Since 2018 it has recycled tons of textile waste to give it a second life as bricks.
The fashion industry is one of the more pollutants in the planet; from the raw material extraction and manufacturing process until it reaches our hands and we dispose of it. It is estimated that fast fashion is responsible for throwing half a million tons of microplastics in the sea every year. He also uses some 93 billion liters of water to make all the clothes we consume; a quantity sufficient to supply five million people.
This is a problem that does not have a simple and unique solution, but rather there are many and different ways to attack it. Y Clarisse Merlet is a girl who found a great way to reduce the pollution caused by textile waste. This is how she was born FabBRICKa Paris-based company dedicated to recycling clothing to create bricks that retain heat and insulate sound.
According to the medium novethic Every year in Europe, more than 4 million tons of textiles that mostly end up in landfills or incinerators. With a desire to do something about this huge problem, Clarisse turned to recycling.
The young woman is an architect who mixed her passion for buildings with her desire to help the planet. And at the end of 2018 she presented a project to transform old clothes into decorative bricks and construction soon. This is how she was created FabBRICK, a company that has grown by leaps and bounds and whose services are in high demand.
“I wanted to find new construction materials that were less polluting than concrete or sand. Seeing the mountains of textile waste generated by the fashion industry hit the nail on the head,” Merlet said.
How does it work?
The idea is simple: the pieces of fabric are shredded and mixed with a special glue that Clarisse developed. Then that mass is pressed into blocks of different sizes and voila, the bricks are obtained. In addition to fulfilling an aesthetic purpose, Merlet ensures that his textile bricks are excellent thermal and acoustic insulators.
For each brick the equivalent of two or three shirts. material can be cotton, polyester, elastane either pvc and the glue is made with a special and ecological recipe. The process to obtain these beautiful blocks was long as Merlet had to do many tests with different glues and compression methods to achieve the desired shape and consistency.
FabBRICK obtains textile waste from different companies and of any type such as production scraps, prototypes, defectives, work clothes. And for the most part, the bricks return to their origin, since the same companies request this product to put it in their offices and/or stores, either as furniture or wall covering.
Clarisse is very committed to ecology, so she reserves the right to market her product with certain companies if she considers that they do not have a real ecological reason. On the other hand, she also does not accept that companies want to give her textile waste without asking for the bricks because her goal is for the same company to keep its transformed waste to raise awareness.
With 4 years in the market, FabBRICK has made close to 90 thousand bricks, which is equivalent to 30 tons of recycled garments. Although this is a small amount compared to all that is thrown away each year, it is a big step in waste management.