A yarn for the climate
Swiss textile technology developer HeiQ has launched AeoniQ, a cellulose-based yarn that it says offers the ease of use, the performance levels, the versatility, the affordability and the scalability to allow the textile industry to consign polyester and nylon to the past.
A yarn for the climate
It is 16 years since co-founders Carlo Centonze and Murray Height set HeiQ up as a spin-off from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, where they had met. Dr Height, who is now running HeiQ’s subsidiary in his native Australia, was researching silver-based materials as a solution to odour in clothing. On a hike in the Alps with Mr Centonze, they reached the conclusion together that he was onto something and HeiQ is the fruit of that realisation.
In the years that followed, they brought their odour-free technology to market, followed by cooling technology, a fluorine-free water repellent, an oil repellent and, in 2019, the Swiss environmental award-winning HeiQ Clean Tech for sustainable polyester dyeing. More recent innovations have included an antiviral and antimicrobial technology called Viroblock, which won the company the Swiss Technology Award in 2020.
All the while, HeiQ was wrestling with a bigger question: how can we clothe 8 billion people while stopping textiles from contributing any further to the destruction of the environment? It now has what it thinks could be the answer: a new, cellulose-based yarn that it believes really does have the potential to take the place of polyester and nylon.
The new yarn, HeiQ AeoniQ, can come from a wide range of renewable resources, including wood pulp and algae. The yarn is recyclable, biodegradable and will add nothing to the microplastics problem in the rivers, lakes and oceans of the world. At a pilot plant it will begin operating in Austria in March 2022 to produce AeoniQ, HeiQ will run a 99% closed-loop manufacturing operation, using energy that is 100% from renewable sources. Mr Centonze describes its environmental impact as “outstandingly low” compared with that of all other fibres.
A first for the industry
“It’s the first cellulosic yarn capable of replacing polyester and nylon,” he explains. “The problem is that every person on this planet consumes an average of 14 kilos of textiles per year. This means 111 million tonnes of textile fibres are produced each year, a gigantic quantity, a mountain.” Of this total, he describes 80 million tonnes as being particularly problematic because this is the volume that polyester and nylon contribute. Their inherent problem, Mr Centonze explains, is that these fibres are not biodegradable. Polyester, he points out, takes up to 1,000 years to break down in the environment and, therefore, we don’t even know exactly how the degradation of polyester will work; it is too soon to tell, about 900 years too soon.
“However,” the HeiQ co-founder continues, “polyester and nylon are the only fibres today that are capable of serving the demands of the market. More people means more clothing and it looks as though that is likely to mean more polyester and nylon. We cannot produce more cotton or wool because we need arable land to grow food, so there will be less land available for those natural fibres.”
Why circularity is difficult
End-of-life issues are another part of the challenge. Carlo Centonze’s calculation is that only 1% of textiles are part of a closed-loop recycling programme today. The rest fails to come back into the textile value stream. Most of this, 73%, goes into landfill or incineration. First among the factors that make garment circularity so difficult, according to HeiQ, is that they are not designed or made to be recycled. The high cost of recycling can also make recycled materials more expensive than virgin ones.
“It’s time to change,” he says. “Consumers are demanding change and are holding brands to account. It is essential for brands to be authentic and to inspire consumers. The good news is that if brands stick to these principles, people are now willing to pay more for their products, rewarding them, for the first time, for sustainable behaviour.”
He argues that consuming 80 million tonnes of petroleum-derived fibres per year is incompatible with this and that the solution has been staring everyone in the face. Cellulose is the most abundant biopolymer on earth and HeiQ claims to have been successful in using it, through a method it is keeping secret, to create a sustainable, high-performance, cellulosic yarn and explains that it will be possible, in time, to manufacture this product at the scale required. AeoniQ, Mr Centonze insists, is “designed for eternal circularity, from nature, for nature”. It is a continuous, cellulosic, filament yarn that can be “recycled eternally” without loss of performance and is “sustainable and scalable by design”. Carlo Centonze says: “We can take back textiles made out of cellulose and fully recycle them in our process. This is one of the big advantages of our platform.”
Carbon capture
Sources of the cellulose that goes into making AeoniQ will vary greatly but they must be in keeping with three principles that the yarn’s developer has set out. The Swiss company wants all of the raw materials to provide a decarbonising balance by capturing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as they grow, to have no impact on the availability of agricultural land for food crops and to have been produced without pesticide or fertiliser. This will enable a circular material flow. “The spinning technology we have developed will work with any source of cellulose. Among the sources we can use is sustainable pulp from the forestry industry or, even better, algae sustainably farmed offshore. Algae represent an important sink for carbon dioxide as well as a source of cellulose that we can use in our processes.” Onshore bacteria and micro-algae are further possible sources, as are recycled materials from pre-consumer production waste and from post-consumer, end-of-life garments. He emphasises the role these sources can play in providing AeoniQ with good potential for decarbonisation.
He contends that these factors will combine to have the following effect on the carbon footprint of textile manufacturers who opt to use AeoniQ instead of polyester. For every tonne of polyester that they take out of their production process, substituting it with AeoniQ instead, they will make a carbon footprint saving of up to five tonnes of CO2-equivalent. Using the new yarn, HeiQ argues, will break the link between clothes and fossil fuel-based fibres and side-step the carbon cost of disposing of these at the end of a garment’s life. Instead, AeoniQ will promote renewable raw materials, growing them to absorb greenhouse gas emissions, harvesting them and growing them again. Production methods for AeoniQ will also have a lower impact and the yarn can be recycled and reused time after time. The compound result of all this, according to HeiQ’s calculation, is a five-tonne carbon footprint improvement per tonne of textiles.
