Circular engineering
With growing demand for recycled content of any kind and a pressing need to find suitable and sustainable solutions for waste, excess stock and end-of-life clothes, denim mills are investing in closing the loop themselves. This is no small challenge. But their central position in the supply chain places them right where the circle may most easily be closed.
The situation is a source of embarrassment for all of us operating in the textile industry. This statement, taken from a Gama Recycle brochure, could well have been voiced by Zafer Kaplan, head of the Turkey-based company that has been recycling textiles and plastics for the past 20 years.
Speaking at a conference at TexProcess last June, Mr Kaplan gave a precise overview of this ‘embarrassing’ situation. He said some 40 million tonnes of clothing are thrown away globally every year and only 7 million tonnes are collected, mostly in countries that have operational waste management infrastructure and logistics.
Of the 7 million tonnes of used clothes that are collected, he said that around 3 million tonnes can be resold and reworn, and roughly 3.5 million tonnes can neither be reused nor recycled and are therefore incinerated. This leaves just half a million tonnes of clothing that are recycled, though not necessarily into new textile yarns for apparel. He estimates that only 100,000 tonnes of used clothes are converted back into new textiles worldwide. Mr Kaplan would like to see retailers develop larger scale takeback systems.
He would also like to see recycling certification be restricted to post-consumer waste and not allow companies to make recycling claims when they reprocess pre-consumer waste. “Otherwise, there is no incentive to invest in the technologies and infrastructure we need to recycle post-consumer waste,” he told Inside Denim.
Halit Gümüser, managing director of Kipas Holding, was the other speaker at this conference. He is a living example of a company investing in the technologies and infrastructure to recycle textiles back into textiles and jeans. The Turkey-based company began working on this task four years ago, when it made a 100% recycled cotton denim fabric that PVH-owned brand Tommy Hilfiger marketed in 2019.
“We really began to focus on recycling during the pandemic,” he tells Inside Denim. The company invested in a machine made in China and invented by Stefan Hutter, founder of Säntis Textiles, based in Singapore and Switzerland. Equipment from Laroche, a French maker of textile recycling machines, was also acquired. With the expertise of Mr Hutter, a new textile recycling machine, the RCO100, was devised and built at Kipas, delivering higher quality recycled fibres. Key to this achievement is a new shredding machine, engineered by Mr Hutter and built by Kipas and Temsan, a Turkey-based machinery maker. The latest generation RCO100 machine line will be officially presented at the next ITMA show in Milan in June.
“Stefan Hutter and I met for another project, we became close, and worked together to develop Säntis’ RCO100 machine and recycled cotton yarns,” says Mr Gümüser, who is a fervent believer in the power of collaboration. “Stefan Hutter has great machine engineering skills, and his daughter Annabelle has great marketing and communication skills,” he says of the partnership.
Kipas has now installed two recycling lines that are fed pre-consumer waste from its own facilities and from partners that supply their post-industrial leftovers, as well as post-consumer waste delivered by domestic and international waste collector partners. For used garments, the first stage consists of removing all accessories and adornments, zips, buttons, sewing threads and collars. This is followed by a sorting by composition, colour and structure (knitted or woven fabric, yarn waste). The Kipas Recycling Facility currently produces between 30 and 35 tonnes of recycled cotton daily, he says. “Our textile mills use 80% of this recycled cotton. The remaining 20% is sold as a yarn on international markets.” The company’s spinning capacity is 500 tonnes per day and it can weave 8 million metres of fabric (denim and non-denim) every month.
Clever engineering
The presence of elastane, he says, is unquestionably a challenge. But there is no way to avoid its presence as it is preferred by consumers, which he admits leads to more waste and burden on the environment. He put the Kipas research and development teams to work on this issue in 2021 and a hybrid solution that combines mechanical and chemical processes is in development. The company’s favourite Swiss engineer, Stefan Hutter, is involved in the project. Now, due to its current high cost, Mr Gümüser says “we need to translate this innovation to mass production. We are on the verge of designing a new, very environmentally friendly piece of machinery.”
But Kipas has no intention of becoming a professional shredder, nor a used garment processor. “Our intention is to set up circular systems with brands. This is something that brands are looking for, but they are also in the process of discovering how it can work and the challenges it presents,” he says. For instance, a brand does not control cutting waste generated by its manufacturing processes, and these, he points out “have commercial value for garment-making facility owners.” He acknowledges that “there are still things to solve” but seeks to “to streamline the process to make it simpler for all involved.”
