Coats, the supplier of industrial threads widely used in the knitting sector, have launched EcoCycle, a range of water dissolvable threads which have been designed to facilitate the end-of-life disassembly of a garment. The company is now calling on brands, manufacturers and recyclers to collaborate with it on the development on a new “circularity concept” that it believes could make recycling both easier and more cost effective.
The company says that, in theory, a garment with seams made from EcoCycle could be laundered in an industrial washing machine at 95oC and only the other components would remain, that would then be fed back into the circular economy. This, Coats says, would reduce the manual, labour intensive and expensive tasks currently required to dismantle an item at its end-of-life.
“We are calling for industry players who want to meaningfully play their part in end-of-life recycling to work with us to integrate it right at the beginning of the garment design,” Sonya Manolova, Product Director of apparel and footwear, Coats, said. “Together we can enhance our current first generation product version of EcoCycle to accelerate circularity for our industry.”
Figures cited by the manufacturer suggest that more than 100 mn tonnes of new fibre is used by the industry each year and approximately 90 percent of textiles go straight into a waste stream, such as incineration or landfill, at their end-of-life.
With recycling rates low comparative to the vast quantities of material used, Coats believes that the answer lies in product design so that fabrics and unsalvageable garments can be quickly processed and fed back into fashion supply chains.
Andrew Morgan, Head of Sustainability at Coats, added: “As an industry we need to reset the basics in order to deliver supply chain circularity. Sustainable innovation turns product conception and development on its head by addressing end of life first before how to manufacture it.”
Though EcoCycle’s use alone could simplify a product’s disassembly, Coats hopes its innovation could more importantly catalyse greater industry collaboration so that new solutions can support the sector’s push for sustainability and circularity.
