About Sust

Sust is your go-to community for tackling everyday sustainable fashion challenges.

You probably already know that the fashion industry and fashion consumption are unsustainable, whether in terms of climate heating, resource consumption, pollution or workers’ welfare.

Sust is about taking practical action to make hope as well as change. It provides guidance and dialogue to:

• empower consumers to make more sustainable choices
• motivate brands to provide more sustainable options
• make a community where we can act collectively as well as individually

The name comes from “sussed”: the British term meaning “well-informed; shrewd; aware”. We need to get sussed about the things we buy and make. We owe it to ourselves, to our children and grandchildren, and to the other species we share our planet with.

You’re welcome to use Sust as an individual – just install the browser extension for guidance as you browse products online. But we encourage you to get a little more involved by exploring this website. Look for questions and answers on the brand and product pages. If you have a little more time, why not register so that you can post about topics yourself, suggest alternative products, upvote/downvote what you see, and stitch our metadata?

If consumers act together to inform themselves, and if they communicate to brands what they care about, brands will follow suit.

Sounds simple? We freely admit that it’s not, really. Good data is hard to come by. There are many grey areas. A given product may be OK on one dimension (say, working conditions), poor on others (air miles). That means making compromises and trade-offs.

It’s OK to be confused. It’s OK to feel guilty when we’re not always sure we’re doing the right thing (whatever that is).

What we can do is our best, which is a lot better than doing nothing at all.

By acting collectively to improve on what we know, we can make our best better as time goes by.

How Sust came about

Sust is the result of research and development by matter II media and the University of Bristol, funded by matter II media and the Brigstow Institute. We set out to transform online shopping by helping consumers and brands who care about sustainability.