In search of fashion tech finds, Le Boudoir Numérique surveyed the sustainable fashion space at Change Now summit dedicated to ecological transition, in Paris, last week. Bingo, behind a stand where their innovation trophies and a few spools of thread were enthroned, Cédric Vanhoeck, founder of the Belgian startup Resortecs and William Allouche, its technology manager were explaining to visitors how their new sewing thread disintegrates at high temperature, allowing the disassembly of the different pieces of a garment for better recycling of materials. Le Boudoir Numérique asked William Allouche to tell more about Resortecs dissolvable stitching thread technology.

By Ludmilla Intravaia 

Le Boudoir Numérique : What is Resortecs ? 

William Allouche, technology manager at Resortecs : We are a startup that aims to facilitate the dismantling of textile products to promote recycling and reuse operations. We sell to brands and clothing manufacturers a hot melt sewing thread that dissolves at high temperature. These brands will make a garment as they usually do, it will be worn normally, except that at the end of the garment's life, when it must be recycled, we can collect it, put it in our continuous and automated disassembly line, from which it emerges completely disassembled. The zippers and buttons are removed from the textile parts, the polyester and cotton of the same product are separated, they can be sorted and sent to specific recyclers. Today, to manually separate buttons and zippers from a fabric, it’s expensive and time consuming, so nobody does it. This is the bottleneck that we are working on.

How are you developing your business at the moment ?

First, we want to focus on the unsold garments of the brands. Let's not lie to ourselves, today the unsold are mostly destroyed. However, the material of these products which nobody wants to wear is still of very good quality. It’s this deposit of virgin materials that we want to save. First, we will collaborate with brands, from which we will collect unsold products to dismantle, recycle them or use them as is by upcycling.

And for the clothes worn by consumers, what have you planned ?

With regard to post-consumer waste, we intend to create, over the next five years, a consortium, composed of a waste sorter, of a company developing traceability tools such as, for example, RFID tags which can contain information and a fashion brand to generate a circularity solution. Once used, the garment of this brand, sewn with our thread and fitted with a tracer from our partner, will be deposited by the consumer in a dumpster of our partner sorter who will recognize it as using our thread. At that moment, several players will be able to disassemble and recycle a garment in a circular fashion.

So the future of sustainable fashion, in short, could be eco-design, combined with collaborative structures managing the garment from its conception to its end of life ?

Yes, that's our motto : design for disassembly. A big problem in the textile industry today is to trace the clothing journey. How can I get information about a dress found in a dumpster after two years of use ? Even knowing the materials that make it up is already difficult. This is why we want to work with startups that develop traceability solutions in the fiber itself or in the smart labels of clothing. But at some point, there will have to be a real political will to push brands to set up an electronic clothing passport, otherwise retracing its journey will be really difficult.

Are you hopeful in this matter ?

Absolutely. The emergence of many societal and political movements concerned about the impact of human activity on the environment shows how fed up people are with wasting and destroying things that have not even been used. We see this, for example, in France with the measures taken by the Senate last year (notably the ban within two to four years from the destruction of unsold products, including textiles and beauty products which will have to be donated or recycled, AN). In Belgium and the Netherlands, all across Northern Europe in fact, cutting-edge innovators are making a difference. Associations such as the Ellen MacArthur Foundation generate a great deal of knowledge and educate those concerned about traceability and circular economy. We ourselves have won awards, such as the Global Change Award from the H&M Foundation, in 2018 and, last December, the Radicale Vernieuwer from the Belgian magazine De Standaard, which rewards pioneering startups in their field. These kinds of awards boost us financially and allow us to grow our business. We feel that we have arrived at the right time to make a significant change. I am hopeful that in ten years or so the world will have made immense progress in terms of eco-responsibility.

* To know more about Resortecs, have a look at the video below. 

* Resortecs website is here. 

* Change Now, the international Summit for Change displaying solutions for the planet, took place from January 30 to February 1, 2020, at Grand Palais, in Paris. Change Now website is there.