Fashion for Good says the project presents a “concrete step” toward accelerating decarbonisation across the apparel value chain.
While many apparel brands and manufacturers are looking to move away from plastic-based materials, the supply of 100% bio-based materials remains cost-prohibitive for many.
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There are also concerns around the potential impact of sourcing biomass feedstocks at scale on food security, biodiversity, and forests.
Fashion for Good says mass balance could provide a “practical bridge,” allowing brands to integrate renewable materials in a cost-effective and scalable way.
The MBA model allows renewable and fossil-fuel-based materials to be mixed, with renewable inputs tracked and allocated to outputs through audits and certification bodies.
“We are at a point where the industry wants to move and adopt biosynthetics, but the production frameworks and commercial infrastructure haven’t caught up,” explained Katrin Ley, managing director at Fashion for Good.
“The Mass Balance Demonstrator project is about closing that gap: building the impact and commercial evidence, the blueprint, and the feedback loops that will allow the MBA model to scale with integrity.”
Industry partners back biobased
Fashion for Good has worked with Bestseller, Beyond Yoga, On, Paradise Textiles, Environmental Resources Management, Indorama Ventures, ISCC, UPM Biochemicals and Textile Exchange on the project.
Bestseller’s material research lead Anders Schorling Overgård said that polyester was currently the retail group’s second largest fibre by volume and that it was always looking for where it could make improvements here as a result.
“By taking part in this project, we as a company are building experience within mass balance attribution and bio-attributed polyester,” he added. “Hopefully, as we collaborate with other great partners, this can initiate pathways that can support scaling of renewable feedstocks (or inputs) going forward.”
The project has four key objectives:
- Producing biomass-attributed materials: the project aims to physically produce biomass-attributed resin and yarns, matching performance parity.
- Quantifying the climate impact: a comprehensive cradle-to-grave greenhouse gas emissions model will be created for the produced materials, providing science-based insights into their decarbonisation potential and environmental footprint.
- Developing a blueprint for industry scale-up: the project will create a practical roadmap for scaling biomass-attributed PET in the apparel sector, identifying key supply chain actors, assessing lifecycle accounting approaches for different chain-of-custody models, and evaluating the feasibility of market deployment.
- Informing climate frameworks and industry standards: insights from the project will be shared with climate initiatives and standard-setting bodies to help create credible guidance on mass balance attribution
Fashion for Good added that mass balance is “not a final answer for sustainable materials in fashion”. Instead, the group argued it could be a useful tool in the transition toward scaling renewable and recycled materials.