Carbon Recycling & Programmable Textiles to Make Fashion Sustainable and Intelligent
How Teks-Til Is Changing the World By Changing What We Wear
Teks-Til’s mission is to reverse the wastefulness of fast fashion and drive a paradigm of textile sustainability.
We offer a carbon-neutral, sustainably-sourced line of intelligent apparel, and envision a future for fashion that is fashionable for both its user and for the planet.
Presently, the industry is not so fashionable.
Hanging right in your closet is the world’s second largest polluter.
Second only to oil, fashion is the most polluting industry in the world.
Think about that. Wearing your favorite hoodie is as bad for the environment as driving a car.
The fashion and textiles industries account for 10% of global carbon emissions and 20% of global wastewater. And in developing countries where many textiles are produced, water consumption and contamination lead to ecological and anthropological issues. 90% of the wastewater there is discharged into natural water systems untreated, compromising sources of drinking water for local communities and making portions of rivers uninhabitable for wildlife.
On the consumer end, water pollution and material waste is just as bad. 85% of the microfibers and microplastics that pollute our oceans enter our waterways when we wash clothes made of synthetic fibers and 85% of textiles that could very well be recycled end up in landfills, often for minor inconveniences like tears or for a change of preference.
So it shouldn’t be a surprise knowing that the average American throws away 70 pounds of clothing every. single. year.
But it is concerning.
Fast fashion is a huge contributor, compromising quality and sustainability for speed to market and affordability.
Fast fashion occurs when people want the clothes they see on the runway or in magazines pop up in the local stores they shop at instantaneously. It wasn’t so bad when designers only had to worry about 4 seasons of changes to style for. Now, it’s more like 52 seasons—in other words, weekly trends that manufacturers have to keep up with.
This high, ever-changing consumer demand fuels fast fashion, which accelerates the textile manufacturing process, and in turn, the pollution it creates.
Keeping up with more fashion trends means we keep our clothes for less time.
Just how fast is fast fashion?
We wear it only about 5 times in a period of 5 weeks before tossing it out for the next trend. Compared to a garment worn 10x more (50 times) for a year, a single fast fashion garment alone would produce 400% more carbon emissions.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
We change our clothes every day. At Teks-Til, we believe we can change them for the better.
We’re starting with water conservation and carbon removal strategies to slow fast fashion towards sustainability.
And, we’re rethinking what it means do be fashionable in the first place with the latest and greatest in materials science: smart textiles.
Smart Textiles & Programmable Materials
By embedding electronics into traditional fibers, clothing gains the ability to sense changes in the environment like temperature, pressure, and moisture. The ability to track a person’s vitals through clothing is quickly revolutionizing healthcare and sports, among other spaces.
What makes these types of textiles “smart” is when the clothing doesn’t just sense these changes, but responds to them. This could mean changing color at different temperatures, sending a message to an app to prevent you from physical injury, or returning to an original shape after deforming from an impact.
These applications are still fairly passive. True active textiles are even cooler because the fabric itself reacts to the same environmental stimuli in the absence of helper electronics.
By altering the physical and chemical properties of the fibers used and applying innovative knit structures, textiles can respond and move in predictable ways. This is the basis of programmable textiles, a key area of Teks-Til’s R&D. Our plan is to combine advances electronics and knit structures to produce high quality, highly responsive clothing.
One piece of nanotechnology we plan on using is carbon nanotubes. These are extremely thin rods, made of a sheet of carbon one atom thick and rolled up into cylinders. In this particular atomic structure, the material exhibits incredible tensile strength, meaning it can be stretched without breaking, as well as electrical and conductive capabilities that make it valuable for translating a heat signature into an electrical signal.
The Teks-Til Jak-ket is Comfortable, Controlled & Clean
The Teks-Til Jak-ket is the first of our products, all of which are designed according to our Core 3 C’s.
Comfort to Complement Performance
You have too many jackets in your closet right now.
The primary purpose of most of your jackets is probably to keep you warm when you’re cold. The variety and quantity of jackets in your closet reflects the degree to which you wish to be kept warm: thinner jackets for when it’s warmer out, thicker jackets for when it’s colder.
But we recognize that fashion plays an equally important role. We wouldn’t want to ignore the very real possibility that, when you are standing in front of your closet searching for a jacket to complete your fit, you may choose a thin sweater, much more stylistic than the heavy overcoat that would undoubtedly keep you warmer.
