Ep. 88: Aprons capturing carbon from the ambient

This transcription has been AI generated and therefore may have some inaccuracies.

Ep. 88: Aprons capturing carbon from the ambient

This month, WTiN talks to Edwin Keh, CEO at the Hong Kong Research Institute of Textiles and Apparel (HKRITA).

WTiN
Hello, and welcome to textile innovation hosted by WTiN. My name is Ruby and I'm the news editor and your podcast host. Each month we're going to be joined by a brand new special guest. So join me and my colleagues as we deep dive into what's new, what's interesting and what unmissable innovations have hit the market recently, we cover everything on the podcast from sustainability to startups and the latest research developments. And we also quiz the experts in the fields about their new products and ideas across a huge spectrum that is the textiles industry. So no matter what your interest is WTiN have you covered and we can connect you to everything you need to know right here from our central hub in the UK. In this episode I talked to Edwin Keh they see are over HK ita all the Hong Kong Research Institute of Textiles and Apparel, we talk about industry 4.0 sustainability goals, as well as some of the innovations that the Institute is currently working on like a material that eats carbon from the air and extremely absorbent textile that could help with farmers, and even the world's shortest supply chain, which the institute expects can fit into 40 foot containers, which takes you through the whole supply chain journey from growing the actual cotton within it to the finished garment at the end. Thank you so much for joining me for this. I'm very excited to speak with you because I know you do some incredibly interesting things. So you want to start off by telling me a little bit about yourself and your history in the textiles industry.

Edwin Keh
That's complicated. So I get interested in how large complex systems operate or are organised. I was on my way to get a PhD in Sociology after my undergraduate in urban design and in city planning, and I wanted to understand cities and people and I took what I thought was a summer job working at the UN, I went and worked in a refugee camp at UNHCR and one of the most frustrating jobs of my life because I was watching people die unnecessarily not as a blank resources but because they couldn't get access to resource. So I went to business school to understand that more. And in the process. Look for one of the most globalised industry or most globalised supply chains I can find. And the fashion industry happened to fit that very well. I got into that and stayed in that industry for about 30 years. But always curious about how these large complex supply chains were towards the end of my commercial career. I got a chance to work on the sustainability strategy for a warm I was at my last job chief operating officer for Walmart's global procurement. And that was a period in which they were trying to figure out what to do as an organisation about sustainability. And when they discovered so this is 2006 there abouts. Oh, most of that happens in the supply chain. And this is when I got involved and said well let's develop a strategy for the supply chain because that's 80% of the carbon footprint the and the challenge for most people's corporate things militia. So that got me into understanding CSR LCA and what have you. And then I stepped off, I was going I retired, I didn't want to be an industry anymore. And I thought I wanted to spend more time researching this. And then one of the things that happened is that I was invited to run Hong Kong Research Institute for textile and apparel, and here I am. So that's a long answer to a short question.

WTiN
Longer answers are always best I feel. So you're now with the Institute. Can you tell me just a little bit about what it is that the Institute does and why it does it and what the overall vision is just for those who haven't heard of you before.

Edwin Keh
The research institute for textile and apparel is an Applied Research Institute. And it's positioned to fill the gap between what happens in basic research in academia or theoretical research in academia and highly commercialised research that happens in industry, there's a gap of somewhere between in our context about three to five years from to market where there just was under resource and things sort of die in this valley of death. And so the the Hong Kong government set up a fund called Innovation and Technology Fund, and we're one of the five applied research centres that draw from this research funding. And our brief is to Well, first of all, we serve the industry. And when I took over the job, the first thing I did was to conduct a fairly broad stakeholder question basically asking people what are your challenges? Or what are some things that you want to solve for what is important for industry big subjects came up over and over again, this was in 2012. So sustainability industry 4.0, and something called social good, how do we take what our industry produce and use it for society in general, help people live healthier, live longer for society to be better? And so sustainability is one of our big three research domains. It became more and more apparent as we look at the context of where we operate out of Hong Kong that there are two big challenges for us. So one, Hong Kong needs to find a future value creation role for itself. 67 years ago, it was a manufacturer 2030 years ago, it started being There's a sourcing hub. Today, it's a financial hub. It's a supply chain manager for lots of people. It's an organiser and hub for a lot of the sourcing and production activities that happen in this part of the world. But but you can see that gradually going away. And so the question we asked ourselves is, what's the next 10 years? Where can we create value and innovation and solutions for the biggest challenges for the industry? We think is the answer. We serve the industry. And we also are in the process trying to create the next role for Hong Kong. And so that's kind of sort of why we do what we do.

WTiN
Amazing, great stuff. So part of the mission then, really, is to kind of build this green, healthy focus on sustainable materials. Obviously, a large part of that damage on sustainability is textiles industry, and what are the current challenges that the industry is facing?

Edwin Keh
There are there are some fundamental challenges that we face today? The obvious one is if we look at what are the root causes for some of these sustainability challenges that we have today is overproduction overconsumption, we make way too much stuff. But it's not only that we make too much of the wrong stuff, and we ship them to the wrong places, and up being that stuff. So it's sort of similar to the to the food industry, right, like 30% of everything that we produce for food gets thrown away, I think in the same way that we produce a perishable product that if you don't get to the right place at the right time, doesn't look cool or good or fashionable, and there's not a market for it. And it's an explosive growth of consumption. I think for the large volume part of our industry, it's the deflationary business, there's huge pricing challenges discount and in the mass market products, which in terms of sheer volume, that's the bulk of the market, and year on year has become a smaller and smaller part of our disposable income. And so as a result, the industry pushes everything down to the lowest costs, manufacturing economies looks for cheaper and cheaper sources of materials in general look at ways to be more cost effective. And so you see some corner cutting with one of the chemicals that we use, for example, or some of the material fastest growing material is polyester, just because it's the cheapest of the materials. I think all those and there are others. But I think those add up to be some of the big, big challenges. And of course, the traditional way in which we make things is not only labour intensive, but it's also energy intensive and water intensive as well. There are lots of opportunities there.