Technical profile
Its pilot plant will be located in the town of Herzogenburg, 60 kilometres west of Vienna. In parallel with building the plant there, HeiQ has also set up a new Austrian subsidiary, with Martin Gebert-Germ as its chief executive. Mr Gebert-Germ officially joined HeiQ at the start of November from technical yarn manufacturer Glanzstoff, now part of the Indorama Group.
Of AeoniQ, he says: “The most important point is that it can be texturised while keeping its high tenacity and, up till now, this has not been possible with any other cellulosic fibre. Spin-dyeing is possible and we will also be able to shape the functionality at cross-sectional level. HeiQ’s secret here is the method it has developed for spinning AeoniQ, but once spun, the yarn will work with nearly all textile processes. This means business-as-usual for manufacturers because they will be able to use all existing equipment for weaving, knitting and dyeing. They can use standard dyes and existing functional finishing such as antimicrobial functionality.”
He adds that the fabric that knitters and weavers will be able to make from the yarn will be ideal for people to wear next to the skin. It can match the quick-dry and stretchability properties of polyester and nylon, Mr Gebert-Germ adds, the smoothness and coolness of viscose and the touch and cosiness of cotton. Combinations with other fibres will also be possible, he explains. On this point, Carlo Centonze says specifically that AeoniQ will combine well with cotton to produce denim fabrics. “We can definitely do denim combinations too,” he makes clear, “combining AeoniQ with cotton in whatever proportion the denim mills and brands require.”
No oil means stable prices
He goes on to say that the cost structure of AeoniQ will be stable (factories will use the nearest, most abundant and affordable source of cellulose, provided it is in keeping with their three principles). Preliminary autumn 2021 calculations put the price of AeoniQ at €4.50 for a 100gsm fabric. In the same calculations, HeiQ’s figures for other materials (of the same length and weight) put viscose and polyamide 6.6 at €5.10, polyamide 6 at €4.80, polyester at €4.15 and cotton at €3.70. “We’re in the middle,” the new chief executive of HeiQ Austria says, “so our customers will be able to use AeoniQ to make apparel at a reasonable price, not related to the fluctuations of the oil price and without any agricultural land demand.”
He also makes the point that, while the yarn itself appears similar to some filament viscose yarns that are already on the market, the process to make it is “totally different” and much more sustainable. For example, the process in place for filament viscose today cannot accommodate recycled material, but the process for AeoniQ can.
Call for partners
Work is already under way in Herzogenburg and HeiQ’s pilot plant will come into operation during the second quarter of 2022, with the first delivery of yarn expected in April. This plant will have the capacity to produce only 100 tonnes of AeoniQ per year, but Carlo Centonze is adamant this will be enough for the brand partners that come forward to be early adopters of the yarn. There will be enough for these brands, who will be limited in number to 20, to make sales samples, prototypes and capsule collections. And there is scope for brand partners to join forces with HeiQ in the “creative space” that he says AeoniQ offers, for example in work to integrate durable functionality and performance benefits into the yarn.
Efforts are under way already to raise further financing of $300 million to build a mass-manufacturing plant by the last quarter of 2024. HeiQ is still working out the best location for this first large factory (gigafactory is the term it uses), but it has estimated that it will have a production capacity of 300,000 tonnes per year, meaning that, by early 2025, the company will be able to offer what he calls “recurring mass deliveries” of AeoniQ.
It is looking to secure, initially, five operational partners (in addition to the 20 brand partners), Mr Centonze says, manufacturers who will build and run these additional mass-manufacturing plants, similar to the HeiQ one, around the globe and, thus, contribute to the scaling up of AeoniQ.
“This is a climate-positive technology,” he says, “and we want to make sure it is adopted as quickly as possible by as many as possible.” Yes, it would take a network of around 2,500 of these mass-manufacturing plants to be able to substitute all of the polyester and nylon in production at the moment, but HeiQ has designed the new yarn to be scalable and insists that the potential exists to make 80 million tonnes of it per year, if entrepreneurs, inside and outside the textile and apparel sector, help take the technology adoption forward forcefully.
Its search for partners does not end there because it also wants to bring two strategic partners on board to work with it “at a very deep level” to keep innovating with AeoniQ and bring the new ideas to market. The first of these is on board – The Lycra Company, with its $1 billion in sales and 3,000 employees. “We are proud to partner with HeiQ in the technical development and commercialisation of this fibre,” Lycra CEO Julien Born says. “The industry is ready for innovations such as AeoniQ. We are well positioned to learn quickly and maximise the huge potential of this new technology.”
Brands have had no option
Asked how willing apparel brands really are to move away from polyester and nylon, Carlo Centonze says: “It’s very simple. All brands, without exception, are aware of the problems associated with using fossil fuels to produce fibres, yarns and fabrics for clothing, but what alternative have they had until now? Cotton is a wonderful fibre and it’s biodegradable, but it’s using up tremendous water and land resources and is not scalable any more.
“Here, we have new technology that is sustainable and can meet the scale required. I believe brands will be very willing to substitute polyester and nylon for this. And consumers will very quickly push the brands to do so, once they realise the option they have here: textiles with a higher sustainability content that they will not have to overpay for. Very quickly they will switch to brands that embrace stewardship for the planet and people.”
The yarn that has the potential to provide a green alternative to polyester and nylon, AeoniQ from HeiQ.
Photo: HeiQ
