Workers reporter
From farming cotton indoors to changing waste clothes into new yarn, Hong Kong Analysis Institute of Textiles and Attire and the H&M Basis’s Open Lab is pioneering quite a lot of sustainable garment and textile options.
The 20,000-square-foot analysis and growth hub at Tseung Kwan O InnoPark’s Superior Manufacturing Centre, Open Lab goals to search out scalable options and functions for the worldwide textile and garment business to handle local weather change, mentioned HKRITA chief government Edwin Keh Yee-man.
The hub’s style future lab is a modular analysis house specializing in early-stage options. Its first undertaking, “farm-to-garment,” is a location-independent manufacturing line, spanning hydroponic cotton cultivation to yarn processing and garment knitting.
Indoor-grown cotton can save water and house standard strategies take, and harvests twice a yr as a substitute of as soon as with no pesticide used, Keh defined.
The lab’s pilot plant is an end-to-end upcycling line designed for industrial-scale demonstrations and know-how trials. It contains an AI-powered sensible garment sorting system and a brand new inexperienced machine to separate polyester fibers from PET-cotton blended textiles with a one-tonne each day recycling capability.
Whereas there was know-how for producing yarn from PET bottles, Keh mentioned {that a} recycling course of for waste clothes is uncommon.
