A new partnership reinforces Artistic Denim Mills Ltd.’s (ADM) commitment to drive circularity and traceability in the denim industry.
The Karachi, Pakistan-based vertically integrated denim company signed an exclusive global strategic partnership with Recover Textile Systems, S.L. to use the Spanish material sciences company’s certified and traceable recycled cotton in its collections. The multi-year partnership enables ADM to scale its use of recycled cotton from post-consumer denim and provide clients the level of transparency that is increasingly becoming vital to responsible business.
ADM and Recover are united in their mission to achieve circular fashion and to deliver innovative cost competitive recycled fibers. As part of the strategic alliance, they aim to to implement new industrial options and technology. In addition, together they will develop new fiber blends and yarns utilizing Recover recycled fiber with sustainable cotton, and Recover will install their fiber production equipment within ADM’s new facilities.
The new facility ADM is installing in Pakistan will produce 100,000 kg of yarn per day—enough to produce 250,000 yards of fabric a day, said Faisal Ahmed, ADM CEO.
ADM began sourcing recycled cotton from Recover’s facility in Spain about one year ago. After some collaboration and work to optimize the fiber composition, Ahmed is confident that now is the right time to push forward with the partnership, adding that several major brands plan to include Recover in their Spring/Summer 2022 collections.
“We have some expansion plans to bring in more machines in,” he said. “But step by step.”
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Trusted by companies like Kontoor Brands, Tommy Hilfiger and G-Star Raw, Recover is known for its low-impact, upcycled, high quality fiber made with unique recycling techniques that maintains the longest fiber length. The company collects and sorts old garments and textile waste, cutting and shredding into new Recover fiber, including R-Denim, Recover’s unblended recycled cotton fiber from post-consumer denim. The fibers are then spun into yarns for new applications.
One million units of jeans made from R-Denim saves 1.3 billion liters of water—the equivalent of 537 Olympic size swimming pools—and 2 million kg of CO2, or the annual emissions of 417 people.
Higg MSI Index shows that Recover makes the “lowest-impact cotton fiber in the global market and generously outperforms virgin equivalent fibers across all sustainability metrics.” The company measures and shares the environmental performance of its fiber products, and all sustainability claims are supported by third-party certifications as well as studies that Recover has conducted using the Life Cycle Assessment) methodology.
Additionally, the company reports that it is considered to be the only scalable sustainable fiber with traceability compared to other options. Last year, Recover scored funding from Story3 Capital to grow its recycled cotton fiber output by more than 16 times in the next five years.
Recover uses Global Recycled Standard (GRS) certification to ensure traceability along the supply chain. It is also developing BioTracer, a proprietary technology that can be fixed to the fiber and identified using bioluminescence under certain conditions. The company is currently working to make BioTracer cost-efficient before applying it to all of its product lines.