An innovative system including heat-dismountable stitching threads and rivets that enables automated disassembly and cost-effective recycling of garments.

Website: resortecs.com

Country HQ: Belgium

Industry: Textile

Applications: Stitching threads, rivet buttons

Business Model: B2B

Founded date: 2017

YOUR JOURNEY TO FOUNDING

I studied design engineering at TU Delft, in the Netherlands, and that was one of the first Universities to be interconnected with the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, working on circular economy already in 2012. I always say we were ‘brainwashed’ by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation quite early on (laugher). I then ended up at the Antwerp Fashion Academy, where I discovered the gap between what the industry was starting to say—as circularity was becoming more famous—and what fashion designers were studying and working on.

I saw there was a really big gap between the current expertise of designers and the tasks and skills we will require of them in the years to come. Often fashion designers don’t have technical information on materials, don't know the difference between nylon and polyester, and have never been trained to think in a more systemic and product-structure way. For instance, they rarely think in terms of disassembly, which was quite obvious to me because at TU Delft we were working on design for disassembly and remanufacturing, and learned the principle that products can be designed to dismantle themselves upon use of an external trigger. This is something I brought from my engineering background and then applied to the fashion industry.

“I saw there was a really big gap between the current expertise of designers and the tasks and skills we will require of them in the years to come”

I took a sabbatical to see if I could combine both, and that was successful. So I never quit my sabbatical and started a company. We went for subsidies in 2017, and based on that we have continued to develop a panel of industrial solutions under the brand name Resortecs® for circular and regenerative fashion, like stitching threads and rivet buttons.

THE INNOVATION

Based on the skills and mindset gap you uncovered, what major problems are you tackling in the fashion industry?

For me, it was always clear that if we want to have a circular fashion, then we need to be able to separate technical and non-technical material sources from each other. And that the only way to do so in an efficient way is by working on active disassembly. It is just impossible to manage huge amounts of volume of garments manually, so design for disassembly—and preferably allowing disassembly without manual interference—is key. This is the challenge I wanted to embrace to test out whether we could tackle this.

By doing your research, you understand that the problem is extremely big, because 34 million tonnes of textiles of garments are wasted every year, and of this less than 1% is effectively recycled, just because it’s not recyclable. We have textile recycling technologies, but not garments recycling technologies. Once there is a button, a zipper or two materials stitched together, no recycler can manage to recycle those garments.

So, today, you need a person that gets manually with scissors buttons and zippers out of garments, which is slow and extremely expensive. If you want to do this in Europe or the United States, it’s often more expensive than the value of the materials of the garments, like a polyester shirt. The manual labour of getting out the buttons will cost more than new virgin polyester for manufacturing the same shirt. This leads to the challenge that it doesn’t make any sense to start recycling garments, because financially is just a no-go. With Resortecs® we make sure that it becomes not only technically but also financially feasible to recycle garments at industrial scale.

“With Resortecs® we make it sure that it becomes not only technically but also financially feasible to recycle garments at industrial scale”

And how does Resortecs® technology work to enable this?

For our stitching threads, there is a disassembly temperature. We have stitching threads that will dissolve at specific temperatures, such as 200, 170 and 150 degrees Celsius. This allows you to design and stitch your garments without compromise nor change, and on existing sewing machines. You can use the garments normally, wash and iron them, and the moment you want to dismantle the garment you just have to heat it up at the temperature of that specific thread. Then the thread will melt down and the seams will disappear. In this way, you can automatically take out zippers, buttons and separate all of those components, whether it’s garments, a mattress, a sofa or a pair of shoes.

