From the Sector

With the Earth population reaching 8 billion in November 2022, the need to address the issue of textile waste becomes more critical.

According to earth.org, 92 million tons of textile waste is produced every year, a number that is expected to soar to 134 million tons by the end of the decade. Around 85% of all textiles discarded in the US are said to end up in landfills, leading to land and water pollution impacting first and foremost local communities.

Archroma, a company who creates colors for fashion, decided to look at the issue creatively: what if it could create colors from waste fashion?
The company had already developed a way to turn waste from the herbal and food industry into its range of EarthColors® featured by brands such as G-Star, Patagonia, Esprit, Tom Taylor, Pangaia, UGG, and Primark. Now they are is introducing a new innovation: the FiberColors* technology.

With this technology, Archroma upcycles textile waste into colors. The colors are synthesized from a minimum content of 50% waste-based raw material.
R&D experts have developed a way to use cotton and/or polyamide and their blends (with a >95% purity) to substitute the major part of the petroleum-based raw material usually used to make dyestuff.

The resulting FiberColors* range, which is patent-pending and therefore exclusive to Archroma, includes five dyes covering a palette of timeless shades: Diresul® Fiber-Teak (brown shades), Diresul® Fiber-Ochre (olive shades), Diresul® Fiber-Maroon (bordeaux shades), Diresul® Fiber-Slate (blue grey shades) and Diresul® Fiber-Graphite (dark grey shades).

The dyes are especially suited for cellulose fibers such as cotton, viscose, linen and kapok, and can be used in continuous, exhaust, denim and garment dyeing and printing processes.

• Scientific researchers from 10 countries, including North America, UK, Japan and Germany
• Bertrand Piccard, Solar Impulse Foundation, as Keynote Speaker
• Speakers from strategic partnerships: L’Oréal, Salomon, and McKinsey

Carbios hosted the first PET Biorecycling Summit from 7 to 8 December 2022 in Paris. The event attracted over 100 international participants from the scientific, academic, and industrial worlds to exchange on the advances in the field of biological recycling, and how to bring these innovations for a circular economy to market.

The two-day conference gathered scientists from various academic institutions to share their latest research on PET enzymatic depolymerization.  Bertrand Piccard, Initiator and Chairman of the Solar Impulse Foundation^[1], joined as the Keynote Speaker for the last session focused on PET circularity, and praised Carbios’ contribution to reducing plastic pollution. The Summit concluded with a visit of Carbios’ demonstration plant in Clermont-Ferrand. The demonstration plant was inaugurated in September 2021 and brings Carbios’ technology one step closer to industrialization. Following the demonstration plant’s success, Carbios is on track to build and operate the world’s first industrial-scale enzymatic PET recycling plant (with a processing capacity of 50.000 tons of PET waste per year) in France (Longlaville) by 2025^[2], and to start licensing its technology throughout the world.

^[1] To address sustainability challenges while enabling economic growth, Bertrand Piccard and the Solar Impulse Foundation have identified 1000+ clean and profitable solutions. More details available on the official website.

^[2] Cf. Press release dated 23 February 2022.

• Lenzing again recognized for sustainable sourcing, innovation and transparency
• Lenzing achieves the highest category for the third time already

The Lenzing Group achieved first place in the “Hot Button Ranking” of the Canadian non-profit organization Canopy, thus confirming its leading role in the areas of sustainability and responsible wood and pulp sourcing. Lenzing can also once again celebrate a dark green shirt, synonymous with the highest category.

In this ranking, which receives a lot of attention in the textile and apparel industry, Canopy evaluates the world’s 34 largest producers of cellulosic fibers in terms of their sustainable wood and pulp sourcing, their efforts with regard to the use of alternative raw materials and their achievements in the protection of ancient and endangered forests. Resource preservation is a key element of Lenzing’s corporate strategy and at the core of its innovation agenda. The sustainable production of TENCEL™, VEOCEL™ and LENZING™ ECOVERO™branded specialty fibers is based on these principles.

Promoting the circular economy
With its REFIBRA™ and Eco Cycle technologies, Lenzing offers solutions for transforming the textile and nonwovens industries towards a circular economy. In line with its vision for the circular economy, “We give waste a new life. Every day.” Lenzing is driving the industry toward a full circular economy by striving to give waste a new life in all aspects of its core business and developing circular solutions together with potential partners inside and outside the current value chain. A milestone on this path is the cooperation with the Swedish pulp producer Södra. The two global market leaders, who have been proactively promoting the circular economy in the fashion industry for many years, are joining forces to give the topic a further boost and make a decisive contribution to solving the global textile waste problem by making fibers from post-consumer textiles.

Today, Lenzing offers lyocell fibers made from 30 percent recycled cotton waste. The company aims to launch lyocell, modal and viscose staple fibers with up to 50 percent recycled post-consumer content on a commercial scale by 2025 and to develop a new circular business model by closing the loops for post-consumer waste. By 2025, the company plans to enter into further partnerships with 25 key supply chain companies.

