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France’s Clothing Repair Program to Decrease Fast Fashion

Posted on September 13, 2023September 13, 2023 by dishanth

Fast Fashion is the design, manufacturing and marketing method focused on rapidly producing high volumes of clothing and selling them at inexpensive prices. Over the past few years, fast fashion has increased due to the affordability of many of these items. With fast fashion brands like H&M and Zara and now online brands like Shein taking over the fashion industry, fast fashion doesn’t show any signs of slowing down.

The Fast Fashion Market is projected to reach over $280 million by 2030. Apparel consumption has reached 62 million tonnes a year and is expected to be 102 million tonnes a year by 2030. With the increase in the production of clothing, there is also an increase in the amount of waste produced as well.

Apparel companies produce 53 million tonnes of clothing annually. Over 57% of clothing produced and purchased ends up in landfills. The reason is due to the increase in production. These fast fashion brands use cheaper materials that are generally not made to last more than a year or even a season. Much of what is purchased isn’t worn and is either donated or dumped—with the rise of fast fashion, buying something new when articles rip or tear is cheaper than fixing it.

France’s clothing repair program is trying to change these habits and encourage people to fix their torn clothing. France’s clothing repair program intends to offer a repair bonus for people to mend their clothes. In France, over 772 000 tonnes of clothing are discarded annually, most of which are still wearable.

With France’s clothing repair program, people will receive a $6.73 to $28.05 credit for bringing their shoes and clothes to a cobbler or workshop to be mended. The monetary incentive will be based on the amount of mending that needs to be done. The government will fund the program with around $173 million in contributions over five years. This program aims to create a circular economy for shoes and textiles so that products last longer. This program will hopefully lower how money items people purchase and donate annually.

France’s clothing repair program is run by an eco-organization called Refashion. The organization manages the prevention of waste and management of the end of service life of products on over 5000 companies placing goods onto the market. Within France’s clothing repair program, tailors, clothing brands and repair shops can join the initiatives for free with the organizations.

The organization has reported that approximately 56% of donated textiles can be reused, while 32% can be recycled into new products. By raising awareness about these possibilities and incentivizing repairs, these schemes may actually encourage individuals to reconsider their buying habits. In France, clothing companies are now required to label items with information about the materials used and their country of origin. This will allow customers to make more informed choices and encourage them to shop sustainably.

France’s clothing repair program follows a similar initiative launched last year by the French government, which offered bonuses to individuals to repair their household appliances. In 2020, a law was passed to promote sustainable practices and consumption habits related to household goods.

If more people choose better quality clothing or consciously decide to have their clothing mended, the popularity of the fast fashion industry might begin to decrease. If people are rewarded for their environmental efforts, they will actually save money instead of constantly buying new clothing. It’s an initiative that could have a significant impact on the way we shop and consume. I’m interested to see how it will play out and if other countries will take on similar initiatives.

Source – Happy Eco News

The Plastic-Eating Enzymes Used in Recycling Clothing

Posted on August 5, 2023August 5, 2023 by dishanth

Plastic eating enzymes have interested scientists looking for solutions to increasing plastic waste. Enzymes are important to living things because, as proteins, they allow biochemical reactions to happen faster than they would otherwise. They aid in everything from breathing to digestion. Enzymes are even used in food processing, paper industries, and detergents.

Because enzymes are so diverse in their uses, scientists have engineered a new enzyme to help us with our plastic program. These super plastic eating enzymes can break down plastic in a few days. Scientists believe this is a natural adaptation by the bacteria and might be a response to the increase of plastic in the environment.

The most common type of plastic that plastic eating enzymes can recycle is polyethylene terephthalate (PET). PET is a type of plastic used in many common products, such as bottles, food packaging, and textiles.

Other types of plastic that can be recycled by enzymes include:
High-density polyethylene (HDPE): found in plastic bottles and children’s toys.
Low-density polyethylene (LDPE): found in plastic bags, shrink wrap and food packaging.
Polypropylene (PP): found in disposable medical devices, textiles and auto parts.
Polystyrene/styrofoam (PS): found in takeout food containers, consumer electronics packaging and packing peanuts.