A major recycler of PET plastics into rPET, Gama Recycle also recycles used clothing. It has developed a biochemical process that removes indigo, elastane, polyester, viscose, sewing threads and sundry adornments from jeans. A functioning lab-scale model has been developed and a full-scale system is in the works, Nesli Nur Bilgin, sales and business development manager tells Inside Denim. “In the past, we had to cut off the top of jeans to remove zippers, rivets and leather labels, and cut out the legs’ sides to remove sewing threads. This means we were only able to recycle 20 to 30% of a pair of jeans. Our biochemical process can break down 80-90% of the entire product,” she says. The technique dissolves the cotton fibres into a cellulose pulp which can then be spun into a manmade cellulosic yarn. “Demand is up for recycled content,” she confirms, adding that Gama is working with Inditex and H&M. “Brands come to us with their recycling projects. We set up the supply chain, take their second and third quality goods and recycle them into fibre and/or yarn.”
Turkish denim mill Orta has been working with Gama for a few years now, sending its own waste and retrieving recycled fibres that the company integrates into new denim fabrics. It was expecting to increase the volume from to 650,000 kilograms in 2020 to 1 million kg in 2021.
Scaling up
In its Egyptian facility, located in El-Sadat City, Sharabati has been recycling pre-consumer cotton waste for years and formed partnerships with local collectors and sorters. “We recycle our own waste, collect post-industrial waste from other factories in the neighbourhood and also use ideally post-consumer waste from the hospitality industry that needs a solution for its worn pure cotton bath and bed linens,” Alessandro Moretti Ciacci, head of sales and export, tells Inside Denim. This system has been up and running for years. “We know what we have when we are processing our own waste,” he says. Every day, the company collects five tonnes of waste from its own operations and purchases 15 tonnes of cotton-rich waste from nearby textile factories. It is currently investigating the possibility of buying post-consumer clothing, but the transport of waste is problematic. “It is not possible to import second-hand garments into Egypt,” says Dilek Erik, marketing manager for Sharabati. “But we are working on a project that will allow us to receive shipments of cut garments. We are investigating the custom regulations for that right now.”
Investments in building a recycling infrastructure is also at work at Artistic Denim Mills (ADM), based in Port City Karachi, Pakistan. Since 2019, it has been working with Recover, a producer of mechanically recycled cotton yarns based in Spain but whose operations are now global. As part of the partnership, ADM set up a new facility that can produce 100 tonnes of recycled yarns daily.
Turkish denim mill Calik launched its RE/J denim fabrics made from 100% pre- and post-consumer waste in 2021. But it has also devised a spinning technique to integrate recycled content without diminishing the quality of the yarn, a process it calls E-Denim. The shorter recycled cotton fibres are placed in the core of the yarn, which is covered either by a Tencel Refibra yarn (a lyocell that is partially made from recycled cotton pulp) or a blend of Tencel Refibra and rPET.
This yarn’s structure, the company states, makes it possible to achieve higher quality fabrics that have a more premium look.
DNM’s Re-Generation denim fabrics are 100% recycled, using cotton from both pre- and post-consumer waste, Unifi’s Repreve rPET (17%) and Lycra’s EcoMade. These fabrics do not need to be dyed nor washed, as during the sorting process, four different shades are extracted to create a range of anthracite, raw, stone- and bleach-washed references, says Mustafa Kara, product development manager for the mill based in Damietta, Egypt. He confirms that the demand is up for recycled cotton content, “Brands are actively looking to lessen their carbon and water footprints.”
“All wastage, from spinning, dyeing and weaving is reused in our collections, with the exception of products containing elastane,” says Tejidos Royo vice-president José Royo. The Spanish mill now incorporates recycled content into every fabric it produces. “As opposed to certified organic cotton which may not be what it claims to be, we can completely control our recycled yarns,” he points out. He suspects that demand for recycled cotton is up in part due to fraud in organic cotton. “We have realised that a certificate is not enough and that we need to better control ourselves what we put in our fabrics,” he says.
Motivated both by their own zero waste policies and brands’ sustainable fibre pledges, mills have thus come to expand the scope of their activities to include sorting and shredding. They have devised special spinning techniques to maintain quality while using recycled fibres, seen above and at Advance Denim (see article page 46). They are, in short, funding the research, investing in new equipment, and putting their staff to work on developing and designing the advanced engineering the industry needs to close the loop.
RE/J is a range of denim fabrics made from 100% pre- and post-consumer waste that Calik introduced in 2021.
PHOTO: Calik Denim
