The New Factory & Fashion Revolution Indonesia to Team Up in Scaling Economic Democracy in Bandung’s Textile Recycling Sector

Funding Update!

We’re excited to announce that The New Factory and Fashion Revolution Indonesia will be collaborating on a scale-up experiment to expand worker-ownership and the recycling capacity of Bandung’s textile recycling sector. This initiative will be funded by The Democracy at Work Fund. We are honored to have been selected among the 19 awardees, out of 319 global applicants.

The New Factory was initiated at the peak of the COVID-19 lay-off in Bandung, one of Indonesia’s largest textiles producing region. With many of its members out of work, The West Java Garment & Textile Labor Union temporarily shifted its focus to support its members to find any available short-term work. It was out of that very spirit; The New Factory was first established — both as a way to help workers regain lost livelihoods, but also as an opportunity for us to re-imagine a local fashion industry that takes ownership of its social and environmental responsibility.

Two years have passed, and we have now evolved into a worker-owned textile recycling start-up with a mission to make fashion circular. Our goal is to scale a fashion waste recycling ecosystem that operates under a shared ownership/co-operative model.

Cheap labor, precarious contracts, systemic silencing of workers’ voices, and gender-based violence are known lived experiences for many involved in the fast fashion supply chain. On the environmental side, there’s also no shortage of reports highlighting the egregious environmental impact of fashion, from the harm industrial cotton production does to its surroundings to the mounting pre/post-consumer textile waste.

We’re often told that there is no alternative — those are the necessary costs of economic development.

But is that really the case?

Can the fashion industry be reformed and intentionally organized to prioritize economic justice, workers’ rights for dignified labor, and environmental sustainability? If so, what does that alternative look like? And how do we go about building that?

Those questions are at the core of The New Factory and Fashion Revolution Indonesia’s partnership. To help us answer those questions, the grant from The Democracy at Work Fund will:

• support the publication of an action research on how to build and scale a localized, co-operatively owned, and viable textile recycling ecosystem
• provide seed capital for the R&D and scale-up of The New Factory recycling operations

We will draw upon lessons and examples from successful co-operative experiments — such as the Mondragon Corporation — as well as textile recycling initiatives across the world. Fashion Revolution Indonesia, who has worked extensively at the forefront of global and local campaigns for a cleaner and fairer future for the industry, serves as a strategic knowledge and incubation partner.

We are insistent that the shared-ownership model is a way to ensure that economic value derived from the recycling economy benefits and builds community wealth. However, we also acknowledge that there can be no textile recycling at scale without innovation in recycling technology. That is why a component of this grant will support the R&D of textile recycling outputs that show promise of commercial viability.

Everything we learn will be documented and published as a public report. After all, presenting that an alternative is possible and replicable is important for our collective fight to achieve economic, social and environmental justice within the fashion industry and beyond.

It is our hope that communities, unions, social entrepreneurs, and other grassroots organizers around the globe working to solve their textile waste challenge locally can benefit from such knowledge.

Every year 92 million tons of textiles waste are produced, only 12% of that is recycled. Alongside calls to curb fast-fashion overproduction, we are in desperate need of widespread localized network of recycling initiatives across the world to effectively tackle the global fashion waste problem.

It is with delight that through this announcement, we kick-off The New Factory and Fashion Revolution Indonesia partnership. Our journey will be one full of experimentation and collaboration.

If you are interested to learn more about us or contribute to our efforts, please get in touch through contact@thenewfactory.co or indonesia@fashionrevolution.org.