With the Australian Fashion Industry Awards fast approaching, Ragtrader is taking a daily look inside each category — the finalists, the work behind the entries and the strategy that earned them their place.
Next up: Sustainability Excellence Award, a category showcasing diverse solutions to fashion’s biggest problems. The seven finalists are Bellroy, Decjuba, Kowtow Australia, Natv Basics, Salvos Stores Australia, The Iconic, The Sussan Group.
Winners will be revealed at the AFIA Awards Lunch on Thursday 6 August at The Promenade Docklands, Melbourne. Tickets are on sale now.
The AFIAs 2026 are supported by Headline Sponsor The Retail Score, Gold Sponsors Better Packaging and ReStore, Silver Sponsors Apparel21 and Williams Logistics and Bronze Sponsor Afterpay.
Here's the work that got the finalists there in alphabetical order:
Bellroy
One of Australia's earliest B Corps, Bellroy achieved its fourth certification in 2025 with a score of 96.9 — its highest yet. The score was underpinned by a program spanning recycled materials, repairability, extended warranties and chemical safety.
All main body fabrics and linings across its woven range are now made from 100% recycled materials. To date, Bellroy has upcycled 24 million 500ml plastic bottles and 397 tons of combined industrial, textile and ocean waste. Its 2025 luggage launch was designed for modular self-repair, lab-tested to the equivalent of 10 years of travel and supported by Fix-It Kits that cut freight impact.
Warranties were also extended from three years to six on bags and 10 on luggage — including cover for material breakdown that many lifetime warranties exclude. On chemical safety, 84.7% of primary and secondary textiles are Bluesign certified and 15.3% Oeko-Tex certified. As of 2025, all materials are made without any intentional use of PFAS with none detected in testing.
Decjuba
Decjuba x Authentified embeds circularity directly into the customer account experience, making it easy to resell, repair or donate garments rather than treating resale as a secondary channel. The initiative addresses a systemic industry challenge: hundreds of thousands of tonnes of clothing discarded in Australia each year, most with usable life remaining.
The resale functionality uses first-party product data to auto-generate listings within seconds, distributing them across multiple marketplaces. Authentified provides the technology platform, Salvos Stores enables donation pathways and repair and alteration services support garment longevity. A Theory of Change framework links customer behaviours to environmental outcomes, with platform data integrated into Decjuba's emissions measurement and sustainability reporting.
In 2025, more than 3,000 Decjuba items were recirculated through the platform alongside over 1,000 additional items through expanded multi-brand resale, contributing to an estimated avoidance of approximately 50 tonnes of CO2e based on lifecycle emissions of new garment production. Rising repeat participation signals genuine behaviour change, while the expansion into multi-brand resale demonstrates potential to influence outcomes well beyond Decjuba's own range.
Kowtow Australia
Kowtow's Regenerate programme answers the question the industry rarely does: what happens to a garment when it can no longer be worn? Its first project transformed 100% natural fibre garments into biochar — a stable form of carbon returned safely to soil — creating a closed loop from seed to soil.
The groundwork was a full audit of garment components, with design, sourcing and sustainability teams removing plastics from trims, threads and labels to make garments entirely plastic-free and pyrolysis-ready. Working alongside The Good Carbon Farm, Carbon Options and Massey University, Kowtow researched whether worn-out garments could safely undergo pyrolysis, with extensive fibre and soil testing measuring carbon retention, soil health, water retention and biodiversity outcomes.
Early trials successfully converted 160 kilograms of Kowtow garments into 40 kilograms of biochar, demonstrating a viable pathway that diverts end-of-life clothing from landfill while preventing decomposition emissions. Unlike composting, biochar retains carbon in soil for extended periods, improving water retention, microbial activity and nutrient availability. The biochar has been independently tested to the ANZBIG Code of Practice, confirming it can be safely returned to soil — a scalable framework where discarded garments become a resource for regeneration.
