Citizen Wolf, Upcycled

For our debut yarn range, we collaborated with Sydney-based sustainable fashion label Citizen Wolf to turn their post–production offcuts into spun yarn.

 

After Otis and I returned from our tour of The Billie System in 2019, we hit the ground running trying to find someone who could supply us with enough textile waste to develop our first upcycled yarn.

We had two key criteria for our search: the waste had to be of entirely natural fibre content (i.e. wool, cotton, silk, hemp, ramie or linen) whether pure or blended, and be knitted: jersey, rib, double knit, full/half Milano, pique, terry, jacquard or any iteration of these made on a circular knitting machine.

 

Fibre recovery machinery varies greatly in quality and function mill to mill, but The Billie team advised us that their system performed best with knitted fabrics, which are typically composed of thicker yarns and are of a looser, more malleable structure than their dense, woven counterparts. This makes knits far easier to mechanically open– and the less aggressively you need to process a fabric, the more likely the recovered fibre it yields will retain its length, making it exponentially more spinnable. As this was our first ever test of the mill's capacities, we were keen to keep things simple and economical, and heed this best practice advice.

 

 

Although we got a few nibbles, we soon realised it was going to be a challenge finding someone who could ensure their textile waste was of entirely natural fibre content. Everywhere we looked it was a world of synthetics and synthetic blends.

We ran afoul of our goal a few times when collecting waste from fashion brands that had assured us their waste was 'all-natural', only to return to our studio, unpack their boxes and discover that was far from the truth. It was disillusioning to discover how many people just wanted to dump their waste on us, with no real care for what we were trying to do with it.

 

Finally, we got an enthusiastic response from the legends over at Ethical Clothing Australia, who agreed to mention our textile waste hunt in their monthly e-newsletter, which got sent out to all their accredited fashion labels, including Citizen Wolf. Aldona Brangwin– the brand’s production lead– saw this newsletter and got in touch. She described that they'd been hustling hard to develop circular solutions for their post–production scraps and offcuts; all t-shirt weight jerseys composed of only organic cotton, merino, silk and hemp. In other words, exactly what we were after.

 

We jumped in the car and drove out to their St Peters factory to take a look (FYI they've since moved to Marrickville) and were thrilled with the quality of their fabrics. Equally as impressive was their commitment to storing every offcut they'd ever produced as they pursued a variety of circular waste solutions (including supplying offcuts to an industrial worm farm for composting, forming coalitions with other locally-made Aussie brands to investigate recovery pathways in Europe, and upcycling bigger scraps into tote bags and scarves).

 

We collected as much scrap as we could fit into our little hatchback that day, and returned every few weeks to collect more scraps until we felt we had enough to send off to the Billie. However, we soon discovered it wasn't just a matter of collecting enough scrap overall, but ensuring we had enough of each colour of jersey scrap.

Because The Billie System doesn't bleach or dye anything, the colour of your upcycled yarn is entirely determined by the colour of the waste you recycled to make it. Certain scrap colours are going to take longer to amass, while others will be a lot more abundant. For example, we had no shortage of black scraps, simply because people buy way more black clothing, while vivid green or bright orange were much less common.

 

In addition to their fibre recovery line, The Billie System also houses an optical colour sorting machine. For this, waste fabrics are deposited onto a conveyor belt, pass beneath a camera which can identify up to nine distinct colours, and then shunted off the belt into their corresponding colour receptacle. This sorting tech becomes extremely valuable when processing bigger volumes, but because this was our initial run we wanted to get a first-hand understanding of how grouping and combining colours would affect the resulting colourways, so opted to do our own colour pre-sort.

In the end we decided on five colour groups:

• pinks, purples, reds and oranges = 'musk' pink
• greens, browns and warm neutrals = 'sage' green
• black, navy and dark greys = 'charcoal' grey-black
• whites and pale greys = 'chalk' white
• pale and mid blues and mid greys = 'denim' blue

Just like the colour sorting, I often find the best way to understand something is to roll up my sleeves and do it myself. So once all the scraps were boxed up and we’d organised shipping to Hong Kong, Otis and I rented a truck and hand delivered our shipment to the export drop-off bay at Port Botany in Sydney– the largest container port in Australia.

This was a pretty familiar sight to Otis, who had worked for a Taiwanese logistics company in Hong Kong for almost a decade when I met him– but it was a very new experience for me; weaving our little truck through towering canyons of stacked shipping containers and being yelled at by boom gate operators, drop-off bays the size of stadiums and giant gantry cranes as tall as the Anzac Bridge.

It gave me a new insight into the sheer scale of stuff coming into and out of Australia, and the colossal infrastructure required to facilitate all this trade– the whole port was a monument to globalisation.

 

A few weeks later our shipment arrived at The Billie System in Tai Po, Hong Kong to undergo fibre recovery– after which the recovered fibre would be relayed to Novetex Textile's spinning mill in Zhuhai, Guangdong Province, mainland China, to be blended with virgin fibre and spun into yarn.

Over the coming weeks The Billie team sent us reports and progress updates on how they’d gone working with these scraps, and we were thrilled to hear they were able to achieve a yield rate of around 86%. The lost 14% was fibre that came out too short to spin and was captured in the machinery before it reached the carding and slivering stages.

Post-production waste of this quality often achieves higher yield rates, because although the fabrics have been cut up into narrow and irregularly shaped pieces, the fibres that compose them are essentially brand new– they're of optimal strength, having never endured wear and tear or the gradual degradation of natural fibre that comes with age. Also, because we sourced these fabrics directly from the manufacturer, we had total clarity as to the fabric's real fibre content and what chemical, printing or dyeing process they had undergone– all of which can affect the fibre recovery process and, if unknown, needs to be confirmed through assessment, trial and error.

 

When the first bales of slivered fibre came off the recovery line, we finally got to see what all those months of collecting, sorting and shipping had led to. The fibre composition of the Citizen Wolf offcuts came back at around 60% cotton and 40% wool, with trace amounts of silk, Tencel and hemp folded in.

To spin this into yarn, we chose to blend the recovered fibre with virgin Australian merino wool from Gostwyck farms in New South Wales. Novetex had been sourcing merino from Gostwyck for years to produce their signature range of merino yarns, so they had a stock volume of this wool ready to go for our consignment.

 

The final yarn we developed carries that story forward: a 10ply/Aran weight blend of 32% upcycled organic cotton, 23% upcycled merino wool, and 45% virgin Australian merino wool. The yarn combines the dry, breathable handle of cotton with the springy loft of merino. It’s a combination that feels equally at home in cooler months layered up, or worn lighter through the shoulder seasons– and I've had a fantastic time working with this yarn to sample everything from beanies to sweaters to bumbags.