REFACT (INDUO®)

From “water-repellent” fabric to advanced recycling

Every second, the equivalent of a garbage truck full of clothes is burned or abandoned in a landfill and, at the same time, the demand for cellulose fibers increases by 10% every year. Producing more and more virgin fibers and letting our old clothes go up in smoke is an ecological and economic aberration that must be stopped. To meet this challenge, the fabric producer INDUO has launched the REFACT project.

In the world of fashion, INDUO, a specialist in textile innovation, is one of the leading players. This Franco-British start-up, based in Lille and London, has filed nine patents and is known for having launched a revolutionary “water-repellent” fabric that resists stains and perspiration. Awarded numerous prizes in France and internationally – including Dubai in 2018, where it was voted one of the top 20 fashion and retail start-ups in the world – it is now focusing all its research on natural materials and the recycling of used clothing through the REFACT process. This breakthrough technology, strongly supported by ADEME, BPI and the European Union, has the particularity of allowing the recycling of a huge deposit of old clothes that no other technology can currently recycle. Indeed, it allows to treat very roughly sorted used textiles, mixtures of fibers, multicolored clothes and clothes with zippers or buttons. This is the case for the vast majority of our textile waste and is currently an obstacle to its recycling. The viscose fibers produced by Refact are 100% recycled and 100% recyclable. As qualitative as virgin viscose fibers, they are also much less impacting for the environment: producing a recycled viscose yarn is 2 times less impacting than producing a virgin viscose yarn and 6 times less than a cotton yarn.