closing the loop is about finding circular approaches in the whole value chain of the industry; changing the way garments are designed, produced, shipped, bought, used and recycled. This is seen by the funder as a radical departure from the old linear “take, make, waste” production and consumption model where products and resources are designed to have more than one life.

Five winners will be chosen by an international jury and will share a grant pot of €1 million. Each winner is awarded a grant sum of between €150,000 and €300,000. In order to actualise ideas, winners will also get access to a tailor-made, one-year Innovation Accelerator.

The Global Change Award 2019 is open for applications until 17 October 2018.

Find out more and apply here.