As autumn and winter fashion rolls in, so do the new “must-buys” of the season. What is “in” this year? Barn jackets and leather midiskirts, according to Vogue. And out? 11.3 million tons of textile waste in the US alone.
Pre-owned clothing sales surged by 18% last year to $197 billion, suggesting consumers are becoming more eco-aware, but the forecast for fashion’s carbon emissions is still abysmal.
According to sustainability experts Quantis, if fashion takes no action to reduce fashion waste, global emissions from the industry will increase by 50% by 2030.
So what can the fashion industry do about its recycling problem? Can technology help it knit a better sustainability story?
Fortunately, a couple of scientific start-ups, spun out of university, are on the case as they attempt to create sustainable materials and use carbon dioxide to recycle some of the most problematic textiles.
Material changes
When James MacDonald was a research fellow working in the field of computational protein design at Imperial College London, he attended a funding programme event focused on creating new textile materials through engineering biology.
While there, he met a materials science professor, and together, they came up with the idea of using novel designed proteins for high-performance fibres.
This meant developing textile fibres, which are used to create sustainable materials from AI-designed protein molecules. Ultimately, the aim was to be both high-performance and sustainable: “The idea worked and eventually led to the foundation of Solena Materials.”
With the fashion sector emitting as many greenhouse gases annually as the combined economies of France, Germany, and the UK, MacDonald says.
“There is an urgent demand from apparel companies and their customers to develop new sustainable alternatives to both petroleum-derived synthetic textiles and resource-intensive natural materials.”
For instance, natural textiles such as cotton and hemp require a lot of environmentally damaging pesticides.
Trained on proprietary data, the firm has generated in-house, the team created new-to-world proteins using deep neural network models.
The proteins are crafted to be strong and sustainable, making them suitable as an eco-friendly material.
“Our fibres have a unique combination of properties: they are tougher than nylon, have an ultra-soft luxurious hand-feel, and a high lustre. However, we aim to produce not just one type, as we have a technology platform that can produce fibres that are customised to particular use cases, offering versatility that sets us apart.”
Currently, at lab-scale, the firm is in the process of raising a £6 million seed round to scale the technology.
Solena has contracts with “well-known fashion brands who are keen to incorporate our materials into their products,” says MacDonald, and it plans to start producing significant quantities of fibre within the next two years.
Runway success
How long do you think, on average, it takes clothing to decompose in landfill sites?
If you said around 200 years, you’d be right. Despite this, only 10% of clothing is recycled across the globe.
On top of this, 60% of new clothing materials are made of plastic, such as polyester and acrylic.
Polycotton, for instance, is a fibre that intertwines cotton and polyester, making it an extremely durable material yet the most difficult to recycle, says Eugenio Gandolfo, managing director of Glyon.
Glyon sits at an early stage of ‘Technology Readiness Level 4’ (TRL), a method for estimating the maturity of technologies from levels 1 to 9 during the acquisition phase of a programme.
It began at the Department of Chemistry at the University of Copenhagen, led by Jiwoong Lee as lead inventor, and is developing polycotton recycling technology using its patented chemical containing CO2.
“We use CO2 in our patented process to separate the polyester and cotton fibres. After the process, we purify it and then get new materials that can be turned back into fibres for new clothes or used for other applications like bottles,” explains Gandolfo, speaking to TI at the conference TechBBQ in its home base of Copenhagen.
Plus, if the cotton cannot be used for new clothes, it can be used to create bioethanol or other biochemicals.
“With this, we are tackling two issues: textiles and CO2. We’re bringing them together to solve big issues and make recycling easier.”
Additionally, Gandolfo explains that while the cost will initially be higher than virgin PET and cotton, Glyon hopes to reduce the cost as the firm scales.
“Most importantly, you don’t have any trace of metal at the end, which isn’t the case with other technologies that need extra steps to remove it after it has been used to create the separation.”
The CO2 is part of its patented chemical discovered by Jiwoong Lee as the main inventor, alongside Dr. Yang Yang and Shriaya Sharma, a founding team member, “almost by accident,” says Gandolfo, “but that’s the beauty of science. You experiment and sometimes find surprises.”
While the team hasn’t looked into AI yet, Gandolfo imagines it will be useful for sorting different textiles.
Glyon hopes to reach TRL 5 and build a demo plant by 2028 with support from its partners, KU Lighthouse.
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