My Takeaways from the UKFT Sustainability Conference 2026

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Seaweed-based stretch, banana fibre, better hemp and colour made from plants. The UKFT Sustainability Conference 2026 was full of promising ideas, but one question kept coming back to me: how do we turn them into products people can actually make, buy and use?

The theme of this year’s UKFT Sustainability Conference was Progress in Practice. It brought together material innovators, brands, manufacturers and researchers to look at what is changing across the fashion and textile industry.

At Fazane Fox Production Agency, we spend our days turning ideas into products that have to work in the real world. So while I love seeing a clever new material, my brain immediately goes to the next questions: How does it feel? Can a factory work with it? What will it cost? Can a founder get hold of it in a useful quantity?

Here are the innovations and conversations that stayed with me.

A brilliant material still needs a route into production

Georgia Parker of Fashion for Good opened with a look at the work involved in moving innovation towards adoption. One phrase from my notes sums up the challenge: innovation theatre versus innovation in practice.

A fibre sample can be exciting. Turning it into consistent yarn, fabric and finished products, at a price a brand can afford, is a different job altogether. It takes testing, willing manufacturing partners and brands prepared to make decisions.

That was the thread running through the day for me. Sustainability gets much more interesting when we ask what happens after the lovely sample is passed around the room.

Seaweed, banana plants and the future of fibre

Stretch is essential in many of the products we develop, from performance clothing to garments designed for comfort and access. That made Jeanne Bégon-Lours’ work at Tera Mira particularly interesting. Tera Mira is developing a seaweed-derived stretch fibre intended as an alternative to conventional elastane. It is still in development, but its aim to work with existing manufacturing equipment matters. Changing a material is much easier to consider when it does not mean rebuilding the whole production process.

Then there was Sarah Angold of 29acacia, who is turning waste from banana cultivation into textile fibre. The ambition is to make that agricultural by-product into fibres soft and durable enough for everyday textiles. Could an alternative fibre eventually compete on feel and price, as well as on its environmental story? That is where things get exciting.

Premal Gadhia of Fibe brought another agricultural waste route to the conversation. Fibe is developing fibres from crop residues, including potato stems and oilseed straw, with a focus on how they can fit into existing spinning and weaving systems. A fibre has far more potential when mills can actually turn it into fabric.

Hemp is having a rethink

One of my favourite lines came from Josh Nusenbaum of SEFF: “We didn’t invent hemp, we unlocked it.”

Hemp has been around forever, of course. The difficulty has been getting fibre that is soft and consistent enough for the range of textiles brands want to produce. SEFF’s Nano-Pulse™ process uses controlled electrical pulses in water to help separate the fibres and make them more suitable for conventional spinning.

The denim examples caught my attention. This was about the hand feel, appearance and performance of the finished fabric, as well as its fibre content. If a lower-impact material also helps you make a product people genuinely want to wear, that is a much stronger proposition.

Better materials have to feel good, too

Dr Cynthia Adu of PACT spoke about Oval, PACT’s collagen-based biomaterial. Seeing and feeling a material makes a difference that a description on a website never quite manages. The sample had a beautifully supple feel.

For any proposed alternative to a familiar material, the test cannot stop at what it is made from. Designers and customers will also judge its touch, flexibility, appearance and suitability for the product. Those are part of making a material commercially useful.

Colour and finishing deserve more attention

We talk a lot about fibres, but the colour and finishes applied to a fabric deserve just as much thought.

Caroline Adams of Sparxell introduced colour made using plant-based cellulose. Sparxell’s approach draws on structural colour, where the structure of a material creates the visual effect. It is a fascinating way to rethink pigments, shimmer and decorative finishes.

Dr Adelya Khayrova of Demeter Bio presented Fibrepel, a bio-based coating being developed to give textiles water, oil and alcohol resistance without PFAS. For performance products, that is exactly the sort of detail that needs proper development and testing. The finish has to meet the brief, survive use and care, and be achievable in manufacturing.

The programme also featured Amphico, which is working on PFAS-free performance textiles and colour systems, and DyeRecycle, whose process aims to remove and recover dyes from used textiles so the fibres can be recycled. Both point to a challenge we sometimes overlook: what we add to a fabric can affect what happens to it at the end of its life.

Waste, recycling and proving what a product is made from

The conference programme then moved from making materials differently to dealing with the products and textiles already in circulation.

Its waste-to-value sessions brought together organisations including Epoch Biodesign, Matoha and Recover. Their work points to different parts of the same challenge: identifying textile waste, processing it and finding a useful next life for its materials.

The final theme was traceability. Technologies from companies including Haelixa and Tailorlux look at ways to identify materials as they move through a supply chain. That matters because a claim about where a fibre came from is only as useful as the evidence behind it.

There was plenty more to explore through UKFT’s Textile Innovation Showcase, which brought together businesses working on fibres, colour, finishes, reuse and recycling. It is a brilliant starting point if you want to see just how many approaches are being developed.

My biggest takeaway

The future of sustainable fashion will take more than discovering a new fibre.

It will take materials that perform in the finished product, processes that factories can run, costs that brands can work with, and clearer thinking about what happens to a garment after use. It will also take brands willing to test ideas, share useful feedback and make decisions quickly enough for innovators to keep moving.

That is the part I find exciting. These technologies are giving product developers new possibilities. Our job is to work out which ones fit the product, test them properly and help turn a promising idea into something people can actually use.

A big thank you to UKFT and everyone who shared their work. I came away with a longer list of people to follow and an even stronger belief that good product development has a real part to play in making progress happen.

Much Love as Always!

Fazane xx