Pure Waste Textiles’ fully recyclable clothes
02 January 2018
Pure Waste Textiles Oy
Description
Pure Waste Textiles manufactures completely recycled yarns, fabrics, clothing and accessories from the leftover material by the textile industry at its production plant in India, which is currently under construction. The company uses cutting waste from the clothing manufacturing process and leftover production from spinning mills as its raw materials. Yarn and fabric waste in different colours is sorted by colour and reprocessed into new yarn and fabric.
Pure Waste Textiles is a Finnish clothing company that produces 100% recycled yarns, fabrics, and ready-made garments. The company uses pre-consumer textile waste as raw material. The textile waste is collected from near-by factories and comes in the form of cutting clips and spinning waste. After sourcing the materials, the material is sorted by color and quality and carded carefully apart without weakening the quality of the fibres. The cotton is then spun into yarns, and finally turned into 100% recycled high quality textile. When buying a Pure Waste Textiles t-shirt, the customer receives a friendly reminder of the amount of water saved: a total of 2,700 litres.
Added value
- One advantage of this recycling process is that the materials do not need to be dyed, which also saves a substantial amount of water. One Pure Waste T-shirt saves 2,700 liters of water compared to one made out of virgin cotton.
- 90% of energy in production is renewable energy.
- 100% of materials are recycled raw materials.
- The demand for high-quality, ethical and ecological textiles is on the rise. Pure Waste Textiles strives to do everything as transparently as possible. The company has its own production plant, enabling it to retain control of the entire production chain. The raw materials used for the products are obtained from local textile companies.
- At the moment, the majority of Pure Waste Textiles’ net sales come from producing ready-made clothing but, in the future, the company is aiming for growth in deliveries of yarn and fabric to other companies in the sector. Pure Waste Textiles considers the opportunities presented by the chemical recycling of fibres to be highly attractive in terms of utilising post-consumer textile waste. For this reason, the company is also actively involved in projects that bring together textile-recycling companies to develop recycling technologies and operating models to suit the circular economy.
Challenges
- The greatest challenge is developing means of collecting and sorting textile waste on an industrial scale. Textile materials can have very different properties, and different fibres require different treatments.
- The development of sorting techniques would enable shredding fibres mechanically and promote the development of recycling processes.
According to Jukka Pesola, chairman of PWT: “This challenge affects us as well as other textile recycling companies. Sorting is important when recycling consumer textiles, but it is also an important factor from the perspective of the efficient processing of leftover material from the textile industry”