*Dismantled pocket (Resortecs x Unspun - Rebirth)*

For rivets, we use the same basic principle - a termal trigger that will allow the rivet to open up again. You could say that the squeezed part will unsqueeze, allowing to loosen up rivet buttons. Also metal embellishments in shoes or in bags can be removed automatically with that same process. You could say that the way Resortecs® works is like a Nespresso model, where you have the capsules with the coffee—on the one hand—and the coffee machine where to put the capsules in on the other. For us, rivet buttons and stitching threads are the coffee capsules. And William Allouche, our mechanical engineer, is working on the machine, a big oven that will process 6 tonnes of garments per day, which makes around 4-5 million garments per year. The machine will allow us to heat up the garments and dismantle them systematically.

So, on one side you are working on the design inputs for the dismantling process—stitching threads and rivet buttons—while simultaneously working on the machine allowing the dismantling process to take place - the oven?

Yes, indeed. For the oven, William Allouche is working together with oven builders, setting up collaborations with German oven companies to build those ovens and put them in place. In the short term, we already have collaborations with a recycler in a textile mill in Belgium that invested in top-notch cotton recycling technology and created a joint venture with Purify, which is an American cotton recycling technology. We have a little place there, which allows us to create a ready-to-implement solution for those brands that will be using our stitching threads on their sewing machines.

Especially at the beginning, it will mainly be unsold inventory and factory defects, which will be sent to the recycling facility where our ovens will be able to dismantle them automatically and send the fabric directly into the recycling process already in place. In this way, we will fully close the loop. This means that we are going far beyond just the stitching threads, but really bringing along the whole ecosystem with different companies working together to completely close the loop - and this immediately at industrial scale.

In order to close the loop effectively, however, this only works if the garments that reach the recycling facility have been produced with your own stitching threads, right?

Yes, indeed. If they don’t have the Resortecs® stitching threads, the recycler could recycle the materials, but the garments need to be dismantled first, which leads back to the problem of high manual labour costs. If they have our stitching threads, instead, it can be automatically dismantled, and the recycler already knows how things work. Right now, we are also going one step further, creating collaborations with traceability companies like EON, which is working on a circular identity of garments—a kind of passport—which allows us together to have a complete secure platform where to share all the information and data on material content, where products are, in what stage of life they are and whether they have already been recycled or not. In this way, we immediately know whether the materials can be recycled or not.

So, we are putting in place a whole system that allows brands to switch from a linear to a circular system by simply and only changing the sewing thread bobbins in their factories. By having contact with the people designing at the beginning of the life cycle, we can guide them to make garments so that they can be recycled as efficiently as possible at the end of the life cycle. This is mainly an economic exercise, because technically a lot is possible. This is why we believe it is important to simultaneously work at the beginning of a product life cycle and at its end.

“We are putting in place a whole system that allows brands to switch from a linear to a circular system by simply and only changing the sewing thread bobbins in their factories”

Have you already been carrying out pilot projects with fashion brands to test and validate the functionality and implementation of your innovation?

Yes, absolutely. We are in contact with several brands that are now validating and testing out the stitching threads - at the moment, there are 15 of them, going in all directions: backpacks, furniture, sneakers, denims, workwear jackets. There are already smaller brands selling products with our stitching threads, but as long as there is no big brand launching the threads on the market, the other ones will not just implement it. They all want to test it first, which is annoying for us because we are doing ten times the same exercise, over and over again. So we are trying to get one big brand out there so that we can skip all these small tests and just start implementing on a much larger scale. It’s not so easy to manage 15 different pilots at the same time.

*Sneakers with Resortecs thread (Resortecs)*

And, of course, sometimes things don’t work for little details, and you have small issues that arise over and over again. For instance, sometimes brands give wrong material information: e.g. they state it’s 100% polyester, but when you start doing disassembly, some components start melting down because they clearly are not out of polyester. It’s crazy how few information companies—and we are talking about famous brands—sometimes have on specific materials and components. The fabrics are fine most of the time, but the issue arises mostly with trims that often are clearly not made of the material they are supposed or stated to be.

I can imagine how time and energy consuming this process is. In terms of pilot results, what is the feedback on two main dimensions: functionality and price?

