Industria de Diseño Textil, S.A. (ITX:MC), also known as Inditex, is a Spanish multinational clothing company headquartered in Arteixo, Galicia, Spain. Inditex is the parent company of popular clothing brand Zara.
The transition to a sustainable economy requires nearly all of the products and services we use daily to rapidly innovate. A key lever in the transition will be eliminating as many GHG emissions as we can, as quickly as we can. However, some emissions sources remain difficult to eliminate, so new technologies are being developed to capture and utilize waste emissions in the interim.
US-based startup company LanzaTech and popular Spanish clothing brand Zara, for example, recently launched a collaboration to transform captured waste emissions into party dresses.
LanzaTech partners with companies that face high technological and commercial barriers to reducing emissions and helps them capture and transform waste emissions into useful fuels and chemicals. Through LanzaTech’s carbon recycling technology, the company was able to develop a polyester yarn using Lanzanol that Zara transforms into lower carbon clothing.
As textiles have evolved to include synthetic fibers like polyester, reliance on petrochemicals (i.e., petroleum) from traditional fossil fuel companies has only increased. The benefits of the LanzaTech x Zara collaboration are then twofold: it replaces petroleum-derived polyester and provides a useful application for waste emissions.
The resulting products in Zara’s line included 20% of the innovative Lanzanol polyester and demonstrated a promising, early example of a carbon utilization opportunity, one of the many solutions emerging in the clothing industry. Although a myriad of new innovations like recycled carbon polyester must be implemented to continue the transition to a sustainable economy, collaborations like that of LanzaTech and Zara offer a glimpse into the future’s possibilities.
If you’re interested in reading more about corporate work to lower environmental impacts, please see other EP Insights from Terra Alpha here.