Then, when you engage in high motion activities characteristic of athletes, health nuts, and first responders, temperature regulation becomes even more conducive to performance.
Teks-Til believes that fashion and performance should not come at the cost of comfort.
That’s why the Teks-Til Jak-ket is built with the champion athlete, health fanatic, and first responder in mind.
The slim design of our Jak-ket is made possible through nanotechnologies like carbon nanotubes. When integrated into traditional fibers, carbon nanotubes give regular textiles electrical properties, such as support for thermal sensors, without the added bulk of regular electronics.
Underneath all the science, comfort is our first priority to create clothes for everyone — whether you’re scoring the game-winning point, keeping your health in check, saving lives, or just kicking it back.
Controlled Down to the Fiber
Secondly, the Teks-Til Jak-ket is controlled. Beyond sensing, the physical structure of our textiles allow our clothing to take the electrical signals produced by carbon nanotubes and react by changing dimension.
This is made possible through 3D knitting machinery that weave these nanofibers into responsive structures.
As researched by MIT’s Self-Assembly Lab, the knit structure and chemical treatment of fibers enable textiles to change porosity, thickness, and ventilation in response to changes in temperature.
Using the same principles, our Jak-ket is designed to regulate temperature in any climate and for the duration of any activity.
But as smart as smart textiles are when combined with programmable materials, they don’t solve our problem of textile sustainability. Despite all the benefits of adding sensors and structures to textiles, if you’re putting an actuator on the same old cotton fiber dyed in the same old way, your clothes are still consuming 11% of the world’s pesticides and 343 billion gallons of water every year.
The bottom line is it doesn’t matter how intelligent our clothes become if we don’t become more intelligent in how we produce them. Smart tech is only as smart as its user. And this isn’t something we haven’t heard before.
Clean for the Environment
The value in Teks-Til’s Jak-Ket and all of our products to come lies in our innovative manufacturing processes.
First, we purchase our feedstock from sustainable suppliers, preferring alternative materials like organic cotton, natural fibers from plants like flax, hemp, and coffee, and recycled fibers.
After applying our 3D weaving process, we innovate on the coloration process. This is because dyeing is the culprit of much of the water wastage and contamination in the textile industry, which tolerates a 1:30 dye to water ratio when diluting chemicals for coloring. This process is incredibly wasteful, while also contaminating rivers when discharged.
Instead, Teks-Til uses a process called waterless dyeing, in which we use compressed, pressurized carbon dioxide so that it acts like a liquid and can dilute and color fabrics. Carbon dioxide just needs to be heated to 31 degrees Celsius and pressurized to 74 bar in order to achieve a low-enough density so that it acts like water. Taking place within chambers, the carbon dioxide is returned to gas form and recaptured when the process is repeated later on.
With textile dyeing and chemical treatment accounting for 17–20% of industrial water pollution, the waterless dyeing process Teks-Til is using could reduce this significantly, especially when replicated for future products. Carbon dioxide is readily available from the atmosphere, and frankly inexhaustible, which makes it an inexpensive alternative to water dyeing.
Moreover, the carbon nanotubes we want to use for our sensors are fairly expensive to produce at scale—using current practices. After testing and refining an experimental process of molten electrolysis that uses carbon dioxide captured from the atmosphere, Teks-Til synthesizes our own carbon nanotubes in a cost-effective manner.
Molten electrolysis occurs when you take any substance with a really high melting point, heat it to extreme temperatures (upwards of 1000 degrees Fahrenheit!), and run electricity through it. This causes the substance to change physically or chemically, and in our case, molten electrolysis causes carbon dioxide gas to turn into solid carbon nanotubes.
In this way, the carbon emissions that come from textile manufacturing are offset by the carbon capture and carbon recycling completed by our waterless dyeing and nanotube synthesis processes. As a result, the Teks-Til Jak-ket and all following apparel are carbon-neutral.
Thus, through materials science and nanotechnology, 3D knitting and electronic integration, waterless dyeing and carbon removal, Teks-Til is taking what we sincerely believe to be a step in the right direction for a sustainable future of comfortable, controlled, and clean clothing. Starting with the Jak-ket, we can change the world by changing what we wear at Teks-Til.
Teks-Til is a moonshot startup that was founded by teenagers James Wang, Sam Li, and Caitlyn Coloma (me!) to lead the textiles industry to sustainability through materials science research and innovation. Leave us some claps and a follow here on Medium.
We would love to connect with anyone in the textiles or materials science fields or that could otherwise provide expertise and feedback on our plans.
