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Recycled Fabrics Will Change The Clothing Value Cycle System

2022/12/20 17:23:00 119

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What will human clothes look like in the future?

Uniqlo offers a set of answers - both comfortable and fashionable, as well as helping to protect the earth.

On December 9, Uniqlo's parent company Fast Retailing Group won the "Annual Sustainability Brand" at the 2022 Southern Weekend Annual Celebration because of its renewable fabric technology and innovative water-saving process, reducing the consumption of water resources and fossil energy in garment production, and affecting tens of millions of consumers.

At the Expo held from November 5 to 10 this year, Uniqlo displayed these "future clothes" - sustainable jackets made of recycled plastic, and environmentally friendly jeans that save 95% water in the 1000 ㎡ "LifePark Happy Tomorrow" immersive exhibition area.

In the exhibition area, an interactive "factory" is eye-catching. When visitors turn the turntable, they can see how the waste plastic bottles are transformed into recycled polyester chips, then melted and stretched into yarn, and then made into fabrics, finally producing colorful fleece jackets.

Over the booth, the huge UNIQLO classic red and white logo is switched to green from time to time - a symbol of sustainable development. This is just a silhouette of Uniqlo and its parent company Fast Retailing Group, which set off a sustainable change.

For Uniqlo, change is not surprising. Over the past decades, it has grown from a Japanese suburban retailer to a global clothing industry giant by virtue of its continuous innovation in product positioning, marketing mode and other aspects, and has achieved counter trend growth in the current global economic downturn. According to the performance announcement of Fast Retailing Group in fiscal year 2022, the annual revenue of the enterprise is 2.3 trillion yen, and the net profit is 273.3 billion yen.

But founder Yanai Zheng's ambition goes beyond that. What he cares about is how the textile and clothing industry, an ancient business, is revitalized in today's complex and changing world situation. On the one hand, the COVID-19 epidemic continues to spread around the world, bringing multiple impacts on economic and social development; On the other hand, the threat of global problems, such as climate change, ecological destruction, energy crisis, unemployment and poverty, is growing, which brings many challenges to the clothing industry.

A "sustainable change" came into being. In December 2021, Fast Retailing Group formulated and released the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals and Action Plan, which depicts a grand blueprint - to build a new garment industry in the next ten years by implementing climate action, reducing waste and achieving circular economy, so that it can not only promote enterprise growth, but also take into account the needs of global sustainable development.

With tens of millions of sustainable goods made of recycled fabrics gradually moving to Uniqlo stores, and with the gradual improvement of the people-oriented clothing value cycle, this blueprint is gradually becoming reality. It also indicates that a revolution in the garment industry is coming.

Rebuilding the production chain

For the clothing industry, to achieve sustainability, the first challenge lies in how to reduce the consumption of non renewable resources and how to use more advanced green environmental protection processes. The industry has put forward various initiatives, but it is often difficult to implement them. Due to the high price competition, the upstream enterprises in the supply chain have insufficient incentive to improve their investment. Downstream enterprises in the supply chain generally do not encourage upstream enterprises to give priority to sustainability.

According to Ma Renhe, Executive Director and Deputy General Manager of Shenzhou International Group, Fast Retailing Group is an "alien" and always spares no effort to promote supply chain enterprises to seek sustainability.

Shenzhou International, headquartered in Ningbo, Zhejiang Province, is a leading enterprise in the field of knitted apparel in China. Since 1997, Uniqlo has cooperated with Uniqlo to provide clothing support from weaving, dyeing and finishing, printing and embroidery to cutting and sewing. This autumn and winter, Uniqlo launched its first recycled fleece jacket from Shenzhou International.

In the fully automatic workshop in Shenzhou, the recycled polyester fabric is going through a key process of transforming into fleece -- fleece. The fabric passes through the holes with thick and thin arms. With the vibration of the machine, it shakes again and again, forming spherical particles on the surface, which becomes fluffy and soft.

For recycled fabrics, this touch is hard won. Before formal production, several experiments have been carried out in the fabric laboratory of Shenzhou International. Because the raw material of recycled yarn is not directly refined from oil, but crushed, cleaned, melted and reprocessed from recycled plastic bottles, the fiber is not as soft as new materials. Uniqlo and Shenzhou can only research and develop technology from scratch and experiment repeatedly until they achieve the same softness and skin affinity as the original materials by increasing the weight.

