At WhiteCycle, we believe that achieving sustainability in the textile industry requires reimagining conventional, often linear, business models.
While mindful consumption plays a crucial role inreducing the carbon footprint of textiles, with actions like choosing quality over quantity, extending product life by proper care, and embracing secondhand options, it's only part of the solution.
Beyond the clothes we wear, textile yarn is also woven into products like industrial hoses and tires. When textile lay-flat hoses and tires reach their end of life, they are typically discarded or incinerated, resulting in large waste streams and environmental impact. Yet these textile products are often overlooked in circularity debates.
Here is where the WhiteCycle team steps in with its mission to recycle PET yarn from end-of-life textiles (clothes, tires, hoses),transforming used fibers into new, high-quality fibers. Using life cycle thinking in textile design, including the design of textile lay-flat hoses, helps retain value, create circular resource flows and business models.
The Conventional Lifecycle of a Textile Lay-Flat Hose
Textile lay-flat hoses are essential in many industries and everyday life. They conduct fluids in construction, energy operations, firefighting, agriculture, mining, and transport drinking water. Textile hose sare made from plastic materials and can feature a woven PET yarn reinforcement layer, which boosts their strength and durability. It is important to note thatplastics like PET commonly originate from oil and gas, fossil fuels that significantly contribute to global warming. To make one kilo of plastic requires two kilos of oil.
The traditional life cycle of textile lay-flat hoses involves:
This linear "cradle to grave" model startswith raw material extraction and ends with disposal, resulting in waste, pollution, and loss of value.
Weaving Change -WhiteCycle’s Circular Textiles Strategy
The traditional lifecycle of lay-flat hoses illustrates the need for a shift towards more sustainable business models. The figure below visualizes a simplified overview of the product life cycle of lay-flat hoses, adding value retention options such as recycling and reuse into the system.
WhiteCycle aims to reduce the need for virgin material extraction and minimize waste by developing advanced fiber-to-fiber recycling processes for lay-flat hoses, car tires and clothes. Due to safety constraints,repair and direct reuse of worn-out lay-flat hoses is not feasible. To prevent discarded hoses from ending up in landfills or incinerators, we focus on creating the technology needed to reprocess and reintegrate PET from used- intonew, high-quality hoses.
Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) helps us quantify the environmental impacts of all input, output flows, and transportation steps within a defined system boundary. It reveals environmental hotspots in the supply chain, which are stages or processes with the most significant impacts, such as those with the highest CO2 emissions, and the largest water or land use. Considering social (sLCA) and economic aspects (LCC) enhances our understanding of the complex dynamics inthe textile supply chain. Throughout the entire textile innovation journey, wemake choices informed by LCA data analysis.
Conclusion
The traditional life cycle (Take-Make-Use-Waste) of textiles, including lay-flat hoses, highlights the urgent need for a transition towards more sustainable and circular business models. At WhiteCycle, we are committed to contribute to this transition by innovating and promoting textile recycling. Our choices are informed by LCA results to ensure that we align with Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and reduce the environmental footprint of textiles.
Call to Climate Action:Join us in our mission to build a more sustainable textile industry, Here aresome ideas how you can make a difference:
Note: This blog post is based on the work of Sarah Langes (2024) titled "Assessing the sustainability of industrial textiles - LCA study of lay-flat hoses," a restricted-access master’s thesis at Western Norway University of AppliedSciences (HVL).
Suggested citation: Langes,S. (2024). Assessing the sustainability ofindustrial textiles - LCA study of lay-flat hoses. [Restricted-accessmaster’s thesis]. Western Norway University of Applied Sciences (HVL).
