Resortecs
Designing clothes for a waste-free future
The fashion industry has a revenue of roughly $1.3 trillion a year, a figure that’s predicted to grow to nearly $1.7 trillion by 2028. It is already enormously resource-intensive, using 93 billion cubic metres of freshwater annually. It is also highly pollutant, responsible for 120,000 metric tons of microfibres entering oceans before the textiles have ever reached customers’ washing machines. And then there are emissions of around 1.2 billion tons a year. In addition, Fast Fashion has fuelled a huge waste issue for the industry, with less than 1% of all garments recycled to a high quality, with the rest downcycled, incinerated or landfilled – a loss of $100bn-worth of material each year.
Historically, the cost of recycling clothes has been high due to the need to disassemble garments manually, and a significant amount of the material is lost during the process. Now, a Belgium-based start-up, Resortecs, is offering retailers automated disassembly at an industrial scale. Its Smart Stich yarns are made from either bio-based or pre-existing synthetic polymers, are compatible with existing stitching machines and can be used in a variety of applications, from apparel to workwear.
The yarns have melting points between 150 – 190 degrees C, so when a garment is discarded it can go through Resortec’s Smart Disassembly system, a closed-loop heating system which maximises energy recovery and minimised CO2 emissions. The garments go into the system and the Smart Stitch yarn simply ‘melts’ away, leaving up to 90% recoverable fabric.
If the European garment production share were thermally disassembled and recycled, the textile industry would generate 60.3 million fewer tonnes of CO2 and save up to 2.3 billion Euros per year. Great style doesn’t have to cost the earth.
To find out more about Resortecs, visit their website at https://resortecs.com
To find out about The Sustainable Markets Initiative's Fashion Task Force, visit https://www.sustainable-markets.org/taskforces/fashion-taskforce/
