About 100 billion garments are produced in the world every year. Not all of them have a long life and they inexorably end up causing enormous damage to our planet. Only a small fraction of them is recycled while most of the garments are disposed of by incineration or landfill, significantly impacting the global environment and ecosystems.

From this urgency, which can no longer be postponed, comes the RENU™ project developed by Itochu, one of the world’s largest players in apparel textiles.

Pontetorto who has promoted circularity as a founding value since the beginning of its long history and today represents one of the most advanced realities in sustainability, has fully embraced this initiative by returning to the future and thus to “textile to textile.”

“The RENU™ project will provide multiple solutions to the fashion industry,” stresses Marco Toccafondi, general manager of Pontetorto, “which creates large amounts of waste and aims to realize a new virtuous model with the achievement of circular economy. This is a difficult challenge, but one that will be taken up to redesign the sustainable value chain. We have always promoted ethical and responsible production, and we have seen enormous potential here, which then has been in our DNA since 1952. With RENU™ we promote a true circular economy by closing the production loop.”

The unique technology applied by RENU™ makes it possible to recycle old polyester garments and fabrics, while the conventional approach to recycling can only use selected PET bottle waste with a system that is no longer sustainable. RENU™’s depolymerization and refining processes are the key to producing a new polyester with properties compatible with virgin products.