Coats is calling all brands, manufacturers and recyclers to collaborate with their new circularity concept that can help to make garments more recyclable and cost-effective, an official statement highlighted.
The leading industrial thread manufacturer is launching EcoCycle, which is a range of water dissolvable threads to facilitate the disassembly of garments. With the collaboration, the company is looking to scale up its circular solution through collaboration at the garment design stage.
Sonya Manolova, Product Director, Apparel and Footwear, Coats commented on this and said, “We are calling for industry players who want to meaningfully play their part in end of life recycling to work with us to integrate it right at the beginning of the garment design. Together we can enhance our current first generation product version of EcoCycle to accelerate circularity for our industry.”
The company also mentioned a report in which they stated that the textile industry consumes about 100 million tonnes of new fibres each year and approximately 90% of textiles fibres at the end of life go straight into a waste stream – either incineration or landfill.
Recycling has not scaled up in the fashion industry, primarily because most garments have various components made from a mixture of different materials and composites. The dismantling process is manual, labour intensive and costly, yet at the end of life many of the various fibres are reusable. Approximately 25% of clothing is never even worn, with newly bought items being put into wardrobes and forgotten, until they are eventually discarded into a waste stream without ever being used.
Andrew Morgan, Head of Sustainability, Coats, said “As an industry we need to reset the basics in order to deliver supply chain circularity. Sustainable innovation turns product conception and development on its head by addressing end of life first before how to manufacture it.”
Coats is the leading industrial thread company and has a presence in about 50 countries. The company has a workforce of 17,000 people across six continents, and reported a revenue of $1.2 Billion in 2020.
