Calzedonia Teams Up with Companies to Advance Tights Recycling Initiative

Calzedonia, for textile recycling. The Italian intimate apparel company has embarked on textile recycling of stockings, one of the products with the highest turnover in fashion, to transform them back into fabric while maintaining the quality of the original virgin fibers. The company has launched the Life Re-Tights program, in collaboration with other players in the value chain (such as Golden Lady) and European Union funding, and expects to reduce hosiery waste to zero in three years, according to WWD.

Every year, millions of stockings are discarded after having been used for a very short time,“ explained the company in a statement, “and because they are composed mainly of polyamide and elastane, they are also very difficult to recycle and often end up in landfills”. The technology developed by Calzedonia makes it possible to separate the two materials and recover the recycled nylon for reuse, “with a quality equivalent to virgin nylon”.

The project initially began three years ago, in the company’s R&D offices. Today, each machine developed by the company will have an annual capacity to recycle 1.6 million socks, and the company has left the door open to commercializing this process as a new line of business, as explained by the company.Federico Fraboni, sustainability director of the Oniverse group, the company’s holding company, explained in statements reported by the same media.

Calzedonia operates three factories solely to produce hosiery

Calzedonia will be able to benefit directly from the resulting recycled material, as it carries out much of its production in a verticalized structure. As the company explained to the same media outlet, it currently operates three factories dedicated exclusively to the production of stockings, along with two others that manufacture both stockings and socks. “We produce a large part of our garments, especially stockings,“ Fraboni emphasized.

In practice, consumers will be able to deposit used stockings at different collection points in the group’s stores that will be set up, along with various awareness-raising campaigns. The nylon resulting from the process will be integrated back into its own value chain, while the elastane, which represents around 15% of each sock, will be sold to other external companies.

To carry out the entire recycling process, Calzedonia has teamed up with different European companies, and has benefited from grants from the EU Life program. “We started this project because we are constantly looking for ways to make progress in reducing waste,“ explained the executive.