The global fashion industry ranks among the top environmental offenders, generating massive pollution and waste. Innovation is key to solving the problem — and one Danish fashion designer-turned-entrepreneur believes her groundbreaking tech could shift the industry, as highlighted by The Engineer.
Entrepreneur Trine Young founded Copenhagen-based startup Rodinia Generation, a brand that manufactures "low-carbon clothing." Drawing on her insider knowledge of the industry's flaws, Young developed a high-tech manufacturing solution that significantly reduces textile waste and pollution.
According to the Center for Biological Diversity, global textile consumption has risen 400% over the past 20 years, credited largely to fast fashion. The environmental toll of this consumption is staggering, from large amounts of textile waste to toxic wastewater pollution to planet-warming air pollution. In fact, the industry accounts for about 8% of global carbon pollution, the primary driver of planetary warming, per the United Nations Environment Programme.
"The fashion manufacturing industry is old," the Rodinia Generation site reads. "In fact, most of the technologies used today have not been updated since before the Internet was invented."
Frustrated by the industry's stagnation, Young transitioned from fashion designer to tech innovator to make a change.
"I spent a long time considering how we move forward in this industry," Young said. "The changes that I wanted to see for the industry, I couldn't make them happen from inside the hamster wheel, because I would be long gone and dead before we actually accomplished anything."
Her solution to the waste is new manufacturing tech adapted from lean manufacturing processes commonly used in automotive and industrial production. Young's innovative process cuts and prints textiles to order, drastically reducing waste and pollution — and with zero water use.
"We found a way to sort of bring the puzzle pieces together, as they were pretty incompatible in the beginning," Young told The Engineer of industrial cutting and dyeing machines the startup adapted for textile use. "These two major machines are a digital printer and a digital cutter, and they really hate each other … they really did not want to cooperate."
Young and her team created custom code and new hardware to make the two machines "cooperate." The result is a streamlined, fully dry manufacturing process that eliminates the need for water or dyes, traditionally significant sources of pollution in garment production. For context, the dyeing and treatment of textiles alone account for approximately 20% of global industrial wastewater, according to the United Nations.
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Set strict regulations 🚫 Young told The Engineer that the system can lower a garment's carbon footprint by up to 40%.
"Obviously, we use electricity," Young said. "So it's not a zero-carbon-footprint process."
Not only is the environmental footprint of the clothing smaller, but so is the needed factory space. The Engineer reports that a conventional garment factory producing 700,000 items annually requires around 21,000 square feet of space. Rodinia Generation's micro-factories, however, can achieve the same output in just 2,100 square feet.
But Young's vision extends beyond reducing planet-warming pollution and textile waste. She's also focused on reshaping the human side of the fashion supply chain. Rodinia Generation prints and cuts individual garment patterns and sleeves in Copenhagen. Then, the components are shipped to nearby Lithuania to be stitched into finished pieces of clothing.
Young hopes her tech can bring production closer to the point of consumption, minimizing the environmental footprint of shipping and reducing reliance on exploitative labor. By enabling localized production, she says her technology has the potential to improve working conditions and ensure fair wages for garment workers.
"We need to make sure that the new technologies are sustaining the workplaces rather than replacing them," she told The Engineer. "Our idea … is that we'll use technology to aid and enhance the quality of those jobs."
Rodinia Generation's impact has not gone unnoticed. The startup won Denmark's 2023 SDG Tech Award for Digital Solutions, a nod to its innovative approach to sustainable manufacturing.
With fast fashion continuing to dominate the global market, the stakes couldn't be higher. But if innovators like Young succeed, the fashion industry could transition from an environmental burden into a model of sustainability.
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