A return to apparel for Advansa
Ten years on from major changes at the company, polyester yarn developer Advansa is making a return to the apparel market.
Specialty polyester fibre developer Advansa has had a busy ten years since it paused its involvement in athletic apparel applications. The yarns it produced, including ThermoCool and Coolmax, were of great interest to athletic and outdoor apparel brands because they offered high levels of breathability, moisture management and temperature regulation thanks to special cross-sections in the fibres.
Much of Advansa’s focus since it sold this part of the business in 2013 has been on home textiles, a market in which it has had success for many years with filling fibres for pillows, duvets and other bedding products. It has not renewed its involvement in the apparel market, until now.
The apparel market can be complex, crowded and competitive and Advansa has been happy to concentrate on home textiles as its core market. But three-and-a-half years ago it, too, underwent a change of ownership and, indirectly, it was this that brought it back to the apparel market.
Investment holding company Sverige Netherlands acquired Advansa at the start of 2020. It planned to see what connections might develop (investment companies are fond of calling this ‘exploring synergies’) between its newly acquired polyester fibre producer and another polyester producer under its ownership, Indonesia-based Asia Pacific Fibers (APF). Now, together, Advansa and APF are jointly launching Remotion, a new brand of recycled polyester for the apparel market. The two sister companies have developed Remotion together, with APF carrying out production at its site in Indonesia. Expansion has taken place there recently following extensive investment in facilities for on-site chemical recycling to broaden the product portfolio to include recycled PET. For its part, Advansa is taking responsibility for marketing and supplying the fibres to customers around the world.
Global head of business development for Advansa, Jean-Christophe Rouyer, explains that this first fruit of the partnership with APF would have materialised more quickly had it not been for the covid-19 pandemic. Any synergies that early exploration had identified suffered serious delay. “We were unable to exchange much during the pandemic,” he says. “We were two separate companies, with different set-ups, cultures, production lines and mentalities. There was no real overlap.” The two companies have now begun to build connections with each other and Remotion is one of the first branded, specialty fibre they have produced together.
Green and blue
Two options are available for clothing brands to choose from, Remotion Green and Remotion Blue. The first has discarded plastic destined for landfill as its raw material, while the second comes from recovered ocean-bound plastic. The fibres can be endowed with anti-bacterial and moisture- management performance attributes and can be dyed any colour. In addition, the two sister companies describe Remotion as a breakthrough because it can also be made biodegradable (if customers opt not to have anti-bacterial functionality built in). The fibres have been modified to break down over time at a rate comparable with natural fibres, according to Advansa and APF; tests suggest a biodegradability rate of 40% in landfill or in marine environment within one year, and a rate of more than 90% within four years, depending on the conditions.
In its ten-year absence from the apparel market, Advansa says there has been clear growth in the popularity of recycled polyester. Not that this came as a surprise: its home textiles division has developed a wide range of filling fibres for pillows, duvets and mattresses that use recycled polyester. The company acknowledges, however, that apparel is one of the biggest markets for recycled fibres now and the recycled message is even ringing out at regulatory level in regions such as the European Union.
In 2022, the European Commission published its ‘Strategy for Sustainable and Circular Textiles’, which includes this ambitious statement: “By 2030 textile products placed on the EU market will be long-lasting and recyclable, to a great extent made from recycled fibres. Consumers will benefit for longer from high-quality, affordable textiles. Fast fashion will be out of fashion, and economically profitable re use and repair services will be widely available. In a competitive, resilient and innovative textiles sector, producers will take responsibility for their products along the value chain, including when they become waste. The circular textiles ecosystem will thrive, driven by sufficient capacities for innovative fibre-to-fibre recycling, while the incineration and landfilling of textiles will be reduced to the minimum.”
Raw material availability
With just over six years to go until 2030, there is plenty of work still to do, but the drive towards a circular fashion and textiles economy seems unrelenting. Jean-Christophe Rouyer wonders if the consequences of this will include blends of fibres in garments becoming less common, simply because monofibre fabrics are easier to recycle. “The politicians are really thinking deeply about the circular economy,” he says. “One of the effects of this has been an increase in demand for bottle-to-bottle recycling, because bottle manufacturers are having to put much more recycled content into their products too. Then you have the increases in energy prices that we have seen since the start of the war in Ukraine in 2022. Energy costs have jumped enormously; at the real peak you had to multiply the previous energy cost by six or seven. All of this has had a big impact and has put the cost of standard recycled polyester from bottles up a lot.”
He explains that the intense competition for standard recycled polyester that this has generated is one reason why Advansa and APF have opted to work on a more specialist recycled polyester. The partners are sourcing plastic for Remotion Blue fibres from a programme called Prevented Ocean Plastic, which works by encouraging collectors to pick up plastic bottles from beaches around the world and take them to local collection centres. These centres pay the pickers for the material they have brought in and then sort it and press it for easier transportation to factories for processing. The material is transformed into flakes or pellets from which textile manufacturers can extrude recycled polyester yarn. The volume of ocean or ocean-bound plastic is, sadly, so great that APF and Advansa are unlikely to run out of raw material any time soon. Mr Rouyer says it would be a good problem to have, from the point of view of the health of the planet, if the supply were to dry up. “Collecting plastic from beaches keeps growing and growing,” he continues. “I don’t see how this could dry up.”
The quality of the Green and Blue Remotion versions is equally high, he insists, and both can go into technical apparel. This project is still new and Advansa is in the process of showing the concept to potential customers. There is much to do before garments come to market containing Remotion fibres, but Advansa is confident this will happen in the next year or two, allowing for the long lead-times that clothing brands (and all the partners that are involved from one end of the supply chain to the other) need to plan, design and produce their new collections. Remotion is in motion; Advansa’s return to the apparel market is a reality.
Ocean-bound plastic is the raw material for Remotion Blue. From an environmental point of view, running out of supply would be a good problem for Advansa and APF to have, but there is little sign of that happening.
Credit: ADVANSA
