Who we help · Education
Education
We license the Symolem Sustainable Product Hub to universities — thousands of real products, fully queryable — and support the teaching and research built on it through course design, workshops and lectures.
Academic in Residence
Dr Vinayak Sharma, PhD
Dr Vinayak Sharma is Symolem's Academic in Residence. He completed his PhD in Circular Economy at the University of Exeter, affiliated with the UKRI National Interdisciplinary Circular Economy Research (NICER) Programme, and is a Postdoctoral Research Associate on the EPSRC-funded Digitally Enabled Circular Healthcare Innovation (DECHI) programme at Exeter, alongside a Lecturer appointment in the Department of Management. His advisory work spans Defra, the Ellen MacArthur Foundation and NHS England.
His research examines how organisations develop the capabilities needed to navigate circular economy transitions, and the social dimensions that established frameworks consistently underestimate. His doctoral work proposes reacting as a fourth dynamic capability, extending Teece's sensing–seizing–reconfiguring framework. His presence ensures what Symolem publishes, teaches and validates meets a scholarly standard.
Selected circular economy research
- Harmonising Social Considerations in Firms Transitioning to a Circular EconomyDoctoral thesis, University of Exeter, 2026.
- Advanced Clothing Solutions: Digital Technology Enabling Circular Fashion at ScaleWith D. Bermudez. DICE Network+, 2026.
- Global challenges – local responses: Scaling up local sustainability innovations and business models to address the SDGsConference proceedings, University of Iceland, 2025. DOI: 10.33112/tyeu6589.
Full profile: University of Exeter · ORCID 0000-0003-1827-7457.
Contributing Researchers
Enna Uwaifo
Enna Uwaifo is Symolem's Lead Consultant for Policy and Research and a contributing researcher to our teaching programme. Her work on textile waste characterisation in the Kantamanto Market ecosystem in Accra has been accepted for presentation at the ISWA World Congress 2026, the leading international forum on solid waste management. She has directed multi-year research across Paris Agreement Article 6, voluntary carbon standards and compliance markets, and coordinated carbon footprint reporting for more than 830 arts and cultural organisations through Julie's Bicycle.
Alongside the empirical work, Enna writes on how orientalism consistently colours the Western media lens applied to her own academic formation — an MSc in Global Development and Environment from the University of Bristol and a BA in Politics from the University of Essex — and, by extension, to African and diaspora scholarship on climate, waste and development. Her critique sits inside the teaching we offer on the political framing of sustainability, and shapes how Symolem interprets fieldwork in Ghana and the wider Global South.
Education: MSc Global Development and Environment, University of Bristol (2023); BA Politics, University of Essex (2019).
Mette Kirk
Mette Kirk is Symolem's Senior Consultant for Circular Textiles and Recycling Systems and a contributing researcher to our teaching programme on textile-to-textile recycling. Trained at the University of Southern Denmark and Kolding School of Design, she has worked inside the Nordic sorting and recycling infrastructure with NewRetex, Think Design Interventions and Sustaina Company, and has contributed to EU co-funded projects on automated fibre identification, near-infrared sorting and material recovery from post-consumer textiles.
Her particular strength is the point where garment design meets recyclability: how blended fibres — polyester with elastane, cotton with polyester, cellulosics with finishes and coatings — behave when they reach a sorting line, and why the majority of clothing produced today cannot be mechanically or chemically recycled at industrial scale. She has led Digital Product Passport and Digital Material Passport concept development for circular textile value chains, translating regulatory data requirements into what a sorter, a recycler and a designer each actually need to see. In our teaching she covers sorting and grading technology, the recyclability implications of material blends, and how Digital Product Passport data can close the information gap between design decisions and end-of-life recovery.
Education: MA Design Management, University of Southern Denmark and Kolding School of Design (2025); BA Fashion Design and Business, University of Southern Denmark and Kolding School of Design (2022).
