Embracing Eco Design: How Modular Garments and Accessories Lead to a Circular Economy

Garments and accessories are often complex composites, made from various materials to meet distinct requirements. For example, shoes consist of a rubber sole paired with an upper made of leather or fabric. Tailor-made suits feature horsehair reinforcements in the front and lapel, combining wool exteriors with silk, viscose, or nylon linings. Winter jackets are filled with feathers, sandwiched between water-repellent fabric and synthetic linings.

For end-of-life treatments, these composite products present challenges. Each material requires a unique recycling process. To maintain the quality of recycled materials, components like the rubber sole of a shoe must be separated from the leather or fabric upper. This principle applies to all composite garments. Each material must be separated to ensure it can be reused in its pure, high-quality form.

Unfortunately, most apparel is not designed for easy disassembly. Disassembling different materials currently requires a labor-intensive and manual process. Consequently, “recycled” garments and accessories are often shredded into a low-quality textile mixture. Effective recycling and repair are virtually nonexistent.

To truly implement a circular economy and protect our future prosperity, we must consider product structures and hierarchy. Effective repair, remanufacturing, and recycling demand that garments and accessories be modular. Achieving this necessary modularity involves using reversible joining methods and prioritizing design for disassembly.

Resortecs is at the forefront of this revolution, providing design-for-disassembly solutions that enable high-quality textile recycling on an industrial scale. By pioneering innovative threads and disassembly techniques, Resortecs empowers brands, sorters, and recyclers to address today’s environmental challenges at the pace and scale the Earth needs.

Resortecs combines thermal engineering, eco-design, and chemical engineering to offer state-of-the-art solutions that empower the entire textile value chain to close the loop. Discover Smart Stitch™ and Smart Disassembly™: Resortecs’ solution for multi-material disassembly in a fast, easy, and cost-efficient manner. To learn more about the financial impact of design for disassembly, dive into the From Waste to Profit report.

Smart Stitch™ is a range of 16 heat-dissolvable threads – enabling automatic thermal disassembly and design for recycling. Suitable for a variety of applications, from apparel to fire-resistant workwear, the Smart Stitch™ threads have been exhaustively tested on various production line configurations and are compatible with every stitching machine widely available on the market.

Smart Disassembly™ is the world’s first thermal disassembly system – combining the quality of manual methods with the speed of mechanical processes. A fully automatic process empowering sorters and recyclers to disassemble textile products while removing zippers, elastic bands, and any other trims that hinders recycling 5x faster than manual disassembly. The low-oxygen chamber ensures no risks of fabric oxidation and recyclability rates as high as 90%.

When you hear “circular economy,” think “modular.” This shift in perspective is essential for fostering sustainable fashion and advancing circular design principles.