As the enzyme breaks down plastic, the bacteria produce MHETase, by which the enzymes break the pieces down further. After this process, other bacteria can break down the products into CO2 and water. Unlike other recycling methods, they can break down plastic into its original components, which can be reused to create new products. Enzymes require less energy than traditional methods, such as mechanical recycling. But maybe best of all is that they can be used to recycle plastic that is difficult or impossible to recycle using traditional methods such as those mixed with fabric or other dissimilar materials.

These plastic eating enzymes are now making an appearance in the fashion industry. The fashion industry uses tons of plastic-derived fibres in many clothing products. What’s worse is that very few of these materials are recycled today. Fashion brands have been known to turn to mechanical recycling and approaches using solvents to repurpose textiles for reuse. The challenge with these approaches is that they involve virgin plastics and require a lot of energy. Using plastic eating enzymes will break down plastic more efficiently. They will turn the materials into monomers that act like virgin-quality materials.

Athletic apparel company Lulelemon has teamed up with Australian startup Samara Eco to help them break down old textiles so they can be turned into new ones. Samara Eco has optimized plastic eating enzymes found in nature to efficiently recycle PET and polyester plastics at scale so they can be made into new, virgin-grade plastic.

The plastic waste is sourced and prepared for recycling by cold washing. The enzymes revert the plastic waste from its complex state into its original form. The plastics are then separated from any other additives like colourants. The recycled monomers can then be used in the re-manufacturing of brand-new plastics.

Using this technology, Lululemon hopes to spin used nylon and polyester blends from pre-owner, damaged or discarded apparel into a form that can be used in new collections. The partnership is Lululemon’s first-ever minority investment in a recycling company and Samsara’s first partnership with a clothing manufacturer. The recycling company hopes to make breakthroughs into the mainstream fashion industry as well as work with partners in other spaces to meet its goal of recycling 1.5 million tonnes of textiles by 2030.

This partnership is also part of Lululemon’s Be Planet goals and a step toward a circular ecosystem by 2030. Samsara Eco’s infinite recycling helps to close the clothing loop by using apparel waste to create new recycled materials over and over.

The two companies will create new recycled nylon and polyester made from apparel waste. They will be able to show that recycling textiles and repurposing materials is possible and can be done sustainably. This partnership might be the move we need to change the fashion industry for the future of our planet.

Source Happy Eco News

Composting Your Clothing – it’s Being Done in Australia

Posted on May 9, 2023May 9, 2023 by dishanth

The average consumer now buys 60% more clothing than they did 15 years ago, and over 92 million tonnes of what is purchased gets thrown away – usually into a landfill. Another problem is the fabric from which our clothing is made. Around 70 percent of the clothing market is made from synthetic fabrics such as polyester, nylon and acrylic, all made from non-renewable sources such as oil and natural gas.

These synthetics can’t biodegrade, meaning they sit in landfills for hundreds of years. Because so many different materials can go into making a single garment, they are hard to separate so they can be recycled properly. Sorting different fibres and materials by hand is extremely labour intensive, slow, and requires a skilled workforce that doesn’t seem to exist in many countries.

What is the solution to reducing textile waste? Consumers can buy less, repair, donate, rent, and organize clothing swaps with friends. Some clothing brands are taking the issue further by creating garments that can be composted after they can no longer be used. Based in Australia, the Very Good Bra has created bras and undergarments made from 100% botanically sourced materials that can be composted, worm-farmed or buried in the soil at the end of their life.

The company uses no spandex, polyester or nylon – even in sewing, thread, elastic and labelling. This means that their products are 100% plastic-free. Their elastics are made from natural tree rubber knitted into organic cotton. Their hooks for bras are made from 100% organic cotton and Tencel sewing thread. Everything has been designed to be put in the soil as is.

The company has worked with sustainability experts, academics and industry to create a proposal for Standards Australia to create standards for compostable textiles. This standard would allow garments to be disposed of in commercial composters and would guarantee that the clothes would compost safely. The proposal was approved by Standards Australia and will enter a development phase to determine the criteria clothing will have to meet so that the compost would not be affected by dyes or flame-retardant coatings. For this to work, more brands must actively participate and consider using more than just natural fibres to ensure their clothing is truly compostable, such as nuts or bio elastics buttons to replace zippers.

