THIS MACHINE DOES MAGIC
This is where one of the pillars of this project comes into play. An optical reader that is capable of grouping the garments that pass through the belt based on color and composition, or both at the same time.
They have an optical reader, which will soon see its capacity multiplied by six, which is capable of classifying fabrics based on color and composition Ángel Manso
Javi, one of the operators who is in charge of feeding the machine, explains that you just have to make sure that what enters through the belt is textile. Then, depending on what we ask, it will classify. For example: cotton mix (multicolor), black or white. This is an option, but we could also say: “Separate viscose and polyester” or “multicolor cotton and black cotton”. The garments go through the belt and when the reader detects what we have requested, blowers with compressed air spit out the garments into giant boxes. The rest, which is minimal, goes to the discard drawer. It is not infallible, it has a margin of error of 10%, "a totally acceptable figure in a recycling process."
“This step is key because we need a certification of the composition to know what we are processing. If we don't know, we can make cotton from cotton without any problem, but we can't make polyester from polyester again, because the thread would not resist. The same goes for viscose. In textiles, the great challenge is to know what composition we have to know the application. You can't always make thread, but you can still make stuffing," says one of the two founders of Insertega.
Right now, the machine has a capacity for two blowers, but soon they will have one of 24, which means multiplying the current capacity by six. "We are talking about how we would reduce times by much more than double," he points out.
What happens after going through the machine leads us to the Ikea uniforms. Once we know 100% of the composition, we have to take it apart and make a cloth. Richard is one of the employees who is in charge of processing the garment. With a cutter, remove labels, sticker prints... Leave the fabric completely clean. «We try to produce the maximum in less time. Sometimes we lose some fabric, but counting the time, the production is worth much more”, he points out.
Juan assures that, along with the optical reader, staff training is the company's greatest asset. "They have to be the best at what they do," he stresses. 100% of the staff are people with disabilities. «The issue of recycling is milk, but what is behind it at a social level... A little while ago an Inditex Social audit came, we are super-audited by our clients, and the girl tells us: 'Is there no worker representative? ?'. "No," I told him, "but we'll put it on right away." He was here all day and freaked out about the system. He told us that we were the most unusual company he had ever seen. It's just that people come here and tell you about their lives. When the shift ends, you have two at the door waiting, who tell you: 'This or that happened to me...'. We have not lost that essence of Insertega Social —the warehouse that was set up in Culleredo (A Coruña) in 2013 to manage street clothes collectors. However, if you scale the project internationally, it is difficult for it to be maintained. And if you are going to ask everyone the same thing, you are wrong. Here the capacities of each one are measured”, explains Juan.
REPLICATE THE PROJECT
There are 42 jobs in the plant and 185 external, because from that social mission that they want to give to the project, they derive some manual work (removing the bags in which the garments come, the cardboard of the shirts, the price tags ...) to occupational centers such as Aspronaga or Paimeni. Something that they want to keep when they replicate this ship in Catalonia, in the area controlled by their partner. «We are going to set up another plant in Tordera to serve the entire textile core that is there: Oysho, Bershka, Lefties, among others. We want to replicate part of this plant there, but without losing the social essence," adds Juan, who asks for a helping hand. «The beauty of this project would be that the Administration was involved. We seek support because we are not selling a pilot project, this is a reality. If we are able to create 185 jobs outside and 42 on the ground with our own funds, imagine if we had a minimum of support, we could be a benchmark”.
They opened their doors in June of last year, and to date they have processed a thousand tons of garments. Right now there are trailers waiting in Tordera, Germany and Prague for the green light to come and unload in A Coruña. They ensure that what they manage is a very small amount in relation to all the textile waste that moves in the world. «We are very small in this scenario, that is why it is urgent to scale this, because so far, everything is going to the dump. The fact that a landfill, which is a waste manager, brings you theirs because they don't know what to do with it, makes you think. They recycle glass, plastic, mattresses... they are capable of recycling everything except textiles. It is not easy, you have to know the composition, have specialized machinery, disassemble the garment manually, the machines that exist are not reliable, and even if they did exist, for us, disassembly is the engine of all this," says Juan, who warns that they only send 8% of the tissue that they cannot recover to the landfill.
As we pointed out at the beginning, the milestone of this project is not only environmental, the economic part has been "our great success to enter the industry". Juan explains that if you put a recycled garment that is 30% more expensive for the customer, there may be people who buy it because it is more sustainable, but most consumers will opt for the other one. It is the reality of the market. “Given this reality, we had to offer them a recycled product at a market price, this is our premise at the business level. Today, the thread they buy at source costs the same as the recycled one. It has been very complicated, it has taken us a long time, a lot of commercial margin. We have had many operations before starting to lose money, but we had to show that we were capable of doing it, otherwise we were never going to enter. We charge for waste management, which is why it is also sustainable for us, because if we only dedicated ourselves to selling the cloth that we process, we would not be able to sustain ourselves”, indicates Juan, who emphasizes: “Here we have two accounts, the economic one and the environmental one. That letter of introduction to our clients is brutal. If you are a company, and I tell you that we are going to recover 83% of everything that you are sending me to landfill ... That is pure magic ».
Customers are already hit with that reality when they are sent a trial of the product they want to get rid of. In Insertega they prepare a product sheet based on a unit of what recycling would mean. For example, from the Pull & Bear from the previous page, which weighs 657 grams, 600 have been recovered, that is, 86%. As there are 259 units, you just have to do the math to get an idea of the fabric that is saved from going to the landfill. Based on this first analysis, a budget is made. The cheapest thing is to recycle cotton t-shirts, because it is also the easiest. On the contrary, a polyester coat with buttons, padding... increases the price.
DISCARD, THE MINIMUM
You can't always recover everything. When the fiber is very short, it is complicated, but not impossible. The alternative is to mix it with a good material. «We had a batch of socks that was giving us problems because the thread was so short, because when you go to spin it, it breaks continuously. But we had so much of it, 8 tons!, that we couldn't throw it into a landfill. We did? Dilute it with another very good one”, explains Juan, who again refers us to the gray bag they are making for Zara in Japan. "In addition to the tested multicolored cotton that comes from here and that we know gives perfect results, it contains 20% of materials of dubious behavior, for example, these short fiber socks," explains the businessman, who is almost at the end of the visit confesses how this project came about
It was an afternoon of beers in Santa Cristina, in A Coruña. He was with his friend Manuel, a Civil Engineer, who told him of his intention to leave his company. Javier, who has spent his entire life dedicated to the textile sector, saw it clearly. "The future is this," he told her. This is how in 2013 they set up Insertega Social in a warehouse in Culleredo, where they manage the clothes that are deposited in the street collectors. They spent years classifying according to the state of the product until they realized that 30% were capable of selling it, of underselling it, to exporters who, in turn, derived it to African countries. "We were sure that many of these garments were pure waste, we did not send them here to the landfill, but they were going to send them there," says Juan, who indicates that it was then that they discovered this market niche. And they set themselves an objective: "Something must be done with that 35% of clothing that is going to landfill, and with the textile industry as well." That wish is a reality today: Insertega. And it is here in A Coruña, Galicia, to the envy of many.
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