Repurposing
The fashionable fire hose
Fashion label Elvis & Kresse has built its business model on reclaiming industrial waste products such as decommissioned fire hoses, auction banners and military-grade parachute silk and upcycling them into luxury accessories such as belts, bags and wallets. The company works with institutions such as the fire brigade as well as manufacturers and retailers to take their waste – which is a free source of raw material – and in return, donates 50% of its profits to charity.
Repurposing, or upcycling as it is technically known, is a recycling process in which waste products are converted into new materials or products or higher quality and environmental value.
Most materials are cleaned before being prepared and handcrafted into new products. The fire hoses for instance are polished, exposing a bright red rubber with a nylon core that can be cut, riveted and stitched into belts. Elvis & Kresse’s determination to find a use for niche materials that are not currently recycled has seen it divert around 250 tons of industrial waste material from landfill since it launched in 2007.
The company is now planning to scale up its operations and enter new markets such as home wares. It is also working to minimize waste even further by incorporating the offcuts from its upcycling processes into new products.
Tomato-based car parts
Ford and Heinz are investigating the feasibility of using waste tomato skins as the basis of new composite materials for vehicle parts. Researchers at Ford are testing the durability of tomato fiber to see if it can act as a bio-plastic, which could potentially be used for vehicle wiring brackets and storage bins.
The collaboration could solve an ongoing problem for Heinz as it looks for novel ways to upcycle and repurpose the peels, stems and seeds that are left over from the 2m tons of tomatoes used annually to produce its tomato ketchup brand. Although the research is at an early stage, the technology conversion process has been validated.
The experiment forms part of a wider initiative at Ford to develop sustainable, lightweight plant-based plastic composites to reduce the use of petrochemicals in its manufacturing process. Its bio-based material profile now includes rice hull-filled electrical cowl brackets, soy foam seat cushions, and cellulose fiber-reinforced console components.
From fishing nets to flooring
Discarded fishing nets are being transformed into carpet tiles under a scheme called Net-Works, a collaboration between the Zoological Society of London, Project Seahorse Foundation for Marine Conservation, yarn producer Aquafil and carpet manufacturer Interface. The initiative is not only reducing marine waste, but also providing new sources of income for fisheries in some of the world’s poorest coastal communities.
As fishing nets are made from nylon, they are an ideal material for producing carpet yarn. By salvaging this waste stream, Interface saw an opportunity to create a closed-loop, inclusive business model. It has developed an upcycling process with its yarn supplier Aquafil to take waste nylon – not just from fishing nets, but from used carpet fluff and industrial offcuts – and repurpose it into 100% recycled nylon fiber with the same quality and performance as virgin fiber.
The Net-Works scheme began as an initial pilot in 2012 with four fisheries near Danajon Bank in the Philippines. In the first month, one ton of nets were collected for reprocessing. It has since been expanded to involve more local communities and hopes to scale up further to other regions such as India and West Africa.
The circular economy places an emphasis on the sharing of physical resources through a more collaborative form of consumption where customers pay for the benefit of using a product, rather than owning it outright. Companies will sell usage of their products through leasing or access arrangements allowing them to retain ownership of these goods through the entire lifecycle, extending their performance through maintenance, repair and reuse.