The Hong Kong Research Institute of Textile and Apparel (HKRITA) has announced a new, five-year collaboration with the H&M Foundation. They have chosen ‘Planet First’ as the theme for this new chapter in their work together to drive further sustainable development in the textile and fashion industry.

Major change is coming to the textile and apparel sector whether consumers and brands like it or not. This is the conclusion that partners The Hong Kong Research Institute of Textile and Apparel (HKRITA) and the H&M Foundation, an independent, non-profit global foundation funded by the main owners of fashion retail group H&M, have come to after working together since 2016.

The two groups announced at the end of 2020 that they are extending their partnership for a further five years and will “scale up” their ambitions. They are launching a new programme of initiatives called Planet First. HKRITA will conduct research on current and new technologies and look into the possibilities for commercialising them. H&M Foundation will invest $12 million in the programme; further support will come from the Hong Kong government’s Innovation and Technology Fund taking the overall budget to as much as $100 million.

“Our goal is to find technologies and solutions that we can openly share with the industry to ensure rapid scaling and a positive impact,” says HKRITA chief executive, Edwin Keh. Garment-to-garment recycling machines are among the achievements of the existing partnership so far. One has been operating in Hong Kong for some time and a second opened in an H&M store in Stockholm in the autumn of 2020. Calling them “Green Machines”, Mr Keh explains that, while the Hong Kong unit has been operating at a capacity of 150 kilogrammes of clothing per day, the Stockholm version is a scaled-up, industrial system that will have a daily capacity of 1.5 tonnes.

In all, between 2016 and 2020, the partners completed 11 projects, generating 24 distinct pieces of intellectual property and winning ten global awards along the way.  Four projects are ongoing and will carry forward into the Planet First programme out of what Mr Keh calls a desire to scale up and develop real-world applications.

Pain-points

Innovation lead at the H&M Foundation, Erik Bang, says he believes further exciting results will come in the course of the next five years of this relationship. He describes both organisations as being “very impatient” for progress and “not afraid to take risks” on the road to achieving it. “Planet First will be, to our knowledge, the largest programme in the industry,” Mr Bang says. “We are talking about a full $100 million to develop solutions and address systemic pain-points for the fashion industry."

Innovations the two partners will seek to take forward include a new type of cellulose sourced from algae. Their hope is that the algae and other natural sources can become replacements for some of the more energy-intensive materials the apparel industry uses at the moment while also helping to clean up some of the wastewater that factories generate.

Other new types of cellulose can come from recycled content in general and from the Green Machines in particular. Mr Keh has already shown the market a prototype T-shirt made from 80% recycled fibres, with 50% of all the material in the garment coming from the Green Machine. “The output from the Green Machine is at no price premium to virgin comparables,” he says, “and its performance is as good.”

There are also prototype versions of clothing made from entirely new materials, including a T-shirt that absorbs CO2 as the wearer walks around. One T-shirt can absorb around 33% of the CO2 that a tree absorbs every day, the HKRITA chief executive explains. “We see this as a way for the industry to become carbon-neutral,” he says, “and move towards becoming carbon-negative.” These T-shirts will come to market in the course of this year. He adds that all of the intellectual property arising from Planet First will remain with the Hong Kong-based non-profit institute and, therefore, become available to “all collaborators”. He adds: “Speed, impact and scale will continue to be the hallmark of what we do in the next five years as we create an open platform for solving the big challenges facing our industry and our world.”

Regeneration game

Erik Bang explains that this must lead to a regeneration of resources. Any time we use and enjoy a product, we must leave behind a world that is “a little bit better”, he says. He adds: “This is the only resilient insurance we can have against the inescapable consequences of climate change and biodiversity loss.” Examples will include technologies that can make sure the water exiting a factory after treatment is cleaner than the water coming in, and ideas such as the CO2-absorbing T-shirt, which he describes as “a visionary garment”.

In keeping with this, the aims of Planet First will be to encourage innovation in regenerative farming, production processes, wastewater treatment, the sequestration of carbon and other areas.

