Outdoor lifestyle brand, Kathmandu, has launched a biodegradable jacket dubbed “BioDown”, unveiling a giant installation in Melbourne created from more than 3000kg of fashion waste sourced from Upparel.
The installation illustrates the amount of fashion discarded by Australians every five minutes. Customers can access content about BioDown by scanning a QR code inside the installation. Meanwhile, large-scale screens in Federation Square highlight informative and educational video footage surrounding the issue.
“The aim was to give visual representation to this staggering statistic and force people to confront this issue head-on,” Joost Bakker, founder of Future Food Systems, who designed and built the installation.
“Every 10 minutes, Australians throw away 6000kgs of fashion into landfill – twice the volume of what was used to build this structure.”
The launch of Kathmandu’s biodegradable jacket is part of Kathmandu’s plan to achieve net-zero waste by 2025 with 100 per cent of its products designed, developed and manufactured using elements of sustainability.
“The BioDown jacket shows how deeply committed we are to this 2025 goal,” said Robert Fry, GM of Product at Kathmandu.
Kathmandu, a B-Corp-certified company, was founded in New Zealand and sells from physical stores and online intnertaionally.
