During the Dornbirn Global Fiber Conference (GFC) held in Austria from September 13-15, Acerina Trejo-Machin outlined how her company, Brussels-based Resortecs, is making recycling easier and more actionable for fashion brands, recyclers and supply chain partners through two simple but highly effective design-for-disassembly technologies.

The company’s Smart Stitch is a heat dissolvable sewing thread that is suitable for a variety of applications, from apparel to workwear, and has been exhaustively tested on various production line configurations.

It is also compatible with every stitching machine available on the market and in different colours and tenacities to enable full creativity in design and high quality in manufacturing.

“Smart Stitch sewing thread is engineered to dissolve at various temperatures between 150 and 190 degrees depending on fibre type,” said Trejo-Machin. “If widely employed at the design stage, it would be highly advantageous for disassembling fabrics, especially in dealing with unsold inventory. The garments can be washed, ironed and laundered without problem during their lifetime.”

Smart Disassembly is the company’s complementary technology – a patented industrial-scale thermal disassembly system with a flexible capacity of from 1-13 tons per day and processing speed five times faster than manual disassembly.

It is based on low-oxygen chambers with no risk of oxidation damage in a closed-loop heating system that maximises energy recovery and minimises CO₂ emissions.

The first continuous Smart Disassembly line with a capacity of ten tons per day will be rolled out in the EU in 2024.

For the past two years Resortecs has also partnered with BekaertDeslee, a Belgian leader in the production of mattress textile covers which are especially difficult to recycle due to their mixed materials and components.

The two companies have now created the first multi-material covers designed for industrial-scale disassembly and recycling.

www.resortecs.com