For years, plant-based fashion materials were promoted as a sustainable breakthrough. Their rapid collapse tells a more sobering story – not about plants, but about hype, scale and transparency.

For nearly a decade, global investors and sustainability commentators championed a new class of plant-based materials made from pineapple leaves, cactus pads, mushroom mycelium and agricultural waste. These alternatives were promised as scalable, plastic-free solutions that would transform fashion’s environmental footprint.

But in 2024–2025, the sector experienced a rapid and largely unreported collapse.Natural Fiber Welding (the US creator of MIRUM®), once hailed as a plastic-free breakthrough and heavily funded by Australia’s Tattarang with an investment of $26.8million, announced an orderly wind-down. Piñatex contracted significantly. Mushroom-based materials stalled. Other innovators quietly exited.

The pattern is not failure of the concept, but failure of the model.

Most companies struggled because their technologies were expensive to scale, dependent on complex processing, reliant on chemical stabilisers, inconsistent across production batches, or commercially fragile.

The larger cost is trust. Products were marketed as sustainable when tailored in these so-called ‘plant-based’ materials when many, in reality, depended on synthetic bonding agents or lacked full lifecycle transparency.

This collapse should sharpen Australia’s policy attention and ACCC regulator attention.. Especially as it applies to the fashion industry in Australia.

As governments consider circularity frameworks and procurement standards, clarity is essential: not all plant-derived materials are inherently sustainable.

The long-term path forward lies not in speculative “breakthroughs,” but in materials with transparent sourcing, stable agricultural supply, truly 100 per cent plant-based composition, and existing recycling or composting pathways.

Cotton, hemp, jute, cork, natural rubber and paper-based fibres – familiar, renewable and scale-ready – are far better positioned than experimental biotech composites.

If Australia wants to reduce its reliance on synthetic materials, the solution may not be in exotic new innovations but in the plants we’ve trusted for centuries.