The Verdigris blog by Laurel Brunner
We recently came across a company that takes used textiles, including printed ones, and refashions them into new products. Founded by Rikke Thykier and Jamie Harris, Amolia is all about upcycling, using waste as the raw material for new products such as cushions, bags, accessories and even artwork. Amolia collects sheets, blankets, uniforms and suchlike waste from laundries and elsewhere to upcycle them, upcycling around 60% of uniforms it collects. The free raw materials are cut and stitched into new products, with sewing outsourced. For banners and displays printed with a company’s logo, the logo is incorporated into the new product design, and could even be sold back to the original maker.
Most of Amolia’s textiles come from the healthcare industry, so they are of excellent quality and often only lightly used. For the most part they are white so they can easily be dyed and Amolia often sells back to the healthcare sector products such as laundry bags and cage covers. Textile printers might want to get involved in branding some of this stuff, because it is surely a growth business.
Production of the upcycled goods takes place in Denmark and Poland with Amolia’s business to business customers choosing their preferred production site. Business to consumer sales are via the Amolia website and social media. The cutters and stitchers are people “not fully engaged with the job market” so there’s a social dimension to this company too. A lot of Amolia’s products, such as bags, replace single use plastics with reusable textiles. Rikke Thykier estimates that between 2023 and 2025 6.3 tonnes of plastic have been saved, approximately 100,000 plastic bags per year.
Amolia’s supply chain includes companies for sorting and recycling materials, uniform manufacturers, yarn recyclers, and regional municipalities who want to support a closed loop waste management model in support of a circular economy. What Amolia cannot use for upcycling is sent to a partner for recycling. The next step for Amolia is to establish the same model in Sweden.
For the printing industry this kind of innovation creates all sorts of opportunities. The most obvious sector to provide services to companies like Amolia are the wide format digital printers who could assist with personalisation and decorative services. The biggest difficulty to overcome is the printability of these upcycled fabrics, so perhaps this is really one for the supplier and communities. However this pans out, it is clear that printed banners and soft signage have a route other than landfill or incineration. Sustainability is taking another step forward.
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This article was produced by the Verdigris Project, an industry initiative intended to raise awareness of print’s positive environmental impact. This weekly commentary helps printing companies keep up to date with environmental standards, and how environmentally friendly business management can help improve their bottom lines. Verdigris is supported by the following companies: Agfa Graphics, EFI, Fespa, Fujifilm, HP, Kodak, Miraclon, Ricoh, Unity Publishing and Xeikon.
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