Circular Business Podcast

Recycling polyester fabric waste with Dutch aWEARness | Ep. #60

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Once you enter Delhi from Himachal or Punjab, you see a landfill hill welcoming you to the City. It is the Bhalswa landfill. Its indeed a tragedy to see so many people working there. If you ever get a chance to visit the landfill you'll notice scores of textile waste there. In addition to plastic, textile waste is huge. Coming back to the city, when we go to shopping malls you can see floors of stores selling clothes; with no take back mechanisms these clothes are definitely ending up somewhere right? Textiles have huge carbon footprint during the production especially with social and environmental challenges but not many people really talk about post consumption waste.

Circular Economy has an immense potential to transform textile waste problems. Also, India being a huge manufacturing hub for textiles, we really need to promote good practices and create disincentives to avoid mass wastage of textiles!

Socho na If waste can be turned into resources, then wouldn’t we live in abundance?

As years pass by we face a great challenge. There will be more and more people on this planet and all of them need products and want to consume. Isn’t it? This will lead to

  • raw material shortage
  • environmental problems &
  • economic problems

    • Fashion industry is one of the most resource-intensive industries which is built on complex linear supplier relationships. By now we all are well aware of how this resulted in massive toxic pollution, unethical labour practices and spiralling waste, with the rise of textile materials hurtling towards end of life at an ever-increasing rate.

    But there is hope, and yes we have something crucial to learn from this Netherlands based brand- Dutch aWEARness whose products are designed for reincarnation.

    They are performance based.

    Established in 2012, Dutch aWEARness creates clothes from 100 percent recyclable polyester — called Returnity®

    In the year 2010, Rien Otto (founder of Dutch aWEARness) met cradle-to-cradle pioneer Michael Braungart and got inspired by their discussion, which set him to investigate how the cradle-to-cradle concept could be applied to the textiles industry.

    He wanted to change the world & make new materials. 

    How do they do it? To put it simply-

    • They make returnity clothing that is worn by customers and takes it back after use.
    • The garment is then reprocessed into raw material.
    • A factory makes new raw fibers out of the raw material.
    • These fibers are then transported to the yarn Factory
    • Now In this factory the fibers are sprayed into yarn
    • After completing this process various yarns are developed and ready for use.
    • The yarns are later sent to a weaving Factory where these yarns are taken into production.
    • Here in the weaving mill the new clothing fabrics are made the fabrics are then sent to the manufacturer
    • The manufacturer uses the fabrics to make new garments
    • This new garment is made from this circular fabric material and ready to be worn again by the customer.

      • Keyword : What is a circular economy?

      YouTube : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VK8o9ZHOwRo

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      Circular Business PodcastBy Sreepriya Sridharan
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