Currently, most of the textile industry is far from being sustainable, regarding the use of water, energy, and usage of toxic compounds for dyeing textiles.

Farming for textiles, particularly cotton, uses monocultures and massive quantities of insecticides and herbicides which are environmentally harmful. Using synthetic fibers is not a better alternative, as it requires a lot of mineral oil-based resources and is non-biodegradable in the environment, which causes big problems with piles of textiles in landfills and in the environment leading to a bad carbon footprint.

Most of the fashion today is fast fashion, which is bad for the environment because textiles have a short usage and low lifetime. They end up mostly in landfills, in the environment, or are burnt.

So, what can we do? The answer is to create a truly circular economy, recycling textiles to produce new yarns, replacing polyester, polyamide, and other synthetic fibers by fibers based on natural products and recycled materials like the HeiQ AeoniQ™ project does, stopping fast fashion and sell quality textiles with longer life span. Textile suppliers and vendors should also be obligated to take used textiles back and put them to recycle, as was already determined by the European Commission. Other possibilities would be renting textiles, selling used textiles in second-hand stores, motivating brands to move away from synthetic fibers, avoiding toxic compounds in textile production, using natural dyes instead of synthetic ones, producing locally in the countries where the textiles are used avoiding long transportation distances to reduce the carbon footprint, and force textile producers to use renewable energies, as well as a safer water consumption.