REFIBRA™ Retrospective: The Backstory
By Michael Kininmonth
In early 2011, three separate events contrived to significantly influence my thoughts about my view of the environment and my view of the products that Lenzing manufactures.
American photographer Chris Jordan won the Prix Pictet Commission for his shocking photographs of albatross chicks on Midway Atoll, a remote and isolated island in the middle of the Pacific. His project documented nesting baby chicks being fed bellies full of plastic by their parents, who soar out over the vast polluted ocean collecting what looks to them like food to bring back to their young. On this diet of human trash, tens of thousands of albatross chicks died each year on this island alone, from starvation, toxicity and choking.
Not a single piece of plastic in any of these photographs was moved, placed, manipulated, arranged or altered in any way. These were the actual stomach contents of baby birds more than 2,000 miles from the nearest continent. It is testament to humanity’s disinterest in environmental matters that plastic pollution is only just becoming a concern several years on.
The second event was that I final finished reading my copy of the now seminal book “Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things.” I had invited one of the co-authors, Prof. Dr. Michael Braungart, to speak at a R.I.T.E. group conference some years earlier, and it was his outspoken style and original thinking that led me to explore his work further.
Along with William McDonough, he extolled the virtues of circular thinking, where a circular economy replaces one assumption—disposability—with another: restoration. At the core, the theory aimed to move away from the “take, make, and dispose” system by designing and optimizing products for multiple cycles of disassembly and reuse.
The main proposal was that the cradle-to-grave model of industrial systems in which material flows on a linear path, from extraction through a brief use phase, before ending up as waste would be replaced by a cradle-to-cradle model of industrial systems in which material flows cyclically in continuous biological or technical nutrient cycles. All waste materials are productively reincorporated into new production and use phases.
The third event was a casual discussion one evening over a few beers with the head of Lenzing R&D. Of the many subjects discussed—life, religion, work—the subject I remember most was a story about taking an old cotton towel from his home and using it in an experiment to produce (in this case) viscose fiber in the laboratory. This was the idea that, in theory, any cellulose mass could be employed as a raw material source for Lenzing fiber production. This was the “eureka moment”: Why not spin fibers from waste cotton?
Early in 2012, I was at a U.K. conference and was introduced by John Mowbray to Nick Ryan of Worn Again, and over the course of the coffee break it became clear from our conversation that we were working towards similar goals, with the idea of developing closed loop recycling for textiles and fibers.
R&D budgets in Lenzing at the time were limited, and so I called an old textile contact at Manchester University, who eventually secured funding from Lord Sainsburys’ Gatsby Foundation for a PhD student to work on the concept. A year of slow progress convinced me that I really needed the expertise of Lenzing R&D, especially the Pulp Group. So I hatched a cunning plan, to get the “buy-in” from the Lenzing management.
I learned that the head of sustainability of a large European apparel retailer was due to visit Lenzing in early 2013. So I called him and outlined the theory that I was trying to convert into reality. He loved it, and so I suggested that he innocently ask the question to our management during his two-day visit. The rest is history, as they say, and within weeks, a project team was formed and the might of Lenzing R&D swung into action.
The result of that research and development is TENCEL™ x REFIBRA™ Lyocell, Lenzing’s cellulose fiber made of recycled cotton scraps and wood that launched on the market in 2017.
Today, many technical barriers remain if we are to achieve our vision, but we are proud that we were the first company to commercially launch such a fiber, and year-on-year we are making incremental improvements as we move to increase the amount and type of waste used to produce our fiber.
This is part one of Carved in Blue’s REFIBRA™ Retrospective series. Read the second part of the series here to see a timeline of the fiber’s major milestones.