R&D Focus
Circular Economy in Garment and Footwear
ITRI introduces sustainable solutions to reduce garment and footwear waste.
How devastatingly fast fashion impacts our planet is no news. According to Earth.Org, the colossal amount of global textile waste is equivalent to having a rubbish truck full of clothes end up on landfill sites every second. In the time you spent reading just that sentence, another 15 tons of clothes were buried.
The footwear industry also contributes a fair share of fast-fashion waste. According to Quantis, an environmental sustainability consultancy, the footwear industry is responsible for 1.4% of global greenhouse gas emissions, of which 60% stems from manufacturing and obtaining raw materials for shoes.
The garment and footwear industries are each dealing with different challenges in their pursuit of circular economy. To realize fiber-to-fiber recycling, the garment industry is striving to sort blended fibers. Footwear manufacturers, on the other hand, are keen to realize a closed recycling loop for shoes due to unrecyclable materials and heterogeneous component integration.
One man’s trash, as the proverb has it, is another man’s treasure. Click below to learn how ITRI’s cutting-edge solutions have turned waste into valuables.