The mini Garment-To-Garment production line developed by the Hong Kong Research Institute of Textiles and Apparel (HKRITA) to recycle post-consumer garments into clean and wearable clothes has won an award in one of the world’s leading design competitions.
Located at The Mills, a revitalised art and cultural complex located in three redeveloped former Nan Fung cotton mills in Hong Kong, the Garment-to-Garment recycle system (G2G) opened in September last year.
It demonstrates to consumers how unwanted clothing can be recycled into new items – all in the space of a standard 40-foot container, which can potentially be transported to other places around the world.
With its anti-vibration, noise- and dust-controlled design, the production line minimises disturbance to nearby businesses, and so can be operated within community spaces such as shopping malls.
The container, which houses the whole production line, is made of glass. Visitors can look inside and view the components that run the system – and can even deepen their experience by recycling their own used clothes.
“We want to demystify the whole recycling process. We want the public to understand the intrinsic value of the clothes that they have and how much more we can do with them,” explains Edwin Keh, chief executive officer of HKRITA.
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By GlobalDataThe facility has now been awarded the Red Dot Award: Product Design 2019, in recognition of its high design quality, selected from more than 5,500 products from 55 countries. The assessment process focuses on criteria such as the level of innovation, functionality, formal quality, longevity and ergonomics
The winning products “are setting key trends in the design industry and are showing where future directions may lead,” says Professor Dr Peter Zec, founder and CEO of Red Dot.
Set up in a retail shop in The Mills, the G2G is a joint collaboration among HKRITA, the H&M Foundation and Novetex Textiles Limited with the support of The Mills.
The production line is equipped with pioneering recycling technology to recycle used clothes into new garments, and shows the entire process of sanitising a garment, removing hard trims, cutting the fabric into smaller pieces, opening and mixing fibre, carding, spinning, doubling, twisting and garment knitting.
The end-to-end upcycling process is intended to discourage the unnecessary disposal of clothes by demonstrating to consumers that textile recycling is possible even in compact spaces like Hong Kong.
The G2G facility launched at the same time as Hong Kong’s first-ever textile recycling mill and the first local spinning mill to have opened in half a century – whose progress was reported exclusively on just-style.
The new Novetex Factory is also applying mechanical recycling technology developed by HKRITA to a production-level textile upcycling system that turns textile waste into quality textile fibre that can then be used in the production of yarn, fabric and garments. This facility will eventually have 3 production lines, each capable of producing one ton a day of recycled fibres from post-consumer textiles.
Click on the following links to read more:
- Why Hong Kong is the new hub for sustainable innovation
- Hong Kong to open first yarn mill in 50 years – Exclusive
