Campuswear Campaign

What if every campus hoodie, tote bag, or conference T‑shirt could tell a story that starts in a farmer’s field and doesn’t end in a landfill?

Over the past years, The Green Silk Road has criss-crossed Eurasia, connecting ecovillages, agroecology projects, and communities experimenting with different ways of living on this planet. Along those dusty roads and overnight buses, one question kept returning: in a world full of toxic cotton, fossil fashion, and throwaway merch, how do we clothe a regenerative future? As we say in India the basics of any economy starts with "roti, kapra, makaan" (food, clothing and housing). We cover those bases by working with regenerative agriculture pioneers Raddis / GVK on food & fibre landscapes and for housing we work with commons and anti-speculation initiatives in Europe (See next blog post).

From seed to seminar room

Our work with Raddis Cotton is showing that cotton does not have to be a story of extraction, but can be key to regenerating soils, livelihoods, and dignity. Farmers who were once locked into debt, chemicals, and volatility are experimenting with mixed cropping, natural inputs and fairer trading relationships. Their cotton fibres are already travelling—quietly—into workwear, festival merchandise and landscape fabrics (see https://circularcottoncascade.org/).

Now we are bringing that story directly into university life. Together with the Green Office movement in The Netherlands (https://www.studentenvoormorgen.nl/en/), study associations, and procurement departments, the GSR textile initiative invites campuses to rethink something deceptively simple: the T‑shirt. Instead of treating them as single use items made from anonymous fibres in invisible factories, we are prototyping value chains where:

• students can meet the farmers who grew the cotton,

• faculty can visit the gins and sewing units,

• procurement officers can trace every step between purchase order and farm,

• and end‑of‑life is part of the design, not an afterthought.

Multiple paths, one direction

Because campuses are not all the same, the initiative is not a one-size-fits-all solution. At the moment, we are exploring several pathways with Green Offices in the University of Amsterdam, Leiden University and AVANS University:

• Direct trade lines, where Raddis Cotton coordinates garment production in India using its own regenerative fibre. These are the pieces you can literally trace back to a specific landscape and group of farmers.

• Mass-balance collaborations with existing ethical wholesalers, where campuses order from familiar catalogues but the equivalent volume of regenerative cotton is secured from Raddis. Not every fibre in the shirt is “ours”, but every purchase grows the regenerative acreage.

Behind these options is one simple idea: give campus communities real choices, with real consequences, and make those consequences visible.

Merch as a learning journey

The Green Silk Road has always been about learning by travelling, and travelling by learning. The textile initiative continues that tradition, but with a different kind of itinerary. Instead of guiding travellers from Auroville to Ankara and Amsterdam, we will follow the path backwards from campus → warehouse → garment factory → fabric mill → spinner → ginning mill → farming collective → cotton field. Students are not just “end users” in this story. They are:

• co‑designers of campaign messages and product lines,

• researchers documenting soil health, water use, and labour conditions,

• advocates in procurement councils,

• and travellers who carry with them the first hand experience of the "making of" story behind their outfit.

For some, this will be a module or a thesis. For others, it may be an overland learning journey that could change their career path.

Prefiguring Alternative Futures

It is easy to dismiss textiles as “just” T‑shirts. But university merchandise is one of the most visible, recurring supply chains in campus life – and one of the most taken for granted. By turning this pipeline into a living example of regenerative practice, we hope to do two things at once:

• support concrete transitions in fibre landscapes and manufacturing hubs, and

• offer a tangible, everyday glimpse of a different economy – one where relationships, responsibilities, and rivers matter as much as logos and discounts.

The Green Silk Road textile initiative is still in motion, like most things we do. There are spreadsheets and shipping delays, yes, but also WhatsApp calls with farmers, late-night design sessions with students, and procurement officers who say: “I didn’t know this was possible, but now I can’t unsee it.”

If your campus, collective, or study association would like to explore these routes with us – whether through direct trade, mass-balance, or a model we haven’t mapped yet – get in touch. After all, the future won’t just be written in policy documents. It will also be worn, washed, shared, repaired, and eventually composted. We might as well start stitching that story now : )