An interdisciplinary team from HSBI visited the local textile manufacturer fast52 and found numerous points of contact for collaboration. The company already works sustainably: it produces clothing on demand, saves resources and produces fairly. Nevertheless, fast52 wants to become even more sustainable - with the support of the InCamS@BI project.





The walls are decorated with printed designs of jerseys, jackets and pants, outdoor jackets, coats and long-sleeved shirts in bright colors hang on a clothes rail, employees sit at a screen and work on 3D visualizations, among other things. In the middle of it all: technology scouts and researchers from the InCamS@BI project. The Innovation Campus for Sustainable Solutions, as InCamS@BI is known, is a transfer project of Bielefeld University of Applied Sciences (HSBI) and Bielefeld University. Today, the interdisciplinary group is gaining an insight into production at the textile company fast52 from Bielefeld-Sennestadt.





What makes the company so exciting for InCamS@BI? The textiles are mainly made from sustainably produced materials, such as PET bottles, and are produced exclusively on demand - close to the needs of retailers and users. And yet fast52 wants to become even more sustainable. At the end of the visit day, two starting points emerged that will be worked on further with the HSBI researchers: The economic psychology approach will be accompanied by doctoral student Eliza Starke. The other approach concerns the possible recycling of textile plastics - chemist Dr. Matthias Pieper is already taking the first fabric samples back to the university on this day.



Global challenges facing the textile industry - and how to overcome them

But first things first: The global textile industry has to contend with many challenges: consumers today expect an enormous range of variants: almost everything has to be available in various sizes and colors. If you want to remain competitive, you also need to offer new products every week. A summer and a winter collection - that was yesterday. But that's not all: competition is fierce and consumers are extremely price-sensitive, especially in developed markets. This is why many products are still produced in countries with low labor costs and then have to be transported over long distances to their target markets. Which products ultimately become bestsellers and which have to be sold off or even destroyed - that is the bet that the management of the major textile companies are repeatedly taking in the current circumstances. Sophisticated marketing, sales and logistics systems are supposed to help keep the business predictable. However, all of this is often not very sustainable, as it favors the use of materials that pollute the environment and often leads to a waste of raw materials and energy.



Ralf Kelber is familiar with these problems. The managing partner of fast 52 is an "old hand" in the textile industry and has opted for a different approach with his start-up, which was founded in 2016: "We currently focus on producing sports, leisure and corporate clothing, but we only produce what is actually ordered and sold. Retailers plan orders and inventories with a maximum lead time of two or three weeks, rather than the six to nine months required by large textile manufacturers that produce overseas." This is called on-demand. And to ensure that customers receive their goods promptly, fast52 produces exclusively regionally. Kelber: "We had a simple, scalable system in mind that would achieve economically competitive products through good quality and minimized waste."



fast52: Recycled raw materials, no waste water, fair working conditions

The fact that fast52 was already quite sustainable per se on the market was not initially a priority for the management. "But it became an increasingly important selling point," explains Kelber, "especially as we use recycled and recyclable materials in production and work with a technology that does not produce any waste water. Our base materials are polyester or polyester blends, which are printed using a sublimation printing process and manufactured on site under healthy and fair working conditions."

However, as mentioned, fast52 does not want to stop at this point. Kelber therefore invited the InCamS@BI team to take an external look at potential challenges and possible "levers" that could make fast52 even more sustainable. This is a good fit, as the university project focuses in particular on small and medium-sized companies in Ostwestfalen-Lippe (OWL) that manufacture, process or use plastics. InCamS@BI, which is funded as part of the federal-state initiative "Innovative University", has the personnel, time and appropriate equipment to record and analyze the problems of market participants and develop ideas for solutions. A wide range of HSBI experts will therefore be coming to almost52 for the first visit, including researchers from the fields of plastics technology, materials testing, circular value creation, business psychology, business law and innovation management.



EU regulations will become much stricter



Kristin Maoro, Business Law Officer at InCamS@BI, assesses the situation in her field as follows: "In the fight for climate neutrality, minimum requirements only apply to a limited number of products marketed in the EU. However, the new EU Ecodesign Regulation, which is set to replace the current EU Ecodesign Directive, will significantly expand the scope of regulation in the future . Textiles will then also be subject to stricter requirements regarding sustainable production, durability and recyclability. The adoption of the EU Supply Chain Directive, which is currently in the legislative process, will have similar consequences. fast52 is a pioneer in the sustainable and fair production of textiles and has already gone further than the current legislation provides for."





But perhaps other disciplines can help to make fast52 even more sustainable? The fast52 range is on display in the entrance area of the new company location in the Sennestadt district: individual clothing and standard items for sport and outdoor, corporate and home and living products. Customers can order the items from the retailer. The retailer keeps a significantly reduced inventory and uses an online tool to forward the demand-oriented order to fast52. So if a handball team orders 17 sets of jerseys, these are first designed - individually, in the club colors, with names, numbers and everything else that goes with them - and then produced in the quantity ordered. A special sublimation printing process is used for this.



