H&M Foundation's 'Oscars' for fashion innovation - meet the European finalists hoping to win

Founded in 2015, the Global Change Award, run by the H&M Foundation (distinct from the retail chain but run by the same family), has given out awards and grants worth around eight million euros ($8.7m) to 46 companies or groups working on early-stage innovations around sustainability in the fashion industry.

While H&M the retail chain have long made their presence known in the world of sustainability, some recent moves – closing an innovation department and cutting climate-related jobs - have however called into question their commitment.

Nonetheless, this year's awards are going ahead. After receiving almost 500 ideas from around the world, the foundation has unveiled 20 finalists.

My colleague Johann Bernövall has already taken a look into the two Swedish companies on the list - Renasens, which recycles mixed textiles, and Reselo, which converts forest waste into biobased rubber. You can get the full rundown over on Impact Loop's Swedish-language site. Here, we run through the other European companies in the running for the H&M Foundation's support.

Great British innovation leads the pack

To begin with, the United Kingdom is far and away the leader for fashion innovation this year, at least according to the award’s panellists. Among the finalists is London-based (in fact, all the UK entrants are London-based) Thermal Cyclones, a company working to decarbonise industrial heating processes with innovative heat pumps, and Pulpatronics, which claims to have developed a less resource-intensive RFID chip (used in supply chains and retail stores to keep track of inventory).

There’s also Tera Mira, which is taking aim at one of the fashion’s biggest issues – plastic pollution – with a biobased textile alternative. Brilliant Dyes, meanwhile, is trying to tackle another very thorny issue – non-toxic, non-polluting synthetic dyes – using a natural pigment called cyanobacteria.

Though UK-based, the project is spear-headed by Mohammad Redwanur Rahman, from Bangladesh, who wrote on LinkedIn about the "exciting news" of the nomination. Sequinova, meanwhile, takes aim directly at sequins, seeking to produce bio-based alternatives which it calls 'the future of sparkle.'

Finally, moving away from the more physical process-heavy approaches is Loom, which has designed an app to connect people and brands looking to upcycle clothes with designers, purportedly making the process “effortless.”

Vorsprung durch Technik (for second place)

The next country in terms of amounts of finalists is Germany, with two. These are FiberFlow, based in Leipzig in the East, which claims to have developed technology to separate blended fabrics into discrete high-quality fibres – a classic circular economy idea. Not too dissimilar is Munich-based CircularFabrics, which uses its own proprietary tech to recover nylon from textile waste. Their team went further than Brilliant Dyes’ Mohammed, saying they were "beyond excited."

And the best of the rest

The three remaining companies come from Denmark, Spain and Switzerland, respectively. Nordic Blue, a spin-out from the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Biosustainability at the Technical University of Denmark, pursues climate-friendly denim using enzymes.

RubyLab, based outside of Barcelona, claims to be able to repurpose elastic textiles that are typically considered unrecyclable (think swimwear). And finally there’s NaCRe, developed by Francesco Stellacci at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, which apparently can break down and repurpose the proteins in wool and silk. If that sounds confusing, Professor Stellacci has posted an explanatory video.

Aside from the European entrants, this year’s Global Change Award also sees finalists from China, Bangladesh, Nigeria, India, Ghana and the US. The ten winners – to be announced in May – will receive €200,000 ($218k) each.