🧦 Renewcell Files for Bankruptcy
Arvin Goods Socks, Tyler The Creator x LV, Lulu Lemon Recycles? Renewcell Goes BK, Nirvana's Final Concert, Take Back Bag
'The Clean Up' is a weekly newsletter that mixes in some Arvin Goods news, products, as well as stories we saw during the week that are worth a share. From books to podcasts, sustainability to business news, we try to keep it interesting, and fun. If you are not a subscriber, sign up and join everyone who receives The Clean Up directly in their inbox every Sunday.
Arvin News
Happy Sunday!
This past week a significant player in the textile recycling industry filed for bankruptcy. The company is called Renewcell. Their product is called CIRCULOSE® it is made from post-consumer textile waste. In simple terms, the technology can break down post-consumer apparel to cellulose through a chemical recycling process. This is referred to as textile-to-textile recycling. i.e. they can recycle millions of old jeans into a fiber that can be used to make new jeans, meaning we don’t need to grow more cotton.
They filed for bankruptcy because the retail and branded clothing industry did not buy their product. We will let the MBA folks, and Economists break down why this happened and how. We will stick to the basics of our market.
There are a ton of innovations in the textile industry right now. There is no shortage of new technologies to help us move forward with a lower impact. However, there is currently a slowdown in the investment community related to this because the adoption of these alternatives is too slow. The bottom line is that retailers and brands are not committed to this (clean) path because there are too many cheap and fast (dirty) available materials, and consumers are not informed.
Our opinion of why this is happening is simple. A lack of consumer education. The average consumer has no clue what chemical recycling in textiles means. Textile-to-textile recycling is a foreign concept to someone just trying to buy some pants. “It’s just a t-shirt”. “It’s just a pair of socks”. We hear this a lot, it is not clear to most consumers how this harmless t-shirt in their closet could have an impact, let alone how or why you would take extra steps to recycle it. Because of this, brands and retailers are not under pressure to change. Because they are not changing the supply chain is not changing, and companies like Renewcell who have new, clean alternative products cannot gain sales traction where and when they need it. And lastly, because of this, the investment community hesitates.
Consumer education, and voting with your dollars is the only way we will see significant change and mainstream market adoption of these solutions. Read the Forbes article below for a more sophisticated explanation. We just make socks.😉
Hope you enjoy today’s Clean Up. We would love to hear from you. Comment here on substack hit us on social, or email us at info@arvingoods.com. Have a great week. Cheers,
Team AG ✌️🧦
Stories Of The Week…
Fashion
First Look: Tyler, The Creator Designed a Capsule Collection for Pharrell’s Louis Vuitton - GQ
At Louis Vuitton Men’s, Pharrell Williams has been dropping hit after hit. And his next surefire smash features the hottest collaborator in fashion, music, and just about everything else: Tyler, the Creator, who he tapped to design a standalone collection for the French house. The capsule is out globally March 21.
Pharrell and Tyler have worked together for years; Pharrell’s vocals and sonic fingerprints can be heard across Tyler’s discography, and Tyler most recently contributed a verse on Pharrell’s 2022 single “Cash In Cash Out.” But the collection (officially dubbed the “Louis Vuitton Spring 2024 Men’s Capsule by Tyler, The Creator”) marks their first fully-fledged fashion project together.
“Tyler has been my close friend and collaborator for years and we’ve always connected on music and design,” said Pharrell in an email. “This collaboration is unique to Louis Vuitton because it’s a natural extension of our LVERS philosophy, building on our network of incredible artists and creatives. There are so many elements specific to Tyler built into these pieces and it’s been inspiring to see him hone in on his craft and collaborate with him for this Spring collection.” 🐝🛹
Design
Lululemon wants to recycle your leggings back into leggings - Fast Company
Over the past five years, Lululemon’s Align leggings and shirts have become a $1 billion business, bolstering the company’s projected $9.6 billion in global revenues. Demand for the shirts means the company is now making millions of these garments a year.
The key ingredient of the Align garments is nylon, which is blended with lycra for stretch. Since both of these are plastic-based materials, they’ll end up sitting in landfills for centuries, where they won’t biodegrade but instead, break into tiny fragments called microplastics that will end up in our oceans and food systems.🧘🏻♽
Industry
What We Can Learn From Renewcell’s Financial Struggles - Forbes
Ordinarily, I subscribe to the belief that in sustainability discussions, opinions are redundant; we should lean on the science. But, yesterday a conflation of both was enlisted in an outcry for answers as to why Renewcell, fashion’s leading textile-to-textile recycling technology, had filed for bankruptcy. The science (and resulting technology) is solid; the route to profitability less so. And it’s the latter that really matters.
Yes, Renewcell’s advanced textile recycling process works—I saw it with my own eyes at the inaugural launch in Sweden of their first (and now painfully numbered) Renewcell 1. But I wondered, from inception, how a facility in Sweden could help fashion brands—Renewcell’s target customer—to solve the problem they seemed to care about most: recycling post-consumer waste. ‘Old jeans turned into new jeans’ was effectively the technology’s strap line, and a fair one in terms of the company’s ambition and technical potential. But the reality was that their advanced chemical recycling process—like all others of its kind—requires a highly specific waste input (at least 95% cotton, at the time I visited Renewcell 1); a need best met by post-industrial (off-cut waste) on factory floors in manufacturing countries, not discarded clothes from consumers. 👖♻️
Entertainment
Nirvana's Last Concert (Full Remaster+Video) March 1, 1994 - YouTube