There is, he argues, a lack of access to help from industry and to the equipment necessary to test and pilot good ideas. “This is holding change back,” he continues. “Because Planet First is so well funded, we will build a joint-lab, a collaborative, physical space with equipment and a whole miniature factory. Here, innovators and start-ups will be able to come in and demonstrate how their ideas will work in a real environment.” Companies already established in the industry will receive invitations to visit, too, to help build up not just a supply of new ideas, but demand for them, through brands that are willing to become Planet First partners. Their reward will be an opportunity to scout new solutions and try them out. “Coming up with solutions only takes us halfway there,” Mr Bang says. “The second half is to have these solutions adopted in the real world. We don’t want this to end up as a scientific exercise but for it to develop real solutions.”

Most decisive decade in history

The joint-lab will be in Hong Kong; HKRITA is engaged in recruiting as many founding members as possible, then it will carry out design work, move in existing equipment and install some new resources. “It’s a work in progress,” says Edwin Keh, “but Hong Kong is a good place for us to do this because we want to solve challenges up and down the supply chain. Hong Kong is ideal because we have manufacturing, retail and distribution here; we sit on everyone’s supply chain."

Erik Bang’s assessment is that we are now living in a decade that will prove to be “the most decisive” in human history. It is ten years until the deadline for meeting the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. To demonstrate that ten years is not a long time, he points out that it is already more than five years since 196 state parties adopted the Paris Agreement on climate change. It is almost 15 years since former US vice-president and presidential candidate Al Gore released ‘An Inconvenient Truth’.

“We really can’t kick this can down the road any further,” Mr Bang continues. “It’s not a long-term problem but a near-term crisis that we face. Change is imminent whether we like it or not, whether we decide to do anything about it or not. The world as we know it will change and I think it’s fair to say that the change we are about to see from climate change will make all these months of covid-19 seem like a walk in the park.” He goes on to talk about the urgency of this presenting an opportunity to make a difference, an opportunity for his organisation and for HKRITA, but for others in the industry too. He says an “inspiring momentum” is building up behind the demands for change and that addressing the technical and structural pain-points will help this momentum grow stronger.

For Edwin Keh, the key point is that consumers will be looking for reasons to buy as they emerge from the pandemic. Offering sustainable products is to give them a good reason. One motivation for brands to think about sustainability, circularity and climate change in the midst of the pandemic, he argues, is that this will help them prove themselves “relevant to what it is people are concerned about”. He adds: “The brands that win out of this pandemic will be the ones that proceed with purpose and with these aspirations.”

Green Machine learning

The Green Machines that the HKRITA and H&M Foundation partnership has delivered so far, one in Hong Kong and one in Stockholm, use a hydrothermal process that fully separates the cotton and polyester in blends into new fibres in the case of the polyester and a cellulose powder in the case of the cotton. The process is gentle, which allows the fibres to retain their properties. When this partnership launched in 2016, the two organisations say that there was no such method in place for recycling clothing made from poly-cotton blends, as so many garments are.

They pay great credit to a research team at the Faculty of Textile Science and Technology at Shinshu University in Japan, led by Professor Kanji Kanjiwara, whose work led to the hydrothermal process breakthrough.

As a result, the Green Machines work using only heat, water, pressure and “a biodegradable green chemical”. These are reused in a closed-loop system, creating no secondary pollution.

So far, the polyester fibres that the Green Machines are producing are going into new clothing. HKRITA chief executive, Edwin Keh, explains: “We saw this as a great opportunity to offer recycled product with no compromise on quality.” A big part of the challenge is that virgin polyester is cheap. This, in the words of H&M Foundation’s lead on innovation, Erik Bang, makes it difficult to come up with a viable alternative. But, in 2020, Monki, a Swedish fashion brand that became part of the H&M group a dozen years ago, released an inaugural clothing collection made from these Green Machine fibres, a world first.

As for the cellulose powder that the recycled cotton produces, the partners will work on ways to use this in clothing too as part of the new Planet First programme, but other uses are possible as well: for example, they believe the powder can help improve cotton farming.

Recycled polyester jogging pants and top from clothing brand Monki, the first garments to result from the Green Machine fibre recycling initiative
Credit: Monki

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