Leading Italian warp knitted fabrics manufacturer Pontetorto, an historical textile group from Tuscany celebrating its 70th anniversary this year and a leading business in the sportswear and fashion world, has teamed up with Fulgar, a leading producer of man-made, innovative and increasingly sustainable yarns. Fulgar was chosen as the ideal partner for a new project aiming at supporting the circular economy in the textiles industry.

Presented for the first time at the upcoming Performance Days show, Pontetorto’s new collection of fabrics for activewear and fashion has been entirely made from Fulgar’s revolutionary Q-Cycle yarn.

Q-Cycle is an eco-sustainable yarn obtained from end-of-life tyres, which are considered to be among the most difficult manufactured items to be disposed of, and also a highly polluting factor at a global level. Each year in Europe alone, 1.37 million tonnes of tyres (40% of total production) are not in fact recycled but are instead mainly incinerated with high CO2 emissions.

“Our commitment towards a sustainable textile industry,” underlines Marco Toccafondi, Head of Pontetorto Sports line, constantly pushes us to both looking for high level partners within the supply chain and finding cutting-edge solutions capable of either accelerating this process and really making the difference for us as a textile manufacturer and for our customers. This is what made Fulgar an interesting partner company while recognizing Q-Cycle as an example of a virtuous story which we hope will be best welcomed by the market."

Q-Cycle yarn is the result of an innovative chemical recycling technology, the pyrolysis, which is part of BASF's ChemCycling recycling project and Fulgar's spinning technology.

Pyrolysis can be applied to any plastic waste that cannot be recycled mechanically such as end-of-life tyres and also allows the material to be returned to its virgin state. This technology is two-fold virtuous by being self-sufficient: the waste portion which cannot be transformed into raw material is pyrolysed into gas and used to generate the energy required for the entire recycling process. The recycled content is allocated to the final product by using a third-party controlled mass balance approach.  

Q-Cycle is an innovative polyamide with the same functional and aesthetic benefits as virgin polyamide (lightness, strength and resistance) yet it features ‘green’ added valued – a perfect yarn for producing high quality and eco-sustainable fabrics.

Alan Garosi, Head of Marketing at Fulgar, comments: “We are particularly proud of collaborating with such a prestigious and benchmark group as Pontetorto. We, as Fulgar, are so happy to be able to contribute to the creation of a new-generation as well as more and more sustainability-oriented textile supply chain. Thanks to the work with BASF, Q-Cycle allows us to build value for our brand and to assert the excellence of Made in Italy. It is about a cutting-edge solution with such a remarkable potential as to allow us in a not-too-distant future to recycle even pre- and post-production waste from the textile sector thus making production totally circular in the same chain.”

New collection at Performance Days

A preview of the full Pontetorto collection will be shown at Performance Days on April 27-28 in Munich, featuring three highly technical ranges, as follows:

-art. 9223/M/Q-Cycle from the Tecnostretch Bio family: excellent thermal insulation and an outstanding tight-fitting elastic structure for excellent muscle support with outer Q-Cycle and biodegradable inner Tencel

-art. 9224/RSME/Q-Cycle, a base layer combining wool in direct skin contact with outer Q- Cycle for excellent thermal insulation and greater breathability

-art. 9226/Q-Cycle for technical city wear: double Q-Cycle nylon on the front and Tencel stretch on the back for total comfort in breathable t-shirts and leggings

www.pontetorto.it