In fact, driven by Uniqlo, recycled fabrics are increasingly applied to more products. According to the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals and Action Plan of Fast Retailing Group, half of the clothing fabrics of its brands will be replaced by environmentally friendly recycled fabrics by 2030. As a supplier of Uniqlo, this has also led Shenzhou to develop recycled fabrics.

However, many difficulties still need to be overcome to realize the complete regeneration of fabrics. For example, small parts such as zippers, clothing piping and labels made of recycled materials are rarely used in the market and can only cross the river by feeling the stones. After conquering the manufacturing of renewable zippers, Ma Renhe revealed that the next goal of both parties is to meet the long-term strength requirements of the suture. "Next, we will tackle the key problems of recycled materials and fabrics, which is also a challenge in the future.".

In addition to more environmentally friendly raw materials, Uniqlo also assisted supply chain enterprises represented by Shenzhou International in cooperation to reduce the consumption of non renewable resources and carbon emissions from the energy structure. Fast Retailing Group's supply chain goal is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 20% by 2030 compared with 2019. Ma Renhe said frankly that every year, both sides will formulate relevant goals and key projects. Uniqlo will assist Shenzhou in formulating quarterly emission reduction plans, provide technical support for emission reduction, and jointly build a greener supply chain.

On the east coast of the Pacific Ocean across the sea from Shenzhou International, the exploration of green environmental protection technology is also ongoing.

In 2016, Fast Retailing Group established the Jeans Innovation Center in Los Angeles, California, USA, focusing on the fabric, shape and environmental protection manufacturing technology of jeans.

"The biggest feature of jeans is that they need to use a lot of water and chemicals in the washing process to create a kind of worn out and lazy effect", said Masaaki Matsubara, chief operating officer of JIC. The Innovation Center has developed a sustainable manufacturing process for jeans. In addition to texture, artificial "ecological abrasive" is used to replace the traditional volcanic pumice, so as to avoid pollution caused by mining and consumption in use; In terms of the old process, laser technology is adopted to replace the traditional chemical agents or sandpaper hand grinding to avoid harm to human body.

In the washing process of jeans, which consumes the most water, the Innovation Center has developed an innovative water-saving technology combining nano bubble and ozone cleaning to replace the traditional way of washing jeans in water. Nano bubble technology atomizes a small amount of water into a nano water mist, which is sprayed on jeans to make them fade. Ozone cleaning uses ozone to rinse jeans to remove residual blue dyes and chemicals in water. The filtered water is not directly discharged, but recycled. Through a series of measures, compared with the traditional process, the water saving amount can reach 95% at most.

No waste world

In this new garment industry blueprint, in addition to a greener production chain, there is also a value cycle of making the best use of clothing - the produced clothing will be fully circulated and realized in a longer time and a larger range.

At present, a large number of non renewable energy garments are consumed during production, and people usually wear them only a few times. According to the Alan MacArthur Foundation report, the average number of times a garment is worn globally has decreased by 36% compared with 15 years ago. The trend changes. Unworn clothes are discarded, and most of them end up in landfills or incinerators. Less than half of the old clothes are reused or recycled.

"I don't want to produce clothes that are thrown away after wearing, but sustainable clothes". Founder Liu Jing once stated his determination to break the "wear and discard" consumption habit.

Different from fast fashion brands, Uniqlo focuses on the basic styles of versatility, focusing on technology and functions, so that a garment can adapt to multiple scenarios in its life cycle, thus improving its utilization and actual wear rate. For example, the light down jacket rated as "100 Great Modern Designs" by Fortune magazine is regarded by many consumers as a necessity in spring, autumn and winter. It is fashionable, versatile, lightweight and convenient, and can cope with sudden changes in weather, temperature difference between day and night and other scenarios.

At the same time, Fast Retailing Group is also developing new services and technologies to ensure that the goods can be reused and recycled for a long time after being sold.

Since 2006, Uniqlo has carried out a recycling activity for all goods in its stores, giving clothes recycled from customers to poor people. In 2020, Uniqlo further upgraded its recycling plan. After the restart, "RE.UNIQLO" not only provides clothes for the poor to "reuse", but also is committed to promoting the recycling "recycling", taking the recycled clothes as new clothing raw materials and entering the production process again. The "recycled down jacket" launched in the Japanese market in November 2020 is the product of this attempt. The down and feather are all from 620000 down products recycled in Japan since 2019.

