An experiment in micro scale, on-demand textile recycling, developed by The Hong Kong Research Institute of Textiles and Apparel (HKRITA).
Otis and I are in Hong Kong this week, rendezvousing with the High Tea with Mrs Woo sisters Juliana, Rowena and Angela Foong, to embark on a couple of textile recycling field trips. For the first of these, we all jumped on the enviably reliable MTR and whizzed up to Tsuen Wan in Hong Kong's Northwest to visit The Mills– an historic factory campus recently renovated into a new shopping, education and exhibition centre.
This was once the site of the Nan Fung textile factory– one of Hong Kong's most productive cotton spinning mills back in the 50s, 60s and 70s, and a major contributor to Hong Kong's concurrent reputation as a textile manufacturing and export powerhouse.
There were once many mills like this dotted around Hong Kong, but as China began to open up under Deng Xiaoping in the 80s– accepting foreign investment, technology, and offering the world a seemingly endless source of inexpensive labour– much of Hong Kong's milling activity migrated to the mainland, and by the 90s had all but disappeared from Hong Kong. Nan Fung held out longer than most, finally ceasing operations in 2008.
The Mills redevelopment seeks to pay homage to Hong Kong's rich textile history in its design, curation of vendors, and exhibitions. CHAT– the Centre for Heritage, Arts and Textiles– extends across the entire top floor of The Mills's central quadrangle. They’ve also dedicated space to consider the future of textile manufacturing, hosting HKRITA's G2G (Garment to Garment) System– which the High Tea sisters, Otis and I had all come to see.
Built inside a glass-walled, 12m long x 3m wide shipping container on The Mill's ground floor, the system comprises a sequence of super scaled-down milling machinery. Customers bring in old clothing they no longer want, and this machinery can shred, tease and recover fibre from these clothes, blend this fibre with a proportion of virgin fibre, spin this blended fibre into yarn and then use this yarn to knit a new seamless sweater on a Shima Seiki Wholegarment knitting machine.
We met with HKRITA team manager Ryan Wong, who explained to us how each piece of machinery worked, and the team's efforts to refine and streamline the system over the past five years of its operation.
It was fascinating to hear from Ryan about the many challenges such an approach presents– one of the greatest being the total unpredictability and diversity of post-consumer waste they were given by the public.
Each garment would yield a different quality of fibre depending on their content and fabric type (woven/knit, fine/heavy, cotton/wool/synth etc). Some were easier to recover while retaining good fibre length and strength, while others were finicky and arduous. Accordingly the service lead time could vary between four days to two weeks.
Each run required a different procedure to navigate every variable: the number of times the textiles had to be fed through the recovery machine, how much cleaning and carding the fibre needed, what ratio of virgin fibre to blend it with and how best to spin this unique blend into a yarn strong enough to withstand industrial machine knitting. All while ensuring the resulting new textile would be of appealing colour, texture and drape, and only ever having a few hundred grams of recovered fibre to get it right.
As the sisters and I gawked at the mind-boggling complexity of this process, Ryan reassured us that all this learning, testing and measuring was the whole point of the system.
HKRITA is a research institute, and the G2G system is very much an educational experiment first and a commercial enterprise second. The years of data, feedback and qualitative accounting being the real pay out, helping them to envision a roadmap for how this tech might edge closer to financial and logistical viability.
The team had already put some of this learning into practice. To reduce the labour of relaying materials from machine to machine, they had collaborated with a mainland Chinese tech company to combine their recovery, fibre cleaning and carding units into one big, integrated unit.
To resolve the challenge of the fibre's unpredictable yield quality, an optical sensor was added to the last phase of this machine, which would assess whether the recovered fibre was ready to be ejected (and then relayed to the spinning machine), or automatically fed back through the combined recovery/cleaning/carding unit until it achieved optimum spinnability. They called this advancement G2G phase II.
Other attempts to evolve the system were less successful. At one point the team had hoped to load the entire system onto the back of a truck (the original reason it was contained inside a standard 40-foot long shipping container) and make it mobile. The idea being you could drive it around to different Hong Kong neighbourhoods and run an in-situ recycling service.
Unfortunately the sensitive, gravity-dependent calibration of the machinery, and the force with which their components rotate, gyrate, oscillate, zig and zag meant that anything less than extremely stable, solid ground would not do.
This reminded me of a friend the High Tea sisters and I share back in Melbourne who operates their own accessories–sized Shima Seiki knitting machine, and recently told me that the knitting carriage jolts back and forth so powerfully that it has begun to rend the foundations of her studio floor, which she now needs to get partially re-stumped!
Inevitably the G2G team's lofty ambitions lead us to question how much the system cost, and whether it could ever become commercially viable– to which Ryan stressed things still had a very long way to go.
Their average output is between 40–50 recycled sweaters per month, and the service cost to customers is just over AUD$100 per recycled garment.
Meanwhile each separate milling unit costs tens of thousands to custom build, with two attendants required to run things at all times. A basic Shima Seiki Wholegarment knitting machine will easily cost over $100k (with newer, top of the line models costing as much as $250k).
At least the system's compact size means you could store it in your backyard and save on commercial rent!
Although expensive and experimental, I greatly appreciate how the G2G project challenges us to imagine radical alternatives to mass-manufacturing, and gives the public insight into the complex realities of textile recycling.
What originally drew me to this system was simply the advent of milling machinery this small, which is a rare find. After our visit to the International Textile Machinery tradeshow in Istanbul earlier this year, it was clear that the predominant narrative of the textile tech industry remains one of endless expansion, proliferating output and the eternal pursuit of new frontiers of cheap labour and minimal regulation. Trying to explain to some of these players that we were looking for a small machine line for our indie practice in expensive, far away, sparsely populated Australia was... awkward.
Most were staunchly unwilling to make things smaller, and had never even considered the idea. Bigger was the only direction.
So discovering G2G's work to shrink things– albeit to a scale far smaller than we're aiming for– was promising. Even more so was HKRITA's willingness to facilitate discussions between us and the Chinese tech company they commissioned to make their machinery, to discover whether they could custom-build a suitably scaled fibre recovery unit for our proposed Tasmanian micro mill.
Wherever this connection leads, it was invigorating to learn about the gritty technical realities of such a system and to probe the expertise of the practitioners who run it. Beyond this, the High Tea sisters, Otis and I were stunned by HKRITA's willingness to invest in such a high cost experiment, and their commitment to learning through diligent practice and specialisation.