Worldwide, only one percent of discarded textiles are recycled as textiles today



When walking through the various rooms, the university group first wants to understand this manufacturing process in order to perhaps come up with good ideas for even more sustainability at fast52: In the design center, the products are visualized in 3D so that customers can view their product and approve it for production. In order to use both the paper required for the printing process and the fabric as efficiently as possible, the individual pattern pieces are printed in such a way that as little waste as possible remains at the end. Around 30 meters of paper are needed for the 17 jerseys and pants mentioned above. In terms of consistency, it is somewhat reminiscent of baking paper. It is now printed on large plotters with the respective base color and the design elements. The print proofs are then passed on to machines called calenders in the next room. They steam the water-based ink from the paper onto the fabric in just 40 seconds. Depending on the garment, this may be simple polyester, such as for a jersey, or a three-layer fabric for a winter jacket. A laser or knife cutter then cuts out the individual parts: sleeves, collars, tops. And then everything "just" has to be sewn together.





Before that, however, the offcuts are separated by type. Some of the fabrics are defibered and used as filling material for cushions and jackets. What remains is currently only being stored. Nobody at fast52 knows yet how to put these leftovers to good use. Because: if it is 100 percent polyester or polyamide, the fabric can be recycled - but only if it is white and not dyed or printed. A sad figure: according to the European Commission, it is estimated that less than one percent of all textiles worldwide are recycled into new textiles.



The dream of a deposit system for textiles



However, this is where technology scout and chemist Dr. Matthias Pieper and his colleagues Prof. Dr. Bruno Hüsgen and Prof. Dr. Christoph Jaroschek from the InCamS@BI research group Plastics Technology and Materials Testing come into play. Pieper: "I see almost52 points of contact in the areas of recycling and printing inks and their removal. In order to make the material recyclable, it is important to recycle textile remnants and returns to . Various questions need to be considered: How can the polymer be decolored? Are there alternatives for the dyes that simplify recyclable handling? Which recycling process is the most suitable? We want to find answers to these questions by examining the substances and colors used by fast52 and looking at the suitability of the various possible recycling processes for this specific problem ."





fast52 is also considering a deposit system for textiles. Ralf Kelber wonders: "How can we take back garments that can no longer be repaired? What happens to individual plastic parts such as zippers, buckles and buttons?" It may be possible to process these back into granulate and reassemble them in injection molding machines. Another idea that InCamS@BI can work on.



Raw materials, service life, CO2 consumption - sustainability assessments are a complex undertaking



We move on to the sewing hall: it whistles and hisses, you can hear the ticking of around 15 of the 50 sewing machines. This is where the blanks are sewn together, the products are checked for quality and then packaged. The group is at the end of the tour. Katharina Schnatmann, technology scout from the Circular Value Creation research group, has a few ideas from her area of expertise: "I see points of contact here in the approach of extending the service life of textiles as an alternative to recycling. To do this, the quality and properties of the recyclable clothing must first be tested. In addition, it is important to assess the initial situation on the basis of a carbon footprint in order to identify potential for improvement and develop solutions, such as an energy concept ."





Next to Schnatmann is Prof. Dr. Eva Schwenzfeier-Hellkamp, mentor of the InCamS@BI research group Circular Value Creation and Head of the Institute for Technical Energy Systems (ITES) at HSBI. She also draws a positive conclusion after the visit: "fast52 is already sustainable in terms of the local value chain, especially in comparison to the rest of the industry. However, we believe that a sustainability assessment based on the materials and production processes is currently difficult and requires a more detailed analysis. However, the company has a lot of potential for implementing further optimizations."



Raising awareness of sustainable purchasing behavior - the field of business psychology



The event was also exciting from a business psychology perspective: Eliza Starke, who conducts research in the business psychology research group, sees as having numerous starting points: "fast52 is a company that has already anchored sustainability in the product life cycle in its vision. In addition to product development towards circular value creation, it is of crucial importance to draw customers' attention to the sustainability of fast52. Targeted marketing measures can help to make the decision-making behavior of the target groups more sustainable and at the same time clearly differentiate fast52 from companies that practice greenwashing . From a business psychology perspective, for example, it is possible to investigate which advertising message is most effective in steering consumer behavior towards sustainability." This fits in with Ralf Kelber's thoughts. He would like to know how fast52 brand communication should be set up in order to raise customer awareness of sustainability and then motivate them to return old products.





Challenge for the InCamS@BI chemist: How can color and material be separated?



Of course, what was discussed at this first meeting between InCamS@BI and fast52 still needs to be tested for practicality. Starke and Pieper make the start here . The business psychologist will be focusing on the development of suitable brand communication in the coming weeks. The chemist will deal with the separation of dyes and textiles so that offcuts and returned old textiles can ultimately be turned into raw materials for new products.





Managing Director Ralf Kelber goes back into the hall with the scientists and hands Matthias Pieper offcuts from production - wrapped in the paper that was used for sublimation printing. Pieper: "I'm now going to start researching the literature and analyzing the samples in detail. Among other things, I can imagine trying out different solvents that work in a closed cycle, i.e. that can always be reused. The end result should be a process that separates paint and textiles without harming the environment."This could be the way forward for fast52 in terms of sustainability.