Thread #2: Tech, leadership and impact
The start of the year means kick-offs and conferences either taking stock or looking ahead. It’s also when new initiatives or pilot projects are rolled out. Here are a few things we at TOMRA Textiles discussed this week.
Burn after wearing: Stunning and scary storytelling from describing the June 2022 fire in the mountains of textile waste gathered in the Atacama. The report accurately describes the reason we need to transform the textiles value chain from linear to circular. Well produced by The Chilean desert is — unfortunately — a dumping ground for used textiles, particularly from North America. & . Julia Shipley Muriel Alarcón
Circularity in action in LA: The Atacama fires and textile-dominated landfills are also a reason to handle more of used textiles within the regions they are consumed. One of the cities where textiles circularity is on the agenda, is Los Angeles. A historical garment manufacturing hub — in addition to a city of dreams — the LA Department of Sanitation is now pushing for separate collection of textiles. Helping realize that ambition is , a gang-rehabilitation project that has now set up Homeboy Threads to do sorting of used textiles. To help them do that, workers in LA have now gotten sorting superpowers with a TOMRA AutoSort machine, which will be with them for three months as a trial. Our own Louisa Hoyes was on site at Homeboy Industries to oversee the installation.
Fiber-to-fiber in Sandefjord: Norsk Tekstilgjenvinning (NTG) is a recycling facility and research centre for mechanical recycling of textiles, in Sandefjord, Norway. The main goal of the plant is textile-to-textile recycling — closed loop mechanical recycling of textiles to fibres suitable for the textile industry. We are super excited for Pål Erik Haraldsen, and read the story in Scandinavian MIND with great interest. It also includes a neat video animation of the process.
From dumpster to Dempstah in Sydney: Small-scale textile fiber recovery needs collaboration across the value chain. We were inspired to read this story from the City of Sydney on designer and entrepreneur Guy Dempster, who is turning unwanted clothing into high-quality yarn.
And since we’re working out of Norway, we kept an eye on business leaders and politicians gathered to discuss “Leadership and solutions” at the NHO Annual Conference on Tuesday. Excited to see a significantly stronger focus on technology, AI and innovation capacity, particularly the all-star #AI panel with Ieva Martinkenaite, Liv Dingsør and Ishita Barua, MD PhD. But a bit disappointed that green industries are only associated with power-intensive plants. Should we not also take a lead in circularity? (just asking…)
#CircularTextiles #TOMRAtextiles #TextileRecycling
Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.
