Seamless innovation for fashion

This startup has created a heat-dissolvable stitch that promises to shake up the textile recycling sector.

It’s been estimated that every second, enough clothes to fill a truck are either burned or dumped in landfill across the globe, largely thanks to the rise of fast fashion and the complexity of garment recycling.

With less than one per cent of garments being properly recycled, the fashion industry has become one of the world’s top five polluting sectors.

Enter Resortecs, a Belgium-based eco-fashion startup that has developed a special thread that could help change that. These stitches are designed to dissolve at high temperatures, making it far easier to recycle clothes such as jeans and jackets.

Disassembly by design

The Resortecs solution has been specifically designed to tackle one of the big bottlenecks in textile recycling – garment disassembly. The solution has two prongs: Smart Stitch and Smart Disassembly (see tech box).

Clothes using both of these have half the carbon impact other clothing generates, the company says, and its patented thermal disassembly tech is five times faster than traditional disassembly methods and makes it possible to recycle up to 90 per cent of the original fabric.

“Our goal is to reduce the textile industry’s carbon footprint by 40 billion tonnes of CO2 by 2040,” Resortecs co-founder and CEO Cédric Vanhoeck says.

“For that, we have to think big and take design for disassembly beyond fashion.”

A stitch in time

Vanhoeck and Vanessa Counaert founded the company in 2017, and in 2021 they raised over €1.8M to fund R&D and start piloting their solution.

The company is now collaborating with several major brands with the aim of creating clothes with recycling in mind right from the beginning.

Companies such as Bershka, Decathlon, and H&M now use Resortecs’ Smart Stitch heat-dissolvable threads in products that are sold in over 60 countries.

In one example, Wedze, the winter-sports brand of French company Decathlon, last year partnered with Resortecs to launch a fully recyclable ski jacket.

Normal ski jackets are extremely difficult to recycle due to their complex material composition. “Clients who want to join our circularity efforts can return their used jackets when they are no longer fit for use, and we’ll recycle them into new products,” Wedze said.

"Our goal is to reduce the textile industry’s carbon footprint by 40 billion tonnes of CO2 by 2040. For that, we have to think big and take design for disassembly beyond fashion.”

The tech

Resortecs’ system includes Smart Stitch, a heat-dissolvable thread which is compatible with existing stitching machines. Its Smart Disassembly solution is a high-tech industrial-scale oven that separates the different components of clothing. The oven has little to no oxygen inside which preserves the fabrics’ quality and prevents the clothes from burning, even at temperatures higher than 200° C. Together this enables fashion brands to create products that can be easily sorted and disassembled for recycling.

Who funds it

In April, Resortecs raised €2.2M in a seed investment round led by ScaleFund and Finance&Invest.brussels. Last year it received a €2.5M grant from the European Innovation Council (EIC) Accelerator.

Is it ready to roll

With the seed investment and EIC grant combined, Resortecs has €4.7M to boost production this year and the company plans to increase its disassembly capacity tenfold in 2024.