If more clothing brands think about making their clothing compostable, we can enter a circular economy and reduce our landfill waste and impact on the planet.

Source Happy Eco News

Xeros study explores upcycling of laundry microfibres

Posted on January 30, 2023 by dishanth

Microfibres are defined as tiny ‘threads’, smaller than 5mm, that break off from textiles through the everyday acts of wearing and laundering garments and textiles Xeros explains.

Estimates from The Microfibre Consortium suggest every year more than half a million tons of microfibres are released into the world’s oceans simply from washing our clothing.

Meanwhile, independent research shows that microfibres from synthetic textiles (known as microplastics) are one of the biggest sources of microplastic pollution in the world’s oceans.

In order to address this, Xeros Technology has developed a washing machine filtration device, XFilter, which captures the microfibres and prevents their release into the world’s oceans.

XFilter lasts the lifetime of a washing machine and allows users to place the captured microfibres directly into their bin to be disposed of with other household waste, as we already do with vacuum cleaners and tumble driers that collect similar mixed fibres.

“Microfibre waste from filtration is a complex material to recycle within existing recycling infrastructure: not only are the microfibres often mixed materials, but they also contain captured dirt and soil,” says Xeros. “This is why Xeros have teamed up the University of Surrey – to accelerative research into improved methods to permanently reduce this continued pollution build-up in the future.

Led by Dr Melis Duyar, the team from the University of Surrey and North Carolina State University have developed a new method specifically designed to upcycle textile micro/nano fibres shed during the washing and drying of clothes. The method produces clean hydrogen and solid carbon nanomaterials as a by-product.

Dr Duyar, senior lecturer at the School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering at University of Surrey, said: “At the University of Surrey, we are developing solutions to upcycle microplastics without releasing the fossil carbon contained within them into the atmosphere in the form of greenhouse gas emissions. Plastics are one of the problems associated with our dependency on fossil fuels, so any solution we develop to address plastics pollution must also fit within our strategy for reaching a net zero emission economy. This partnership with Xeros will allow us to bring our technology closer to commercialisation, by developing methods for upcycling real microfibre waste collected from commercially available filters. We are excited to see our patent pending processes in action as applied to mixed fibre feedstocks, which is a big step towards developing a viable, real-world solution.”

The carbon nanomaterials developed using this upcycling method can be used in various essential products including batteries, solar cells and medical devices.

Dr Paul Servin, application development director of Xeros, added: “There is nothing better than to convert, what is today considered to be waste and a problem in the world, into a highly valuable product which is what we, together with the excellent researchers at University in Surrey, will accomplish. I’m extremely excited about this project which can hopefully lead the way to future separated collection of microfibres from washing machines, tumble dryers and vacuum cleaners for the purpose of upcycling to a higher valued product.”

The project began this month with research conducted over a 12-month period.

Source Just Style

Carbon Innovation Fund: Co-op to allocate £3m to projects creating low-carbon food systems

Posted on November 23, 2021November 23, 2021 by dishanth

Announced today (23 November), the Carbon Innovation Fund will run for three years, offering £1m in grant funding annually to community environmental causes, social enterprises, charities, start-ups and collaborative projects working on solutions for a more sustainable food system.

Ten projects will be awarded each year by the Fund and each successful applicant will be entitled to a share of up to £100,000. Applicants will need to be UK-based but their projects could help decarbonisation at any point in the food system globally.

Co-op said in a statement that it will only support projects that contribute to “real systems change” for food. The company has also said the fund will support the preservation and dissemination of ancient and indigenous knowledge as well as supporting emerging technologies and processes.

“With the Carbon Innovation Fund, we’re looking to do something different; rather than ideas for individual commercial benefit, we want innovations that can be freely shared and can be of benefit to society in general,” said Co-op Food’s chief executive Jo Whitfield.

“It’s this type of co-operation that we believe we need to help accelerate our response to the climate crisis.”

The Fund is being provided with money allocated from the Co-op; the retailer allocates 2p from every £1 of sales to its charitable foundation. Applications are open until 12pm on Friday 10 December 2021.

