Material Innovation: No NEW Materials
October 18, 2023
Listen to my voiceover here.
Personal note about the news, skip if you don’t want to know. I want to start this week off by saying how sad I feel. I see photos and read stories of civilians being harmed and killed- suffering- and I don’t know what to do. I see women and think, “That could be me.” I don’t know why I was born here to my family- why I haven’t had to live through that kind of suffering, and I hope I never do- although I also don’t know the future. My heart is open to all of the civilians and individuals bearing the painful brunt of this historical conflict.
Okay, newsletter.
How we make new products is just as important as how we take responsibility for existing products. I’d like to use the next 2 newsletters to share learnings about materials and designs for circularity. To over-simplify, materials are WHAT you make your products out of, and design is HOW your products are put together. Although these two disciplines are intertwined and cannot be fully separated, I see enough space between them to share about them separately- and there is so much going on in both realms that combining them would be a very overwhelming topic and newsletter.
So, for this week,
Material Innovations for the Circular Economy
There are two main ways I look at material innovations:
Using non-textile materials to make textiles (sometimes out of waste which is super cool)
Using existing textiles to make new textiles (fiber-to-fiber recycling)
For this topic I spoke with three individuals:
Amy Rauen, Founder of Circular Intention, a circular design consultancy
Carmen Gama, Director of Circular Design at EILEEN FISHER, Inc and Co-Founder of Make Aneew, a remanufacturing company
Genia Mineeva, Founder of BEEN London, a company that makes accessories exclusively from recycled and waste materials (no virgin material inputs)
Big Picture on Material Innovation
This is Amy’s specialty. She has her pulse on lots of cool new materials that are being created. Big picture, there are many exciting developments being scaled and coming to market. I don’t think we can underestimate the challenge of scaling. I think there are dual challenges of getting your technology to a point where you can meet serious requests for volume (like if H&M wanted to place an order) and also creating the demand when you have that scale.
Renewcell (chemical cotton recycler) was in the news this week because their Swedish stock price has fallen considerably, and it sounds like they have scaled, but are now facing the challenge of demand. I would imagine that this is quite natural- you take a long time to develop cutting edge technology to offer a new product at scale, and once it’s ready you really get into your sales cycle. If you are selling to large brands who have had the same practices and materials for a decade plus, that sales cycle will be long. I would imagine it could look something like (honestly just one scenario, but fairly likely if it’s a large brand):
0 months: Brand is open to hearing about your new material, but isn’t ready to buy. Maybe they take a sample to put in their fabric library.
4 months: Brand says they are talking internally, but aren’t ready to commit.
8 months: Brand says they want to purchase a small amount of your fabric for sampling. They create design samples with your material for their market (where they sell to their buyers) but no one decides to buy the items made out of your material.
12 months: Brand tries again, designing more items in your material, and this time one of their buyers (or their own website buying team) places an order for one or two of the items that use your material- yay! (Albeit probably a pretty small quantity.)
16 months: Those items are placed for sale to customers and the brand carefully watches how their customer reacts to this new fabric.
20 months: If all has gone well and the customer likes the new fabric, the brand may place additional orders for your fabric, and you can begin to grow the volume you are sending to them.
All in all you’ve spent nearly 2 years getting your foot in the door. It is a long process. That is why I don’t worry about Renewcell and am optimistic that they are and will continue to become a major player in the materials space overall.
Another way brands can help these new material companies is to commit to using their material before it’s actually ready, which is something Amy said is happening frequently and gives her hope!
Here are some great examples of companies creating innovative materials that Amy shared with me:
New Fiber Welding, a company based in Illinois, is making multiple materials, some from recycled textiles, some from other bio-friendly inputs. Their material “CLARUS®” (they say) “enhances virgin fibers and revitalizes recycled fibers, giving them all the strength of the first time around.” (This is in reference to mechanical recycling breaking fibers into shorter pieces, therefore making them weaker.) Ralph Lauren is an investor in New Fiber Welding and has made their classic polo out of the CLARUS fabric. Stella McCartney also used their ‘not-leather’ fabric “Mirum” for their Spring 2023 collection, which is “made from responsibly sourced natural rubber, plant-based oil, natural pigments, and minerals”.
Circ, a polyester/cotton recycling company based in Virginia, says “We’ve pioneered technology that returns polycotton waste back to the raw materials from which it was made, so your favorite fashion brands can reuse fibers and reduce harm to the Earth in the process.” This is super important because a ton of fast-fashion and cheaper clothes are poly cotton blends- you may even be wearing one right now. Circ just launched a fully recyclable dress with Mara Hoffman. If you are in the world of fashion sustainability, you definitely know that Dana Davis and the MH team are first movers in all things sustainability. I think we should all be excited to see Circ doing new launches because their technology specifically enables the recycling of a huge % of fast fashion clothes. (And then any brand- fast fashion or high end like Mara Hofman- can use the recycled pulp for their fabrics.)
Renewcell, a company based in Sweden, chemically recycles cotton and viscose and other materials with high-cellulosic content. They partnered with Levis last year to create a “Circular 501” that has 40% recycled viscose that is made by Renewcell.
Recover, a Spanish mechanical recycler of cotton yarns. Lands End uses their material in their jeans.
Werewool, a US-based innovation company, creates fibers with ‘inherent color’ so no dyes are needed. They are also creating performance attributes without plastic.
