YARN-TO-YARN®: textiles going circular
The global fashion industry produces over 80 billion garments a year – an enormous use of resources. Currently, only one per cent of these items gets recycled or, to put it another way, becomes new clothing again. Some 7.5 million tonnes of textiles go to waste every year in Europe alone, making the textile industry anything but sustainable. Not least because many clothes today are made of mixed synthetic fibres, and the technology needed to recycle these materials has not been available.
Fighting fashion waste with enzymes
The YARN-TO-YARN® project team set out to change this in 2022. With the help of biological enzymes, the project has succeeded in breaking down individual components of elastane-polyamide blended textiles so that they can then be reprocessed for reuse. At least in the laboratory. However, the attempt to scale up the process and make it marketable revealed the project's limits.
And so, the project has ended a little earlier than expected. Nonetheless, the vision of a sustainable textile industry lives on. To this end, YARN-TO-YARN® has processed its findings and learnings with the support of the Migros Pioneer Fund and is now making them available to experts and the public.
- Scientific findings on enzymatic recycling
- Reflections on the YARN-TO-YARN®’s start-up journey (to be published in October/November 2024)
- Collected insights on business models in the circular textile economy (to be published in October/November 2024)
YARN-TO-YARN®
Find out more about this Migros community involvement initiative - perhaps it's just what you're looking for?
Photo/stage: YARN-TO-YARN®
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