The luxury and design industry is advancing hand in hand with technology. More and more projects are positioning sustainability as a value and main driver. This is the case of Scott Hamlin, an American entrepreneur, passionate about fashion. Hamlin founded Looptworks in 2009 with the mission to recycle surplus and turn it into amazing products.
He puts into practice the sustainability of recycling materials. In addition, with his company Looptworks, he wants people to become aware of the important social role they play in the environment around them. All of its sustainable and eco-friendly products are made in limited editions. They make t-shirts, wallets, purses, briefcases, and various accessories among others.
Looptworks is a Portland, Oregon-based company that reuses and recycles abandoned, pre-consumer and post-consumer materials into limited edition products. They are a design brand with a mission: to use only what already exists. All the materials they use to create their products are surplus to industry. As a B Corp certified brand, it’s widely regarded in the industry as a pioneer in circular textiles. This year, Looptwork was awarded a 2022 Best For The World honoree in the Community impact area.
Sustainability and Luxury Technology
Looptworks uses an online platform called Dress60 that allows you to learn about the company's recycling and reuse work. Using material resources that have already been part of fashion, Looptworks creates and gives life to everyday travel bags. In a sustainable, ecological way and, thanks to the technology they use, they do not lose the quality of the final product.
The brand’s technology is utilized as a channel to reach the most hidden corners of the industry. Fashion and luxury are not only the resource used and then treated to elaborate a unique piece, but a mix of resources, culture, passion, art and technology.
Innovative Use of Leftover Materials
Turning waste into value, Looptworks started out by collecting unprocessed textile "surplus", and turning it into T-shirts, jackets and other activewear. The following year, Looptworks discovered a profitable niche market: turning surplus wetsuits into accessories for laptops and tablets.
The company pays for almost all the textiles it uses with money. It strives to justify the material from a business point of view. If it can’t use it, it tries to buy it, preferably paying more than a wholesaler would pay. Hamlin explains that textile production accounts for a significant part of the carbon footprint and also the water footprint of a garment or shoe.
Recycling, therefore, involves a significant transformation of leftover materials. Hamlin estimates that, since its inception, Looptworks has saved almost 227 million litres of water for the environment by reusing textiles. However, he is convinced that recycling is only an intermediate step towards an even better way of dealing with materials, namely the creation of closed-loop systems.
Everything that is no longer useful, from plastic bottles to sports shoes, instead of being taken to landfill or incinerators, he says, should be broken down into its simpler source materials. In clothing, however, as in many other sectors, the source materials are mixed. As a result, it is not possible to separate the popular cotton-polyester-Lycra® fabrics into their constituent fibre types for recycling.
Looptworks once used 80,000 Southwest Airlines leather seat covers to design a stylish line of purses, bags and suitcases. While recycling the leather was much better than taking it to the landfill or incinerating it - and Looptworks offers a lifetime guarantee on recycled products - it is not enough, Hamlin says, in an era of increasing resource scarcity.
Few companies have the reverse logistics in place to take back products when they are no longer useful and there is little incentive at present to implement remanufacturing, but Hamlin believes that, over the next decade, green chemistry will produce enzymatic solutions capable of separating mixed fabrics.
Today, the big fashion brands, like Levi's and H&M, are starting to use leftover apparel, but the next big step is behavioural change, i.e. when companies that currently collect garments manage to transform them into viable raw materials for new products.