Fibre Extrusion Technology Limited (FET) of Leeds, England has installed a FET-200LAB wet spinning system at the University of Manchester which will play a major part in advanced materials research to support sustainable growth and development.

This research programme will be conducted by The Henry Royce Institute, which operates as a hub model at The University of Manchester with spokes at other leading research universities in the UK.

The Henry Royce Institute identifies challenges and stimulates innovation in advanced UK materials research, delivering positive economic and societal impact. In particular, this materials research initiative is focused on supporting and promoting all forms of sustainable growth and development.
These challenges range from biomedical devices through to plastics sustainability and energy-efficient devices; hence supporting key national targets such as the UK’s zero-carbon 2050 target.

FET-200 Series wet spinning systems complement FET’s renowned range of melt spinning equipment. The FET-200LAB is a laboratory scale system, which is especially suitable for the early stages of formulation and process development. It is used for processing new functional textile materials in a variety of solvent and polymer combinations.

In particular, the FET-200LAB will be utilised in trials for a family of fibres made from wood pulp, a sustainable resource rather than the usual fossil fuels. Bio-based polymers are produced from biomass feedstocks such as cellulose and are commonly used in the manufacture of high end apparel. The key to cellulose and other materials like lyocell and viscose is that they can be recycled, treated and fed back into the wet spinning system for repeat manufacture.

Established in 1998, FET is a leading supplier of laboratory and pilot melt spinning systems with installations in over 35 countries and has now successfully processed more than 35 different polymer types in multifilament, monofilament and nonwoven formats.

Hosted outside of Copenhagen for the first time in its 13-year history, on 3 November, Global Fashion Summit assembled over 250 stakeholders representing manufacturers, garment workers, retailers, brands, suppliers, NGOs, policy, and innovators in Singapore and online to spur industry action. The Summit was presented by Global Fashion Agenda (GFA), the non-profit organisation that is accelerating the transition to a net positive fashion industry.
 
The latest edition of the Summit was centred around the theme ‘Alliances for a New Era’, building on dialogues from the June edition in Copenhagen and gathering leaders from across the entire value chain to elevate diverse voices and foster alliances within the fashion industry and beyond, to drive sustainable impact.
 
The Summit’s first international edition facilitated more conversations with manufacturer and supply chain voices to discuss crucial challenges and opportunities around working collaboratively with brands on equal terms. The programme featured bold panels, case studies, masterclasses and leadership roundtables reflecting on topics including ‘Data Scarcity: A Crisis of Measurement?’, ‘Disruption for Better Wage Systems’, ’Community and Circularity’, ‘Connecting the EU Textiles Strategy with the Value Chain’ and ‘Our Energy Transformation Moment’.
 
Attendees heard from over 50 speakers including H.E. Sandra Jensen Landi, Ambassador of Denmark to Singapore & Ambassador-Designate of Denmark to Brunei; H.E. Iwona Piórko, Ambassador of the European Union to Singapore; Anne-Laure Descours, Chief Sourcing Officer, PUMA; Baptiste Le Gal, Chief Revenue Officer APAC, Vestiaire Collective; Christian James Smith, Head of Sustainability Stakeholder Engagement, Zalando; Ninh Trinh, Director of Responsible Sourcing & Sustainability, Target; Roger Lee, CEO, TAL Apparel; Wilson Teo, President, Singapore Fashion Council; Edwin Keh, Chief Executive Officer, The Hong Kong Research Institute of Textiles and Apparel, Ashila Dandeniya, Founder, StandUp Lanka; and more.

Key takeaways and highlights from the event include:

• Global Fashion Agenda announced a new alliance with BBC Storyworks Commercial Productions to launch a film series on BBC.com, which is currently in the early stages of development. The new series will present human-centric stories focusing on both social and environmental sustainability in the fashion industry. It will be released to a wide audience in 2023.
• Federica Marchionni outlined the crucial need for accurate and robust data to substantiate sustainability claims and credentials but acknowledged that the focus on finding ‘perfect’ data cannot be allowed to stifle progress. Global Fashion Agenda will build upon Summit discussions to reflect on how the industry can accurately measure and communicate sustainability performance and illuminate the data credibility challenges.
• The session ‘Establishing circular fashion systems in Cambodia & Vietnam’ outlined the first steps taken by the Global Circular Fashion Forum to establish circular fashion systems in Vietnam and Cambodia with regional stakeholders, government, brand and manufacturer representation.
• Throughout the Summit, the Innovation Forum connected fashion companies with sustainable solution providers. Exhibitors included Better Work , Circular Fashion Partnership, Compreli, Kno Global, Planatones by Noyon Lanka, Redress Design Award and The ID Factory.
• Through conversations such as ‘Disruption for Better Wage Systems’ and ‘Empowering the Worker Majority’, there was a resounding message for people to consider the real people in the value chain. Ensuring dignified livelihoods for these workers should have the same sense of urgency as emissions reductions. 

