Yee Chain International Co., Ltd. (Yee Chain) is a fabric supplier for international brands, connecting the industrial chain to achieve the first cloth-to-cloth cycle in Taiwan.
Carbon emissions and waste in the fashion industry
The fashion industry accounts for about 10% of global carbon emissions. To reach the 2050 netzero carbon emissions target, many carbon reduction plans must be tried and implemented to establish a circular fashion ecosystem. According to a BBC report, 92 million tons of waste textiles are currently produced globally every year, and the number is expected to reach 130 million tons by 2030. Due to high recycling costs, waste textiles are currently mostly buried or incinerated. Therefore, there is an urgent need for brands and supply chains to cooperate in finding a solution.
Connecting multi-party industrial chain cooperation to realize waste-free recycling
Most recycled fabrics on the market are made of recycled PET bottle yarn, but this fails to achieve the effect of intra-industrial recycling. The fashion industry must tackle the issue of the waste it produces and enable its post-industrial and post-consumer recycled fabrics to re-enter the market system instead of continuing to rely on raw materials and PET bottle material sources.
Yee Chain plays the role of integration, planning projects such as finding items to recycle, establishing recycling mechanisms, calculating raw materials, establishing schedules, etc. In collaboration with the Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research (CIER), Yee Chain also proposed to IKEA the implementation of a project commissioned by the Industrial Bureau of the Ministry of Economic Affairs, which entails using Far Eastern’s new cloth-to-cloth technology, collecting IKEA scrap products, carrying out Taiwan’s first full recycling process of discarded fabrics, and cooperating to produce IKEA member gifts.
Benefits
- This project implements the cloth-to-cloth technology process, actually producing finished products that the market needs, and fostering collaboration among stakeholders, serving as a pioneering demonstration for the industry.
- About 1,000 kilograms of waste fabrics can be reused instead of entering the waste system.