1. Information & awareness raising:

The gymnastics festival team was first advised on fair textile procurement. Volunteers, participants, and visitors were then made aware of the issue through a campaign with clear FAIR messages (“Fairdeckt,” “Fairsteckt,” “Fairschwitzt”) and detailed background information. All content is available online on the project website and is supplemented by a digital shopping guide for fair T-shirts. In addition, training courses and presentations were held at the gymnastics festival academy.

2. Fair volunteer equipment:

Through a sustainable tender process (taking sustainability criteria into account), 4.000 gym bags and 1.200 bucket hats certified according to the Global Organic Textile Standard (GOTS) were procured. The volunteers wore these during the gymnastics festival, visibly promoting messages of textile fairness and thus generating a lot of attention on site.

3. Ideas competition for clubs:

Sports clubs were invited to submit innovative projects on sustainable procurement and reuse of textiles, as well as educational initiatives on this topic. The prize was a club set of T-shirts made from Lyocell—a resource-saving functional material, fairly produced in Portugal.

The issue of textile production is very much present at sporting events, for example in the case of volunteer clothing. However, textile production faces social and environmental challenges. Clubs and volunteers often have neither the knowledge nor the guidance they need to procure sustainable sports textiles. This is partly due to the large number and variety of tasks involved in voluntary work and the resulting lack of time to deal with this issue. At many sporting events, volunteer textiles are predominantly procured without binding sustainability criteria, which means that opportunities for visibility and setting an example remain unexploited.

The measure aimed to raise awareness of textile fairness, provide accessible information about supply chains, working conditions, and environmental standards, and establish sustainable procurement processes. At the same time, the 3.500 volunteers were to act as multipliers and raise long-term awareness of fair sports textiles among clubs.