Resortecs is the laureate of Viva Technology & 50inTech’s #FemaleFounderChallenge of 2022! Vanessa Counaert, our co-founder and Strategic Lead, was crowned female founder of the year for Resortecs’ innovation, scaling potential, and solution impact.

The #FemaleFounderChallenge is an initiative that puts female entrepreneurs at the front and aims to accelerate the financing of women-led startups and to urge Venture Capital (VC) funds to commit to more gender equality at all levels. Resortecs was one of the 5 finalists of the challenge, selected out of over 500 applicants from 69 countries.

As the new winner, Vanessa and Resortecs get access to a substantial platform of visibility from Viva Technology – VivaTech is the biggest European event for technology and startups.  Additionally, the laureate also gets private meetings with the #FemaleFounderChallenge’s high-level VC jury, a speaking opportunity with Maddyness, mentoring sessions on fundraising with Claire Calmejane from Société Générale, and last but not least, a startup booth at VivaTech 2023.

It was very inspiring for Resortecs to be surrounded by so many female entrepreneurs, with a special shout out to the other 4 finalists: Charlotte Gaudin from AML Factory, Shusma Shankar from Deep Planet, Lilia Leye Shwartsman from MICA AI MEDICAL, and Bola Bardet from Susu.

What an incredible closure to Resortecs’ participation in Desigual + Plug and Play Tech Center’s Awesome Lab – Spain’s first fashion-tech acceleration program!

This acceleration program supports selected startups through mentorships, training, providing resources and tools, and funding. This initiative aims to boost the development of technology solutions that will face the main challenges of the fashion industry.

Resortecs was chosen for its technological solution and innovation at the service of the circular economy. The challenge proposed by the Awesome Lab was to assign a new use to garments to give them a second life. Resortecs worked alongside Desigual for 8 months on a pilot where the Spanish giant implemented Resortecs’ technology in a strategic manner in order to build together the future of fashion.

Last week, Resortecs was invited to the Awesome Lab’s final Demo Day in Barcelona to pitch the results of the collaboration. But Resortecs didn’t stop there. Not only did our team give a great pitch, but they also won the award for “best project presentation”. Indeed, the collaboration showcased successful results and optimistic insights on collaborations between technologies such as Resortecs and fashion brands, and on the future of circular fashion!  

Resortecs is thankful for the incredible journey alongside Personify XP, Vestico, Syrup Tech, Exonode, Swearit, Shelly Xu Design, and looks forward to years of partnership for circularity con la marca más chula de la moda española!

Resortecs’ innovation – the first of its kind – can process up to 1 ton of garments per day and is being tested by 30 major global fashion brands

Recently, images of the mountains of unsold clothing dumped in the Atacama Desert, in Chile, shocked the world. Each year, 34 million tonnes of textiles worth more than 400 billion euros are wasted by the fashion industry – which became a strategic target of the EU Green Deal. Behind these alarming figures are the costs and complexity of disassembly and recycling. When faced with stacks of unsold inventory, that might reach up to 40% of each season’s production, fashion brands turn to options easier and cheaper than recycling, such as landfills or incineration. If it’s up to Resortecs, however, this scenario is about to change. 

The start-up presents its first thermal disassembly system in a demonstration event for the press, politicians, investors, and industry peers in Brussels on Thursday, 09/12. The system combines heat and mechanical force to disassemble clothes stitched with Resortecs’ heat-dissolvable threads. Inside the system – a globally-patented, high-tech version of an industrial oven – the clothes are exposed to specific temperatures, making the seams disappear automatically and allowing for easy material sorting and recycling. 

“The system works with little to no oxygen inside. This preserves the fabrics’ quality and prevents the clothes from burning, even when they are submitted to temperatures higher than 200° C”, explains William Allouche, Technical Lead for Disassembly and the mind behind the system’s engineering. “We’ve made sure to develop a closed-loop system to preserve the heat produced for each batch of clothes for the longest time possible. This ensures energy recovery and generates way less CO₂ emissions than other heat-induced processes.”

The thermal process is 5x faster than traditional disassembly methods and enables the recycling of up to 90% of the original fabric material, instead of the usual 48% obtained after manual or mechanical disassembly. Using data to prove the impact of its innovation, Resortecs ran an externally-reviewed life-cycle assessment which shows that the process adoption could help the fashion industry cut its CO₂ emissions by 50% and reduce waste generation by 80%. If the entire EU production were thermally disassembled and recycled, the fashion industry could generate 60.3 million fewer tons of CO₂ and save up to € 2.3 billion per year. 

The version presented to the public is just a prototype. It can process up to 1 ton of textile per day and is being used to show first partners, such as the fast-fashion giant H&M and other 30 global fashion brands, how the start-up’s solution works. In the long term, it will be part of a network of thermal disassembly systems placed in recycling plants all over the world. The idea is to cover the globe with automatic thermal disassembly to speed up global textile recycling. Still in 2022, a second system with a larger processing capacity will come into operation. Together, both units will be able to prepare up to 13 tonnes/day of clothing for recycling, an unprecedented volume in the world.

“Everyone thinks of recycling, but no one looks at the biggest challenge to make it happen: disassembly. We saw an opportunity to optimize production while boosting up recyclability and sustainability, and we jumped on it” says founder Cédric Vanhoeck. “Brands have finally realized that there’s no way to continue producing and wasting textile as if nothing is happening with the planet. When we started 4 years ago, brands complained about the costs of sustainability, now they come to us because they understand that circularity is an investment.”