Fristads backs UK Green Business Awards with circular workwear push

Fristads is not just putting its name on the UK Green Business Awards. The century-old workwear maker is using the sponsorship to plant a flag in the sustainability debate at exactly the moment industrial buyers are being asked to clean up their supply chains without losing durability, function or control of costs.

The timing is sharp. The UK Green Business Awards 2026 will take place on Wednesday 24 June at The Brewery in Central London, during London Climate Action Week, with 30 categories spanning renewables, energy efficiency, circular economy, marketing, small business and innovation. That puts Fristads in front of a business audience already primed to talk about carbon, procurement and waste, not just branding.

For Fristads, the message is straightforward: workwear can be part of the decarbonisation answer, not just another line item in a dirty supply chain. Founded in 1925 in Fristad, Sweden, the company says it now operates in more than 20 countries and employs more than 600 people. It supplies clothing for building and construction, service and industry, high visibility, flame protection, cleanroom and food industry use, which means its sustainability claims land in sectors where garments get punished hard and replaced often.

That is where Fristads’ circular pitch gets more interesting. In 2024, it launched Sustainability as a Service across all markets, built around Repair, Reuse and Recycling. The company says it was the first workwear brand to roll out a comprehensive sustainable service offer on that scale, and it has been pushing the same logic in its broader sustainability reporting: garments should be repaired, reused or recycled before they are discarded, and the textile industry needs to move away from a linear model.

This is not just brand poetry. Fristads says that in 2019 it became the first clothing producer in the world to introduce a standard for measuring total environmental impact through Environmental Product Declarations. It has also set a target to cut CO2 emissions by 50 percent by 2030 and wants 50 percent of products to be environmentally declared or contain recycled materials. For buyers, those are the numbers that matter, because they turn sustainability from a mood into something that can sit in a tender document.

The company is already pointing to customer impact. Based on Fristads Green garment sales in 2025, it says customers saved enough water to fill 3,840 Olympic-size swimming pools and avoided CO2e emissions equal to 1,850 round-trip flights between Helsinki and Munich. It also highlights Securitas as one of the first customers to use its circular services to extend garment life. That is the real power move here: Fristads is not selling green polish. It is trying to make circular workwear look like the smarter industrial choice.