Dubbed Circulose, the material is made from pre- and post-consumer cotton garments at Re:newcell’s Kristinehamn, Sweden facility. The company says less than 1% of clothing is recycled currently.
“Circulose was created with the ambition to shift the entire industry to circularity and to dramatically lower the impact fashion has on the environment,” Harald Cavalli-Björkman, head of brand for Circulose, tells dezeen. “As a new material, we knew Circulose had to do three things in order to make a real difference in the industry; it needed to be circular, it needed to be affordable, and it needed to deliver the quality that people expect,” said Cavalli-Björkman.
The process uses donated clothing made from cotton and viscose, which are dissolved in a closed-loop process. The resulting material is dried into Circulose pulp, which can reenter the textile production cycle. The Kristinehamn plant can produce 7,000 metric tons of Circulose pulp annually.