• Focus on the guiding principle of "textile intelligence" and sustainability

Long before sustainability became a trend in the textile industry, Schoeller Textil AG, which has been innovating technical fabrics and smart textile finishing technologies for more than 150 years, made it its mission to develop textile innovations in harmony with nature. Now the company is undergoing an extensive rebranding, whilst unveiling its strong brand foundation in the process. The result embodies the newly defined guiding principle of “Textile Intelligence” - the development and successful implementation of innovative textiles and intelligent textile technologies.

Innovations in the textile industry must meet requirements on several levels – offering both new and optimized solutions to sociological, ecological, and economic challenges of our time. Creating this holistic added value is firmly rooted in the Schoeller brand origin and is still the top priority in textile product development today. The brand essence has thus remained the same, but it has been embodied anew.

“At the beginning of the rebranding process, it was clear to us we had to root ourselves in (Swiss) tradition in order to fully realize Schoeller’s entire brand potential and successfully explore new, digital paths,” said Antonio Gatti Balsarri, Schoeller chief commercial officer.

“The goal of the rebranding is to communicate our traditional brand values in a completely new brand presence. The result was a sharpened brand profile, a clear brand strategy and tonality, as well as a clean, modern corporate design. We will specifically address our sustainability commitment through the expansion of digital touchpoints, their cross-media use, and an increased online presence. Simplified, straightforward, sustainable - in accordance with our greatest source of inspiration: nature.”

Transparency and Sustainability
Paramount to Schoeller’s corporate identity is the full disclosure of brand principles and transparency around all business divisions. A simplified logo design was established by reducing logo elements and colors for a modern look and feel that can be produced in a much more resource-efficient manner. Schoeller’s new brand mantra of “Textile Intelligence” speaks to its company mission of more than 150 years.

Schoeller has been a bluesign system partner from the very beginning and uses the Higg Facility Environmental Module (FEM) to assess sustainable performance. In addition to environmentally-friendly manufacturing processes and careful material selection, the highest quality and sustainability standards in production also mean guaranteeing fair working conditions. Schoeller follows a Code of Conduct that guarantees transparent production chains, environmental protection, and fair working conditions.

“Zero Textile Waste” becomes a targeted brand strategy. While the production of textiles and textile technologies is continuously being optimized to preserve resources, the manufacturing processes are often costly and complex. To this end, Schoeller offers new approaches to efforts around Zero Waste in the industry. Its new online shop, “Schoeller re-Fabric” sells textile remnants from production directly to designers and smaller productions to increase its overall production volume efficiency and avoid textile waste.

The Italian company offers its dyeing technology for practical and theoretical design explorations at the Fashion For Good Museum in Amsterdam.

On Saturday October 22nd in Amsterdam, Andrea Venier, Officina39 Managing Director, took part in the Denim & Dyeing seminar to talk about Recycrom™, the patented revolutionary and sustainable dyestuffs range obtained through an innovative upcycling process that involves textile fibers from used clothing and manufacturing waste for dyeing and printing applications.

The seminar was organized inside the Fashion For Good Museum by the Stichting Textielcommissie Nederland, together with a Design Challenge to which took part a selection of young designers who have explored Recycrom™’s colorful potential in their creations. The winning designs are exposed in a 2-week pop-up show at Fashion For Good Museum.

The Museum is also hosting the “Knowing Cotton Otherwise” exhibition, that highlights the relationship between cotton and the fashion industry, the role of cotton in an increasingly intertwined web of global cultures, and the sustainable innovations driving its circular transformation.

Innovative solutions from Fashion for Good Innovators Oritain and Officina39, which tackle some of the challenging aspects of cotton’s production such as origin and traceability, dyeing and water use, are also used by the artists in their installations. Three of them have been inspired by the ecofriendly dyeing potential of Recycrom™: the protagonist of the meeting between art and fashion, sustainability and design, past, present and future of the industry. The first artist that has challenged herself is Caithlin Courtney Chong, who has realized an artwork installation with Recycrom™ in the print room, and a suggestive installation dedicated to Officina39’s sustainable dyestuffs.

• Carbios’ biorecycling and biodegradation technologies internationally recognized by consumers as promising answers to their top environmental concerns
• Carbios’ innovations considered one of the best for solving recycling effectively and achieving a real plastic circularity
• Consumer research including qualitative and quantitative fields was conducted between March and August 2022. The research institute, Strategic Research, conducted 6000 interviews in Europe and USA

Carbios’ biorecycling and biodegradation technologies acclaimed by consumers
During the first research field study, respondents were exposed to Carbios’ biorecycling process; a new enzyme-based biotechnology that enables biological recycling of all types of PET plastic waste (including bottles, packaging and textiles), and pushes the boundaries of recycling in terms of the number of cycles.