In terms of recycling and new fabric development, Fast Retailing also plans to work with Toray to establish a research and development organization. The latter has jointly developed such popular Uniqlo products as HEATTECH thermal underwear. At the same time, Fast Retailing Group is also considering cooperating with external partners to explore the provision of repair services or establish a simple donation system. In August 2021, a shop of Uniqlo in Germany cooperated with local non-governmental organizations to start the clothing repair service of "SecondLifeStudio" tentatively.

Through diversified means - from the initial design and manufacturing to the consideration of long-term practical wear, to the provision of repair services to extend the service life of clothing, to the combination of store channels to provide clothing recycling, to unite with charitable organizations to make targeted donations, and to work with partners to explore recycling, Fast Retailing Group strives to make a clothing "live forever": after the clothing is sold Realize value in a wider range, reduce unnecessary waste, and help a world without waste. 　　

Changing the world with clothes

In August 2019, the CEOs of 181 American companies jointly signed the Declaration of Corporate Purposes, proposing that the primary task of enterprises is to create a better society, rather than just making profits for shareholders. With the recurrence of the COVID-19 epidemic, the outbreak of local wars and the frequent occurrence of extreme weather, more and more people have realized that sustainable development has reached a key inflection point. According to the 2022 CEO Research Report of Sustainable IBM Business Value Research Institute, 51% of the entrepreneurs interviewed around the world regard sustainability as the biggest challenge in the next two to three years.

In view of the traditional "production distribution use discarding" linear production and consumption mode of the clothing industry, with the deepening understanding of its negative environmental and social impact, many brands and retailers have begun to actively respond to specific environmental or social challenges in their supply chain, and many consumers have also begun to seek a more environmentally friendly lifestyle.

However, unlike the "palliative" repair of some links, Fast Retailing Group tries to "fix the root cause". Establish a set of systematic solutions, reconstruct the circular industrial model, take consumers as the core, take the production and circulation of clothing as the medium, and connect the green sustainable production and clothing use value cycle.

Large scale production provides sustainable goods affordable to everyone, protects workers' rights and interests with cleaner and environmentally friendly clothing standards, and donates clothing to support communities to contribute to society. At the same time, it also strives to disseminate information, and drive more social public to understand and participate in the sustainable cause.

For many years, Fast Retailing Group has set up sustainable exhibition areas or exhibits to convey green ideas in interesting forms such as interactive factories. In September this year, it also donated to the China Environmental Protection Foundation to launch the "Marine Environmental Protection Public Welfare Project", organized the public to carry out beach cleaning activities, and felt how improperly recycled plastics pollute the sea.

In this process, ordinary consumers, factory partners and young people all participated in the green practice, becoming a community of shared destiny for sustainable cause, changing their perception of high consumption, high pollution and high waste in the clothing industry, and experiencing the "power of clothing" of Uniqlo.

Koji Yanai, director and senior executive director of Fast Retailing Group, said: "To provide customers with comfortable and durable quality clothing is our long-term business goal. In addition to environmental problems, the world today is also facing other increasingly serious global problems. We will continue to evolve ideas, show the world a new way of clothing production, and contribute to the realization of social sustainable development. With the support and help of customers and partners, Fast Retailing The group will create a 'new industry' for LifeWear, and is committed to providing more consumers with LifeWear quality products, so that the society and people around the world can live a richer life. "

In the opinion of Lv Jianzhong, a director of the Board of Directors of the Global Report Initiative and a think tank expert of the CSR Research Center of Southern Weekend, this is the right way for entrepreneurs to lead sustainable business - from the perspective of socio-economic environment and creating shared value, and from the perspective of multiple stakeholders, Combine the important indicators of enterprise operation and development with the standards of low-carbon high-quality sustainable development.

As a giant in the global clothing industry, Fast Retailing Group, when facing the problem of sustainability in the clothing industry, handed over its answer: rebuild the production chain, establish a value cycle system for selling clothing, share sustainable production technology with peers, and organically integrate the enterprise's own industrial development and sustainable cause. Create value for more people through garment production, consumption, reconstruction and circulation.

For Liu Jing, this is exactly what he has spent his whole life trying to achieve - to change clothes, change common sense and change the world.