It’s a little-known fact that over 35% of all textiles used for clothing end up being discarded before the garments make it into the hands of the customer.¹ Most of these spare scraps are then rejected from the production cycle and end up being buried in various landfills where most synthetic material takes decades to decompose, adding to the fashion industry's already impressive laundry list of sustainability problems. A pilot project is currently underway in the city of Guangzhou, China to bring these scraps back into the supply chain.²

As the third largest metropolis in mainland China, Guangzhou is an economic powerhouse that is inextricably linked to the issue of fashion offcuts.³ The Parawin factory is one such facet of Guangzhou’s fashion industry, operating on the outskirts of the city as an outsourcer for several well-known industry names. Giant rolls of nylon are stored in warehouses before the factory’s pattern cutters and sewers transform them into swimwear and undergarments. In recent years, Parawin has developed a simple system to rescue some of its scrap production by partnering with an innovative nylon manufacturer.

Nylon was the first commercially successful synthetic plastic polymer. Instantly lauded for its ubiquitous properties and wide potential for commercial application, the thermoplastic was quickly taken up by the fashion industry, most famously in making women’s stockings, for its high strength, durability, and superior scratch resistance.⁴ Like all plastics, however, nylon’s success came at great environmental cost - something Parawin is now making a stand against.

Mochang Gong, a Parawin pattern-cutter, is one of the minds behind Parawin’s campaign to cut back on its environmental detriments. Gong operates a computer-aided design (CAD) system that precision cuts cloth into shapes that the sewers are then able to stitch into finished garments without creating additional waste material from human error in the process. While the CAD machines automatically optimize the amount of cloth used, a significant portion still ends up in the offcut pile once the operations are performed. Until two years ago, most of this scrap material was ending up in landfill sites. Then came the innovative partnership between Parawin and Aquafil - the Italian engineering company that fathers ECONYL, a brand dedicated to creating new yarn out of waste nylon products.

ECONYL initially took off in 2016 as a collaboration between Aquafil and four suppliers working in product transport and tube production via wire. The project progressively expanded to include bigger parts of existing sectors and also branched into new ones, such as the wire finishing sector and the fishing nets supply.⁵ Offcut nylon was ECONYL’s next piece in its growing circular supply chain, and Parawin proved to be a willing partner in the undertaking. Now Gong, on top of running the CAD software, also sorts the factory’s leftover nylon waste so that it can be sent to Aquafil to be processed into pristine nylon yarn.

International trade figures place China as the world's largest textile-exporting country, with the country’s factories accounting for over 39 percent of the world textile exports in 2019.⁶ Clarion calls for the accompanied growth of environmentally conscious production practices alongside this booming fashion industry are becoming increasingly more relevant, and Parawin is an example of how a single company can create a circular supply chain of its own in order to play their part in considering the environmental implications of business decisions. It’s high time for the fashion industry to refurbish their conventions from stiletto to top hat - environmental awareness is no longer just in, but quickly stepping up to become the new black.

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