Nastassia Ramazankhani
Nastassia Ramazankhani is Symolem's Principal Sustainability Consultant and a contributing researcher on measurement, reporting and disclosure. She brings more than ten years of senior ESG and sustainability experience across fashion and textiles, beauty and cosmetics, raw materials and food and agriculture. At The Body Shop she managed supplier due diligence across more than one thousand natural and synthetic raw materials and minerals, implemented EUDR compliance tooling, and led regenerative agriculture programmes across supply chains in Peru, Ghana, Switzerland and Kenya. She previously spent four years at The Sustainable Angle helping lead the Future Fabrics Expo and delivering sustainable materials research for luxury fashion clients, and has worked as a senior ESG consultant in the United Arab Emirates advising clients across the GCC.
In our teaching she covers what industry-grade measurement, reporting and disclosure actually looks like inside a global brand — how due diligence data is collected, verified and disclosed under CSRD, EUDR and adjacent regimes, and how that connects to Digital Product Passport data expectations. She has taught as a supporting lecturer at the University of the Arts London.
Education: MA Sustainability, Chelsea College of Arts, University of the Arts London; BA Textile Design.
Ayesha Naeem
Ayesha Naeem is Symolem's Senior Consultant for Carbon Accounting and Product Carbon Footprint, and a contributing researcher to our teaching on measuring product carbon footprint. She combines a mechatronics engineering background with hands-on delivery of product carbon footprint quantification under ISO 14067, PAS 2050 and the GHG Protocol, organisational GHG accounting under ISO 14064, and logistics emissions frameworks including GLEC and ISO 14083.
She has built carbon calculators, emissions analytics and ESG rating systems for fashion brands and their supply chains, and designed a CSRD and ESRS-aligned sustainability reporting platform. In our teaching she leads sessions on how to construct a defensible product carbon footprint from primary and secondary data, where the standard methodologies converge and diverge, and how PCF outputs are used inside Digital Product Passport data structures and downstream disclosure.
Education: MSc Mechatronics Engineering, University of Engineering and Technology (2020); BSc Mechatronics Engineering, University of Engineering and Technology (2016).
Lavinia Fernandes
Lavinia Fernandes is Symolem's founder and a contributing researcher on Digital Product Passports. She was the founder of Blu-label, one of the first Digital Product Passports released to market, launched in 2019 and endorsed by London College of Fashion at the Sustainable Fashion Industry Forum in 2020 — years before the European Commission published the ESPR proposal that would make product passports mandatory across the European Union.
She now sits on the UN/CEFACT UNTP Supply Chain Working Group defining the technical standards underpinning Digital Product Passport implementation worldwide, and has spent the past year inside that process working to keep the cost of compliance to a minimum and to advocate for the fashion industry in the global standard design. In our teaching she covers the ten-year arc of Digital Product Passports — from voluntary industry pilots to ESPR delegated acts — including data architecture, identifier choices, verification, and how brands, retailers and manufacturers should read the regulation now emerging around them.
Education: Executive MBA Supply Chain Management, London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London; MA Fashion Journalism, London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London.
The Sustainable Product Hub
Fashion and circular economy programmes teach a data-intensive subject without data. Case studies are hypothetical, examples are illustrative, and students graduate having never interrogated a real product set. The Hub closes that gap.
It holds thousands of real products, structured for open-ended querying rather than fixed reporting. There is no predetermined set of questions — students and researchers filter across any combination of attributes and follow whatever the results suggest.
Material blends. Composition at fibre level, across the whole set. Which fibres are blended with which, in what proportions, and how frequently. Students can establish for themselves why blended fabrics are a recycling problem, by seeing how much of a real product range is blended and how — rather than being told.
Which products a material goes into. Query from the material outward: take a fibre or a blend and see every product category it appears in. That reverse view is how sourcing, recycling and regulatory scope actually get reasoned about in industry, and it is almost impossible to teach without a dataset behind it.
Where products are made. Country and region of manufacture across the set, cross-referenced against category and material. Students discover the real geography of production rather than the assumed one, and can test their own assumptions against it directly.
