Textile Insight

ADVERTISEMENT S a ya is doing more to promote circularity while doing less harm to the environment. By expanding sources of recycled ber and innovating responsible manufacturing processes Saya leads the way to a more sustainable future. Saya is in the business of renewal. What that means is that Saya is always actively seeking new sources, and new processes, to advance sustainable solutions, driven by the fact that the supply of plastic to recycle is not endless. e company's latest innovation takes direct aim at solving one of the biggest impacts of the textile industry: material waste. Most people don't realize this but every year between 20 and 40 percent of new yardage becomes wasted fabric in the form of cutting room scraps and overstock. Although the problem of pre-consumer waste isn't obvious to the general public, it is clearly a challenge facing the textile community and industry at large. e rise of fast fashion and just-in-time delivery, along with the escalating trend of e-commerce has put greater demand on global manufacturers to prepare greige and fabrics earlier and earlier in the production cycle. But when markets change abruptly, as experienced in extreme measure during the pandemic, inventories swell with what becomes deadstock. Saya has a cutting edge renewal solution ready to address this global problem. It's called the Rscuw Project, a commercialized recycling program that successfully turns the inconvenient reality of textile garment waste into an opportunity for progress. e company's ecient, centralized system takes rolls of fabric and ocuts that are not used to make a garment and transforms them into durable and functional polyester bers. Saya is not alone in focusing on the issue of pre-consumer textile waste. Indeed it will take a collective eort by industry members to succeed in the goal of creating a modern closed loop textile supply chain. However, Saya's forward thinking approach to renewal technology sparked the company to act quickly with investment and scalability placing Saya in a leadership position. "Continuous innovation in renewal technologies is important to increase the yield and of the recycled goods collected," explains Saya's Director of R&D Jack Chen. "is is the only way we can someday achieve circularity." n Saya's latest innovation takes direct aim at solving one of the biggest impacts of the textile industry: material waste. Charting a Sustainable Future: A Timeline of SAYA's Strides in Renewal Technology SAYA Cutting Edge Renewal of Overstock Fabric to New Yarn 2010-2015 Launch bottle-to-textile recycling Draw and spin fibers with post-consumer recycling content PET (rPET) chips from Japan Received certification from Global Recycled Standard (GRS) 2.0 2016-2018 Expanded to new streams of GRS certified rPET flake to include sources from Japan, Taiwan, China, Vietnam, Thailand, Philippine, Indonesia and USA Launched antimony-free virgin PET (titanium-based catalyst) Increased from recycling 32,000 tonnes/year of plastic bottles into rPET yarn in 2018 to 65,000 tonnes/year in 2019 2020 Expanded recycled processing capacity to 174,000 tonnes/year GRS 4.0 certified bluesign® certification for select manufacturing sites for yarns Pilot SAC's Higg Facility Environmental Module (FEM) and adoption of Higg Material Sustainability Index (MSI) to assess environmental impacts of materials and processes Converting garment cutting scraps and overstock fabrics into new yarn – the SAYA Rscuw Project We strive to build upon our successes by finding innovative ways to improve the sustainability performance of our products.

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