TomTex is a New York based company making a leather alternative from shellfish waste and mushroom waste. I can’t stand how cool this is. Their materials are “sourced directly from the food waste of seafood-based communities and waste-based mushroom manufacturers.” I am so excited about the practice of using waste from one industry to make something valuable and useful for another industry. Article about uses.
https://www.tomtex.co
Here’s a photo of a Dauphinette dress that uses TomTex’s material. The material actually changes color, like a mood ring. Uyen Tran, founder of TomTex said, “If a designer wants to obtain a snakeskin texture in bright pink, we can make it. If they want traditional leather with a dual-tone marble texture, we can do it. Our goal is to inspire people to dream big when it comes to sustainable fashion. There are solutions out there—and the fashion industry does not need to settle for lower quality in order to become more sustainable.”
Rubi Laboratories is taking carbon dioxide out of theozone and putting into fibers. “At Rubi, we produce the same high-quality natural textiles already used by the industry (viscose & lyocell) directly from CO2, for less cost, and completely carbon-negative and water- and land-neutral. We plug into existing textile manufacturing as a branded ingredient.” Link.
Lanzatech is also sequestering greenhouse gas emissions and is turning into polyester monomers. They use nature-based solutions to produce ethanol from waste carbon sources and then work with partners to convert ethanol to polyester. This one goes WAY over my head so read the article, BUT MAKING FIBERS FROM CARBON is amazing.
It is so inspiring to see all of these examples (and there are many more) of companies (mostly American!) making super-sustainable materials. More of this please!
Next, I’ll share two different brand approaches to material innovations, one from a legacy brand and one from a new brand.
Legacy Brand: EILEEN FISHER, Inc
Carmen Gama, Directory of Circularity at EILEEN FISHER, Inc, has a unicorn job and works on finding new recycling solutions for garments that the company takes back but cannot resell or reuse in any other way. Of the items that the company takes back and cannot resell, 57% can be fiber-to-fiber recycled. The materials that can be recycled are: 100% wool, wool blends, 100% cotton, cotton spandex, 100% linen, 100% silk.
They partner with Reverso, an Italian company, to mechanically recycle wool and wool blends, and they have a handful of other partners they work with on their other recyclable materials. (Wool and cashmere have actually been mechanically recycled in Italy since the 19th century.) The remaining clothes (that cannot be recycled) are split between reuse collections (like overdye and mending) and downcycling.
This is a very unique set up, that the brand itself is receiving, sorting and freighting its own post-consumer goods for recycling. I actually don’t know a single other brand who physically does this themselves. My sense is that they do this mainly to do the right thing (bless them!). They will also get a % off new yarns from the recycling mills, but I’m pretty confident at this stage the % off they’ll get will not equal the resources they have put into this process. Hopefully over time as they set up long term partners and repeatable processes the resources spent will go down and the discount on new, recycled materials will help them build a bit of margin on products incorporating recycled materials.
Carmen said that most companies should be working to send their post-consumer unsellables to sorting partners like debrand and Super Circle who can accumulate enough of any specific material to have it recycled at scale. In many ways, Carmen and EILEEN FISHER, Inc are doing on a small scale what the collectors and sorters are beginning to do now. EILEEN FISHER, Inc has the benefit of having longstanding relationships with their mills, so their mills are willing to work with them in ways they wouldn’t or couldn’t with more casual partners.
One of the key challenges that the entire fiber recycling industry is facing is the different specifications for each recycling company. They each require a different % of different materials for their recycling technology. Some cotton recyclers can only accept 100% cotton for recycling, while others can take up to 5% spandex. Or, some recyclers cannot accept a lot of white garments because they contain optical brighteners (to make the white WHITE) that can mess up their batches of recycled materials. I have heard this issue from many stakeholders and it’s definitely something that needs to be addressed. Recently, Accelerating Circularity announced The Alliance of Chemical Textile Recycling, and it includes most of the fiber-to-fiber recyclers I’m aware of. That should help start to create standards and clarity.
New Brand: BEEN London
Genia Mineeva is the founder of BEEN London. The first line on their website is, “We create joyful accessories that take nothing new from the planet and divert waste from landfill.” BEEN exclusively uses waste and recycled materials to make their products. They use recycled leather, felt and cotton as well as new innovative materials made from pineapples and apples. They have never used virgin materials (but Genia says that one of their zipper pulls a while back wasn’t certified as recycled).
The thing that I LOVE about this brand, and Genia it’s founder, is that their driving reason for existence is using recycled and waste materials. Genia and her team work with suppliers who are creating innovative materials and try to bring them to market; by doing this they are helping with that scaling process that is so challenging.
BEEN’s main KPI (key progress indicator) is how much waste they capture and divert from landfills. They prioritize whatever gets them towards that goal. It’s a very idealistic approach, which makes things difficult in our growth + money-obsessed world, but it also means they can get the best people to work for them.
They have funded their business growth through crowdfunding, which I find inspiring because they will not be at the mercy of big VC investors. They continue to grow organically as the demand for their product grows.
I also wanted to include a quick shout out to PANGAIA which actually started as a material science company and became a clothing brand that embraces all kinds of innovative and recycled materials. They say, “Every product we create is born from science and purpose, each solving an environmental problem of the industry.”
OKAY- to sum it all up-
I love learning about the businesses and people making these advancements in materials and business models. We can make fabric out of pinneaple skin and shrimp shells, we can take responsibility for our product when our customer is done with it, and we can build businesses that only source waste materials to make beautiful products.
New Podcast: Emotional Roadblocks to Circularity (and Impact in general)
This one is a bit of a departure- we chat with Marcelo Cardozo, someone I’ve known for over 10 years and deeply respect. Our conversation is all about finding purpose in your work and working with integrity.
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Have a great week,
Cynthia
