Cavani
Goes Even more Green

I:CO

I:CO offers garment collection and a sustainable end-of-life solution for used clothing, textiles and shoes. Every day, 300 tons of these unwanted products go through I:CO’s sorting plant in Wolfen, southwest of Berlin. Each item is sorted by hand and manually categorised according to 420 different criteria, based on quality and material.

Rewear

In accordance with the waste hierarchy, the golden rule is ‘Reuse before recycling’. All waste handling requires energy resources but by making sure all garments and shoes in good condition are transferred to second-hand markets, the energy consumption and the environmental impact can be kept to a minimum.

Reuse

Products that are not in a condition to be used as intended are sorted out, cut into pieces and transformed into cleaning cloths for car workshops.

Recycle

Textiles that cannot be used for either rewear or reuse go to recycling, by shredding the fabric back and reusing its fibres. Some fibres can be spun into new yarns and woven into new fabric, such as ‘recycled denim’, while others are transformed into insulation for use in cars or buildings.


The recycling process is dusty work – but not even the dust goes to waste. The leftovers are gathered and pressed into bricks that can be used within the cardboard industry.

Any stock that we have from suits, shirts and shoes to accessories that are faulty and that can not be salvaged, will be recycled by I:CO / SOEX who will recycle any and all products which we send to them.

Shoes
I:CO are constantly innovating the recycling process and have developed a unique new program for taking care of shoes.

Shoes in good condition go to the second-hand market. The ones that cannot be worn again are mechanically torn and shredded into smaller pieces, then sorted into different materials. Textile fibres are gathered with the fibres from clothing and transformed to insulation. Foam and rubber from the soles are extracted and ground into granulate which can then be used for making new foam and soles, or even floor mats.

No waste
I:CO’s sorting plant is partly powered by solar panels and use neither water nor chemicals in the production. Only 6 percent of all materials handled by I:CO become leftovers that cannot be processed at the facility, such as metal trimmings, and are passed on to other specialised waste services. Everything is considered a resource – nothing is ‘just trash’.