The research results demonstrated that European and US respondents find Carbios’ biorecycling technology more unique and innovative than traditional PET recycling (i.e. thermo-mechanical recycling), as well as more relevant in its ability to address their concerns and challenges regarding recycling.

In the second research study, conducted in the US, respondents were also exposed to Carbios’ biodegradation technology: an innovative enzymatic solution by which an enzyme is incorporated into plastics during the production process of bio-sourced PLA plastics (corn, sugar cane). This approach makes the material made from plants 100% compostable at ambient temperatures and degradable like plants with the built-in enzyme biologically breaking the bioplastic down in less than eight weeks without microplastics or toxic residues; creating a fully organic circularity.

Similarly to Carbios’ biorecycling technology, Carbios’ PLA biodegradation innovation caught US respondents’ attention with 64% overall liking it. Additionally, 93% of the respondents sampled described the concept as innovative, unique, easy to understand (49%), and believable (43%). Up to 82% of the most environmentally engaged respondents declared they would definitely buy more products made with Carbios’ fully circular biodegradable bioplastic.

Consumers: No other choice but to make plastic fully circular
The research says 99% of the respondents consider it important to protect the environment, while plastic pollution is now ranked the third most-concerning environmental issues after climate change and ocean pollution.

This awareness brings most of these consumers to be environmentally active when it comes to purchasing goods and sorting. For the US respondents, eco-friendly packaging comes in the fourth place in terms of purchase drivers for packaged goods and 65% of them declare sorting plastic from general waste on a regular basis, which makes plastic the most sorted type of waste.

Nevertheless, for a vast majority of the respondents across geographies, even if they would like to reduce their plastic consumption most of the time there is no suitable alternative that is as convenient, light, and cost-efficient as plastics. Hence in an ideal world, consumers would like all plastic waste in landfills and oceans to be collected, cleaned, reused and recycled.

As an accredited testing and certification body, the “OETI - Institut fuer Oekologie, Technik und Innovation GmbH“ (OETI for short) has been successfully responding to prevailing market requirements for 55 years and, in the process, has made a name for itself worldwide. To mark its anniversary, this international centre of excellence with its origins in Austria is taking a look back at the most important milestones in its history as well as providing interesting insights into future developments.

As renowned flooring manufacturers founded the Austrian Carpet Institute on 25th of September 1967, no one could have imagined how successful the company would become. But even back then, one thing was clear to the experts: the need to establish a carpet research and testing centre in the form of an association. Today, over five decades later, OETI is a testing and certification services provider for OEKO-TEX® certificates and labels, textiles, leather, due diligence along the textile and leather supply chain as well as for personal protective equipment (PPE), flooring technology, furnishings and indoor air quality.

In 1992, OETI was a founding member of the ‘International OEKO-TEX® Association for Research and Testing in the Field of Textile and Leather Ecology’ with independent certifications and product labels. Ever since, OEKO-TEX® has enabled companies along the textile and leather supply chain and every consumer to make responsible decisions for safe, environmentally friendly and fairly manufactured products.

In line with its focus on sustainability, OETI and its Swiss parent company, TESTEX AG, wanted to build the new OETI headquarters using low energy construction techniques and ensure its carbon-neutral operation. To achieve these goals, the highest possible thermal insulation and energy optimisation standards were applied, while the carbon-neutral power supply is generated by its in-house photovoltaics system as well as domestic renewable energy.

The new headquarters, which the company moved into in 2021, provides space for 75 employees over 2,500m2 and boasts bright and perfectly equipped office areas. The laboratory areas, the analytical/chemical laboratory and the physical / fire laboratory were also designed based on the latest methods and technologies. This makes OETI, alongside its Swiss parent company TESTEX, the second fully fledged laboratory site in the entire, global TESTEX Group.

C.L.A.S.S. continues its path of "strategic sustainable synergies" with the aim of sharing its message of responsible innovation, and returns for the second time to Milan Fashion Week with WSM White Sustainable Milano. The objective is to represent a selected and smart path of the production chain related to materials, technologies, production, customization, finishing processes and dyes that are increasingly less impactful on the environment.
 
After debuting last February, “Unveiling the Fashion Backstage”, the educational and narrative journey of WSM | White Sustainable Milano developed in synergy with Giusy Bettoni, founder and CEO of C.L.A.S.S., returns to the VISCONTI HALL and grows in terms of attendance and thematic areas.

The exhibiting copmpanies are: Bemberg™ by Asahi Kasei, Maeba International, Linificio e Canapificio Nazionale SB, Edmos, Toyoshima, Iluna Group and YKK.