Functional performance is the same. We have been working very hard to get the same functional performance during stitching, because that was the hardest part. Within the product, it was managed quite fast, because you could say that stitching threads in general are over-engineered most of the time - it is often the fabric at the seam that will break, and not the seam or the stitching thread itself. So that performance was covered quickly. But being able to stitch at speeds above 3500 stitches per minute—knowing that there are robotic stitching machines that can handle 5000 stitches per minute—was quite challenging. But we solved it. We still have some types of stitching threads where we can enhance things, and we are working on specific coatings to control this better, but in general we can say that Resortecs® stitching threads work completely the same as current polyester stitching threads - both visually and physically, there is no difference.

“Resortecs® stitching threads work completely the same as current polyester stitching threads - both visually and physically, there is no difference”

Regarding pricing, our stitching threads are more expensive than other threads. Stitching threads, however, often do not represent more than 2% of a garment. In the case of denim, which is a garment that uses a lot of stitching threads—200 metres on average—there is a price increase around 25-35 cents per garment. In a shirt, instead, we are around 15 cents of extra price. So you could say it’s about 20 cents more expensive per garment, but once you start to look down the road, you see what you can gain in cost reductions by managing your unsold inventory more efficiently,and benefits in terms of brand reputation and customer relationships. In this way, the extra cost is easily reduced to a zero-sum game - it’s nearly a free transition from linear to circular. I think we can say that we are one of the cheapest circular economy solution providers out there, especially if you compare us to sustainable fabrics, which are easily twice as expensive per product and moreover don’t ensure a circular supply chain. In our case, the price difference shouldn’t be an issue.

alexandra-bertels-MAD-studio-plastique005 (1).jpg

FUTURE PLANS

In the past few months, we have been busy closing our investment round. Once that is done, in 2021 we will finalise the development of the rivet button, finalise the oven construction, work on the storytelling and marketing support for brands, and increase production. This will allow us to show the complete ecosystem and a complete Resortecs solution by 2022. Then we will have to do a Series A round to be able to scale up everything, but the goal now is to work hard to get the whole system out there and show the enormous economic potential before the Series A investment. From 2022 on, it will mainly be a scale-up exercise, first on European level and then on a global level. From that moment on, we can then start to think about new solutions within the same industry—like for glues—and also go to other industries that also need disassembly for recycling -but that’s really a long future story.

SYSTEMIC VALUE IN CIRCULAR TRANSITION

What is the main message you want to send out to the fashion industry through your innovation?

The main message we want to send is that fashion can be good. You can make fashion that is extremely creative and high-quality while also being good for the whole system and the environment. Creativity and sustainability are not in opposition, they can and should go hand in hand. We want to show that systemic change is possible, and that it’s already here somehow. We want to make sure that brands start to understand that having a target for circularity by 2030 is great if it is for the whole collection, but to have real circular ecosystems we don’t need to wait 10 years anymore. It will be here quite soon, because the ecosystem is already ready to do this. We are working extremely hard to get this total solution running because we really believe in this. Our technology is there to deliver high scale impact whilst requiring little or no change.

“You can make fashion that is extremely creative and high-quality while also being good for the whole system and the environment”

What kind of world do you envision by 2030?

I'm optimistic, and I think we will have a fashion industry that will be working as a closed loop. I would be very surprised if we didn’t manage to close the loop in the fashion industry. I think recycling and closed loop fashion will be the norm, which is clearly not today given that less than 1% of garments are effectively recycled. Given the growing consensus on climate change, I am sure that political action will increase and more and more people will start to question things much more. We will be forced to change and scale the circular systems put in place by today’s frontrunners. At Resortecs® we are not doing what we are doing to be able to recycle 200 garments per year, but to recycle 2 billion garments per year.

A conversation between Cédric Vanhoeck (General Lead Resortecs) & Emanuele Di Francesco (Circular Conversations)

January 2021