'Sustainability & Circular Economy at the NCAD, Ireland' with speaker Gwen Cunningham

Born in Ireland, Gwen Cunningham trained as an apparel designer in her home town of Dublin. In her role as designer, she became critically aware of, and increasingly uncomfortable with, the linear nature of the apparel industry. A drive to inspire change - and to design new systems, not new products- led Cunningham to Amsterdam and to Circle Economy. In her role as Lead for the Textiles Programme at Circle Economy, her mission is to build the circular skillset and mindset of the current and next generation of fashion professionals.

The Circle Textiles Program was launched in 2014 as the first sector programme within Circle Economy. Since its founding, the singular mission is to achieve a zero waste textiles industry, through the practical implementation of circular solutions, together with our network of brands and solution providers. To get there, they focused on two key pillars; firstly, enabling the technology and infrastructure needed to valorize textile waste at end-of-life (reducing the waste mountain!) and secondly, building apparel brand's capacity to adopt circular design and circular business models (preventing the waste mountain!). Recent and ongoing projects include the development and commercialization of the Fibersort (a breakthrough technology that automatically sorts post-consumer textiles by fibre composition, in order to generate consistent input for textile-to-textile recycling), the launch of On Course (an educational circular training programme for apparel brands) and Switching Gear (a project that guides 5 apparel brands in the design and launch of a rental or recommerce business model pilots).