Fashion for Good has launched ‘Full Circle Textiles Project: Scaling Innovations in Cellulosic Recycling’ – a first-of-its-kind consortium project. Focusing on cellulosic fibers, the project aims to validate and eventually scale promising technologies in chemical recycling from a select group of innovators to tackle landfill and other issues.
In the project, leading global organizations—Laudes Foundation, Birla Cellulose, Kering, PVH Corp, and Target—join Fashion for Good to explore the disruptive solutions, with the goal of creating new fibers and garments from used clothing and ultimately drive industry-wide adoption. The project’s overall aim is to investigate economically viable and scalable solutions for cellulosic chemical recycling to enable a closed loop system converting textile waste – of cotton and cotton-blend materials, to produce new man-made cellulosic fibers (MMCF).
Over an 18-month period, project partners will collaborate with innovators, Evrnu, InfinitedFiber Company, Phoenxt, Renewcell and TytonBioSciences, to validate the potential of their technologies in this still nascent market. The recycled content produced by four of these innovators will be converted at Birla Cellulose’s state-of-the-art pilot plants to produce high quality cellulosic fibres. From there, fibers will move through the project partners' supply chains to be manufactured into garments. Given that InfinitedFiber Company produces industry-ready fiber through their process, their fiber will be delivered directly to the project partner’s supply chains for garment production. The project will provide an assessment of the innovator’s environmental impact, technologies, recycled output and subsequent garments.
