A promising dual innovation for recycling clothing

The textile industry is particularly polluting and harmful to the environment. It is responsible for around 10% of all greenhouse gas emissions, while consuming large amounts of resources in terms of land (almost 400 m² per European citizen), raw materials (nearly 400 kg per person) and water (9 m³ per person). It also causes soil and water pollution through chemicals and microplastics.

Based on the observation that only 1% of clothing is currently recycled, due to a lack of effective solutions for disassembling different materials, start-up Resortecs has developed a double technological innovation.

It has developed a range of 16 heat-dissolvable threads that can be used to design textile products that can be easily disassembled and recycled at the end of their life. In addition, this Belgian company has invented the world's first thermal dissassembly and sorting system which enables very rapid recycling. It doubles the amount of textile material recovered from a product, while ensuring that the reclaimed raw material has a purity level of over 90%.

These two technological innovations are designed to make recycling easier and more efficient by taking the end of a textile product's life into account right from the design stage. Textile waste is therefore transformed into raw materials that can be used to create new textile products.

Let's hope that this technological breakthrough, encouraged at European level, will make the textile industry increasingly circular, to the great benefit of our environment!