Natv Basics
Queensland brand NAT’V Basics launched its 100% GOTS-certified organic cotton women’s underwear collection in October 2025 to tackle the outsized impact of a category worn and washed daily. Conventional cotton drives roughly 16% of global insecticide use, while synthetic fabrics contribute up to 35% of ocean microplastics.
The collection — Vintage Nighty, HALO G-string, HALO Bralette and Classic Crop — replaces conventional and synthetic materials with certified organic cotton. Ethically manufactured with low-impact dyes, the range is shipped in plastic-free packaging, offers carbon-neutral delivery options and is available in inclusive sizing from S to XXXL.
Since launch the brand has sold 4,489 pieces, each replacing a conventional or synthetic-blend equivalent. Supported by industry lifecycle data, organic cotton uses up to 91% less blue water than conventional cotton, generates 46% fewer greenhouse gas emissions, up to 62% less primary energy demand and eliminates synthetic pesticides and fertilisers. Because synthetic underwear can shed 700,000-plus microfibres per wash load, the fully biodegradable collection has also prevented the release of millions of microplastic fibres into wastewater systems — proof that material switches in everyday essentials create tangible benefits even at modest scale.
Salvos Stores Australia
Salvos Stores built Australia’s first-of-its-kind automated textile sorting and decommissioning operation — the Textile Recovery Facility at Carole Park, Queensland — to address a critical gap in textile recovery. The facility responds to the more than 200,000 tonnes of clothing landfilled nationally each year and the lack of infrastructure to sort unwearable textiles by fibre type and remove contaminants.
Delivered over five years with $4.97 million in Queensland Government funding, the TRF deploys automated FibreSort and TrimClean technology, robotics and AI. It sorts products by fibre type and colour, strip zips, buttons and labels and cut textiles into consistent, traceable feedstock for recycling and remanufacturing. Brand and retail collaborators include Kmart, The Iconic and Dissh, with fibre research through Deakin's Institute of Frontier Materials.
At full scale, the facility can process 5,000 tonnes of textiles per year — roughly 20 million t-shirts. In one operational week the TRF sorted 3,473 kilograms of A-grade wearable stock at a 65% yield, around double the expected rate of locally sellable clothing from public donations. The facility runs on 92kW of rooftop solar backed by The Salvation Army's own solar farms, and its specification-grade clippings give recyclers the predictable feedstock needed to invest in Australian recycling capability.
The Iconic
The Iconic launched Re-Iconic in late 2025 — a customer-facing circular fashion hub that brings re-use, repair, donation and recycling into one accessible experience for its two million-plus active customers.
The hub combines a shoppable Pre-Loved category with partners including CIRKULAR and Azura Reborn, alongside national donate and recycle services via RCYCL and REWEAR. Through Rescued — a partnership with Australian start-up Revibe — change-room faulties are intercepted from the warehouse, professionally cleaned and repaired, then relisted at accessible prices.
A Repairs & Alterations pilot powered by Hello Tailr launched in March 2026, with tailoring delivered by local social enterprises. The Iconic is the first multi-brand online retailer in Australia to introduce an initiative of this kind.
More than 1,400 unsaleable items have been diverted to Revibe, with listed items achieving an average 52% sell-through and moving toward more than double cost recovery on faulty stock compared with alternative pathways. Re-Iconic marketplace vendors also recorded a collective 41.2% month-on-month sales uplift from March to April 2026.
The Sussan Group
The Sussan Group has taken a system-level approach to sustainability spanning circularity, responsible fibre sourcing, packaging reduction and customer education. This is anchored by its role as a Foundation Partner of Seamless, Australia's first national clothing stewardship scheme.
The Group has now completed its full Seamless Circularity Action Plan, with 20 team members completing formal circular design training and the first circular design garments scheduled for 2027. End-of-life pilots include a clothing-to-construction recycling initiative, while partnerships with the Remote OpShop Project and Thread Together redirect excess samples to people in need.
Responsible fibre usage has climbed from 24% of the range in FY24 to 35% in FY25 and 42% year to date in FY26. It is on track for the FY27 target of 50% — including more than five million garments made with fully traceable Australian cotton and 137% achievement of the FY25 Better Cotton target.