And in combination. Any filter against any other: elastane content by manufacturing country, blend complexity by product category, regulatory scope by material. This is where the teaching value sits, because it lets a seminar run as inquiry — pose a hypothesis, query it, examine what comes back, including when the answer is inconvenient.
Licensing. Available to institutions under licence for teaching and research use, at programme, department or institutional level.
What comes with it
A materials wiki. Structured reference on fibres, materials and processes — what the evidence supports, and where the widely cited figures originate. Course reference material, and a working demonstration of evidential appraisal.
A regulations tracker covering fifty instruments. Continuous tracking across jurisdictions: ecodesign and product passports, producer responsibility, reporting and due diligence, green claims, customs and trade. Regulatory currency is the hardest thing for a curriculum to hold, because the movement outpaces revalidation. We maintain it as a matter of course; programme partners get access.
Downstream and second-hand field knowledge. Direct working knowledge of what happens after retail — export flows, bale composition and grading, classification and customs treatment, and the receiving markets. Standing relationships in Kantamanto, Accra, and advisory work with a tailoring enterprise in Kakuma refugee camp, Kenya. Very few programmes teaching circularity have access to the downstream they theorise about.
Industry perspective across the chain. Two decades spanning luxury wholesale and e-commerce, carbon markets, standards development and regulatory policy, including a seat on the UN/CEFACT UN Transparency Protocol Supply Chain Working Group.
Live research. We are authoring research on Digital Product Passport adoption, and work with the Digital Innovation and Circular Economy Network Plus, the EPSRC-funded programme led by the University of Exeter.
How institutions work with us
Research. Joint research and co-authorship using the Hub as a dataset, the tracker as a comparative instrument, and our field access. We collaborate on funding applications where practitioner data strengthens the bid.
Course design. Curriculum architecture and revalidation support across undergraduate, postgraduate and executive provision — learning outcomes, module structure, progression, assessment design, reading and industry alignment, written to the quality frameworks institutions work within and supplied with the material to teach from.
Workshops. Intensive sessions taught against live data rather than worked examples, for students or for faculty. Faculty workshops are often higher leverage, because they equip the people delivering the material for years afterwards.
Lectures. Guest lectures and series, from single sessions to full module contribution.
Independent review. Academic review of provision for currency, regulatory coverage, evidential rigour and employability alignment.
What we teach
The technical. Ecodesign and the Digital Product Passport. Extended Producer Responsibility across jurisdictions. Sustainability reporting and due diligence. Green claims substantiation. Life cycle assessment (LCA) and product carbon footprint (PCF) as methods, including their boundaries. Carbon accounting to recognised standards. Traceability, identifiers and verification. Second-hand and export flows.
The theoretical. Consumption theory as the explanatory layer beneath the technical work — on conspicuous consumption and waste, the imitation-differentiation cycle, taste as class classification, and fashion as a form of play, the community of taste, and the ordinary consumption argument that most purchasing is habitual and unobserved rather than status-driven. Applied to ultra-fast fashion, this explains why interventions built on status, distinction or consumer education underperform against volume that is largely mundane. It pairs with the twin themes organising the field: behaviour change on the consumer side, adoption on the organisational side.
Our engagement with Academia
Beyond our Academic in Residence, Symolem works with the University of Exeter through the DICE Network+, maintains a relationship with Maynooth University, and is connected to universities across Europe and North America. The founder holds an Executive MBA in Supply Chain Management and an MA in Fashion Journalism, both from London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London.
The founder has been involved with the UN/CEFACT UN Transparency Protocol (UNTP) for one year, working to ensure that the cost of compliance with Digital Product Passports is kept to a minimum and advocating for the fashion industry in the design of global standards.
Who we work with
Universities and business schools with provision in fashion, textiles, supply chain, circular economy and sustainability. Fashion and design institutions. Professional bodies and awarding organisations. Executive education providers. Research networks and consortia.