Earlier this year, the Co-op Group built on a commitment to reach carbon neutrality for all own-brand food and drink by 2025 with a detailed 10-point climate action plan. The firm’s long-term climate goal is net-zero across all scopes, for all Group activities, by 2040.

Then, at COP26 in Glasgow this month, the retailer joined competitors Sainsbury’s, Tesco, Waitrose & Partners and Marks & Spencer in signing a new joint commitment to halve the nature and climate impacts of food systems by 2030. This initiative is being orchestrated by WWF.

The news on the Carbon Innovation Fund comes on the same week that John Lewis & Partners, in partnership with environmental charity Hubbub, launched a new £1m fund for innovative projects that help to reduce waste across the food, textiles and technology sectors.

Source Edie

Recycling textile waste: ‘A solution exists, we can’t go backwards’

Posted on May 31, 2021 by dishanth

An Australian startup working on a process to recycle textiles by turning worn-out fabric into raw materials says it has funding to build a world-first commercial-scale plant in Queensland.

The federal government held a first national roundtable on textile waste on Wednesday – recognition of a piling-up problem that results in Australians discarding an estimated 780,000 tonnes of textile waste each year, according to a 2020 national waste report.

The problem is exacerbated by the lack of an effective recycling process. Studies show many large-scale garment recycling systems provide negligible benefits and can be as environmentally harmful as producing raw fabrics.

BlockTexx, an Australian company that has developed its process with researchers at the Queensland University of Technology, hopes it can help “close the loop” by diverting textiles from landfill, and at the same time replacing virgin material.

The company’s founders, Graham Ross and Adrian Jones, say the technology has been refined during the pandemic and they now have the $5.5m investment needed to build a first large-scale facility at Logan, south of Brisbane.

Ross and Jones – both veterans of the clothing and fashion industry – say they have enough supply and demand to expand, before the first plant has been built.

“From this original idea we always knew we were early to the market, but also a lot of technical barriers we need to overcome,” Ross said.

“We always seem to talk about textile waste. We always think about how can we take that and turn that into a valuable product.

“The byproduct is we’re solving environmental issues.”

Alice Payne, an associate professor at QUT and the program leader at the centre for a waste free world, said problems with textile waste have been accelerated since the 1980s by global trade policies. Lowered tariffs encouraged more imports. Cheaper fabrics allowed the phenomenon of “fast fashion” to flourish.

“Clothes are cheaper than ever – it’s possible to buy more and more,” Payne said.

“In parallel we’ve seen this stark rise in consumption of synthetic fibres. They’re low cost, they have an ease of consumption compared to natural fibres.

“When you blend a synthetic fibre with a natural fibre you create a monstrous hybrid. The common problem with all attempts at recycling is the more mixed material you have, the more problem you have reusing those resources.”

The process developed by BlockTexx and QUT researchers – called “separation of fabric technology” – is noteworthy because it is designed to handle hybrid fabrics. It turns cotton to cellulose and polyester to flake for industrial uses like injection moulding.

Their aim for the first plant is to recycle about 10,000 tonnes a year by the end of 2022 – initially focusing mostly on commercial fabrics, including old towels and sheets from hotels and hospitals.

Ross said that after two years of lab testing, they were comfortable they could commercialise the process, and that it was producing raw recycled materials of very high quality.

“We’ve now got a product where we can consistently compare our product to virgin material,” he said.

The company would begin to recycle post-consumer waste when it scales up capacity. Plans have been drawn up for a 40,000-tonne plant. BlockTexx envisages licensing its technology on a global scale.

“[The size of the first plant] is significant, but equally only a drop in the ocean of the amount of textiles going to landfill,” Ross said.

“This is definitely a global model. The world has a textile problem. Our solution needs to go to the problem, because we can’t bring the problem to the solution.

“We see ourselves as a technology company. We already have several large waste and textile companies around the world saying this is really interesting.

“The other smart thing about our model is that it’s very modular – it can be run on a small scale and we can expand it.”

Jones said: “Whatever happens from now, because a solution exists, we can’t go backwards.

“I’m not trying to say that from tomorrow we’re not going to put textiles into landfill, we’re not going to export textile waste.

“But we’ve now got the opportunity to do something. It really does move the discussion from the art of the possible to the art of the practical and that’s really important in this space.”

Source The Guardian