PARIS — Italian legwear and swimwear brand Calzedonia is taking on one of fashion’s most overlooked waste problems — discarded tights — with the launch of Life Re-Tights, a textile-to-textile recycling project that aims to transform used tights into new, high-quality yarns through an industrial-scale fiber separation process.
Backed by the European Union’s Life Program and developed in partnership with several European logistics and textile players, the initiative enables Calzedonia to chemically separate nylon, aka polyamide, and elastane from old tights and recover recycled nylon comparable in quality to virgin fiber.
It’s a move that could mark a significant step toward decarbonizing one of fashion’s most wasteful categories, with millions of pairs of tights ending up discarded in landfill each year after just a few wears.
That is due to the complexity of recycling mixed fibers, which has long been the bane of making textile-to-textile recycling a reality.
Under the Oniverse umbrella, the Calzedonia brand benefits from a vertically integrated production model which will allow tights production to move to a “closed loop” model — the holy grail that is the hope of the textile industry.
