Environment

Performing for the Planet

Bringing tasteful textiles is what we do. Bringing tasteful textiles that are healthy for humans and the planet is on the front of our radar. Using less water, dabbling with recycled materials and efficiently dying yarns is our obligation. Performance for the planet is as important as performance of our textiles.

Illerom’s shift to circular textile production with longer use, and more reuse and recycling could help reduce impacts along with reductions in overall consumption. Our focus is on circular design of textiles to improve product durability, repairability and recyclability and to ensure the uptake of secondary raw materials in new products.

Key Initiatives

Circular Design

Circular design is an important enabler of the transition towards sustainable production and consumption of textiles through circular business models.

The design phase plays a critical role in each of the four pathways to achieving a circular textile sector: longevity and durability; optimised resource use; collection and reuse; and recycling and material use.

Partnership with People

The textiles sector is labor intensive compared with others. Almost 13 million full-time equivalent workers were employed worldwide in the supply chain to produce the amount of clothing, textiles and footwear consumed. This makes the textiles sector the third largest employer worldwide, after food and housing. Most production takes place in Asia, where low production costs come at the expense of workers’ health and safety.

Supply chain auditing/investigating, management and ‘knowing our partners’ is what we do!

Water Usage

Producing and handling textiles requires large quantities of water. Blue water and Green Water tops usage in textiles above all industries other than food and recreation. Finding efficient ways to recycle, reuse and reduce water usage in production is a key initiative.

Design as an enabler of circular business models for textiles

To reduce the environmental and climate change impacts of textiles, shifting towards circular business models is crucial to save on raw materials, energy, water and land use, emissions and waste.

Circular design is an important component of circular business models for textiles. It can ensure higher quality, longer lifetimes, better use of materials, and better options for reuse and recycling. While it is important to enable the recycling and reuse of materials, life-extending strategies, such as design for durability, ease of reuse, repair and remanufacturing, should be prioritized. Preventing the use of hazardous chemicals and limiting toxic emissions and release of microplastics at all life cycle stages should be incorporated into product design.

Designing for circularity is the most recent development in design for sustainability. Expanding a technical and product-centric focus to a focus on large-scale system-level changes (considering both production and consumption systems) shows that this latest development requires many more disciplines than traditional engineering design. Product design as a component of a circular business model depends on consumer behaviour and policy to realise its potential and enable implementation.