Summary

Resortecs wants to make clothing recycling a more feasible reality. According to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, less than 1% of all garments are recycled to a high quality. The rest are downcycled, incinerated or placed in landfill, resulting in a loss worth USD 100 billion worth of material annually. (Source)  Current techniques make recycling of clothing very difficult because different components of a garment need to be disassembled and separated and sent into separate waste streams, which created a textile disassembly bottleneck. Traditionally, the disassembly options are either manual disassembly which tends to be complicated and time-consuming, and a lot of the material is lost in this process. The other option is mechanical disaassembly, which involved putting clothes in a shredder, which shortens the fibers and only leads to downcycling, and not much of the fibers can be recycled or upcycled. (Source) To solve the problem of clothing recycling, Resortecs enables high-quality textile recycling on a large scale by leveraging its garment disassembly technology. The company’s Smart Stitch™ technology comprises its heat-dissolvable stitching thread, which enables brands to transform their products into recyclable pieces from the manufacturing stage. The company also provides disassembly solutions in the form of its Smart Disassembly™, its thermal disassembly system, which allows recyclers to tap into higher volumes of premium material, processing millions of garments per year without quality loss. The Disassembly system involves placing the garment in a heated setting that dissolves the thread such that the garments can be re-made or recycled. (Source) The company has designed a new type of thread that dissolve at different melting-points (150°C, 170°C and 200°C) and can be dissolved using a commercial oven. The Resortecs® solution allows up to 500kg of garments (equivalent to more than 1000 pairs of jeans) to be dismantled at the same time. (Source) Currently Resortecs uses a plastic based thread, which when melted should ideally be recovered and re-spun rather than discarded. (Source)

Story

Co-founder Cédric Vanhoeck had an educational background in Industrial Design Engineering and Fashion. He was interested in Circular economy and ended up doing Fashion Design at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp but quit after 2 years. He founded the company with co-founder Vanessa Counaert as soon as he quit fashion school, in part because of some of the negative experiences at the fashion school. (Source) By 2021 the company had already raised over €1.8 million to fund R&D and start piloting their disassembly solution. The technology is now validated by over 30 international fashion brands. (Source)

Pic Credit: Mo