Climate change: Billie spins yarn from textile wastes with neither water nor chemicals in Novetex’s bid to cut emissions and wastes
- Although cotton grows on 2.4 per cent of the world’s cropland, it accounts for 22.5 per cent of insecticide use and 10 per cent of pesticides, McKinsey said
- An estimated 2,700 litres of water is needed to produce a single cotton T-shirt, enough to sustain a person for 900 days, according to the WWF’s calculation
When Ronna Chao returned to her family’s yarn spinning business in 2010 after stints at Goldman Sachs and Tommy Hilfiger, Hong Kong was spewing out about 234 tonnes of textile waste every day, most of them either going into landfills or being incinerated.
Any recycling then involved water and hazardous chemicals, which would end up polluting the waterways. Chao turned to the collective wisdom at Novetex Textiles, one of the world’s largest single-site yarn spinners founded half a century earlier by her grandfather Chao Kuang-piu. She wanted to create a clean recycling process that could produce high-value yarn.
“My vision and hope is that through innovation, we can continue to build our capabilities and offerings so that we can continue to play a role, and more importantly, have a meaningful presence in this industry,” Chao said in an interview with South China Morning Post. “Creating the Billie system was among those steps towards innovation.”
The textile supply chain is the source of multifaceted environmental degradation. Although cotton grows on only 2.4 per cent of the world’s cropland, it accounts for 22.5 per cent of the world’s insecticide use and 10 per cent of all pesticide application, McKinsey said last year.
Some 2,700 litres (713 gallons) of water is required to produce a single cotton T-shirt, enough to sustain one person for 900 days, based on calculation by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF).