WTiN
Definitely. So something quite interesting. In June, I read an interview on fair planet that you did, where you were described as the godfather of Hong Kong's fashion sustainability industry. That is an incredibly impressive title to hold. I also read during my research, they used to work very closely to the fashion sector, that is a huge swap considering the impact that one thing has on the other. What was it that personally made you move over to work into more sustainable futures?

Edwin Keh
So first of all, I don't know if I agree with that, that title. Sustainability, by definition has to be a collaborative multidisciplinary effort, right? It's a it's a production issue. It's a logistics issue. It's a design issue. And it's a business case issue. So you just to solve any of our problems, you need a lot of people working together for it to work. I apologise for getting a little bit philosophical here. But it was the the question I asked myself when I got to my last job in industry was Chief Operating Officer of Walmart's global procurement, the world's largest supply chain, it's bigger than the Silk Road, we were purchasing somewhere on the order of magnitude of about a billion dollars a day. The question in my mind was how do careers develop? How do we make sure that we do what we should be doing not what we're good at doing? Lots of us get rewarded for being good at stuff. And we're good at stuff because we've had a lot of experience in in supply chains. That means we're good at putting out fires, we're good at juggling a lot of things, is that the most useful thing that we can contribute to our industry. And that was why I decided well, I need to step off and think about that. And what I discovered in the process of working at the institute is that if you look at something like sustainability, it is an existential crisis. I mean, it is within our generation, in our lifetimes, this will become a huge issue that will cover over everything else. So we need to do something about and then be known as the generation that solve the problem not be known as the generation that screwed up the world. And so I think those types of thoughts drove me to say, well, you know, let's be ambitious for the right things. So I became ambitious to save the world, if you will. So

WTiN
That's a great ambition to have. Here we are. So circling back to something you said earlier about supply chain, Hong Kong plays a significant role in the supply chain area. What advantages does Hong Kong have when it comes to sustainability?

Edwin Keh
The two big ones that immediately come The miners at one Hong Kong has great upstream and downstream visibility, it doesn't matter which segment of the marketplace sooner or later everybody's supply chain seem to touch Hong Kong. either. It's a place where you finance everything, or it's a place where you do sourcing, or it's a place where there's some trading going on, you can see what the end use of the product is. And you can also see where it comes from, how it's made, and where it's made and the materials that it's made. So that advantage is quite unique. And then secondly, how long has this great resource experience, know how and people you know, we started in the 1950s, as Mills, and then in the 60s and 70s, and through the 90s, as manufacturers and then from 90s, onward to now as sourcing and logistics service provider, there's all that rich experience to build on. So that when there are technical challenges, and when there are things that have potentially unintended consequences, somewhere up and down the supply chain, it's much easier to solve that problem here.

WTiN
Onto something a little different. The UN has put together the sustainable development goals to be reached by 2030. And for those listening at home or aren't familiar with what that is, it's a blueprint of how to achieve a more sustainable future, essentially, what is your opinion on that? Do you think the UN are gonna be able to reach that goal by 2030? And if not, what do you think that needs to be changed to do? So? It doesn't no matter how drastic that might be?

Edwin Keh
Yeah, 2030 is their stated goal right now? I think the reality is, we'll know in 2025, I think that what happens is that there is always a lag between taking some action. And then looking at the results. I think 2025 2026 is when we hit the last chance last stop before we get in trouble. My suspicion is that we probably could do it, it might take a little bit more resource. And the key to look for is this climate change challenge? does this become a core part of our business? This is become part of the DNA of the brand? Is this where investments are going to happen? Are there clear tactics behind the aspirations that are behind all the businesses and brands for their sustainability? Chances are good at this point in time, I think we could get there, especially in your part of the world and UK and the EU, I see lots of very positive moves.

WTiN
That's very good to know. Moving on now, to talk more about the technology and innovation side of things, you have got one hell of an r&d department over there. You're coming up with these fantastic solutions and innovations on we'll talk a bit more about that now, starting with the apron that essentially eats carbon from the air, which itself is fantastic. How does this work? And where on earth did you get this idea from in the first place?

Edwin Keh
Okay, so second question first, right? We've been working on sustainability for a while now, since probably 2014. We got very serious about this. And for a long time, we focused on recycling, and we focused on mitigation, we came to a point and that was about 2018 2019, in which we said well, this is not going to get us to the UN SDGs that you mentioned because we're doing less bad, but we're still we're still solving problems that somebody created in the marketplace, we came to realisation that you have to change that some of the fundamentals of the industry. So the less bad is what we still have to do, because there's still lots of stuff to solve in the marketplace. But we started this category of work called more good. How do we fundamentally change? And how do we work on new materials, new businesses, new new supply chains, so that we disrupt the current way of doing business. And the two areas that we thought were most exciting for us to look at are in the extremes of the supply chain. So how you grow the raw material and how you do business or interface with your customers. The two focus areas in that we looked at was biodiversity and carbon neutrality, because we think that those will help us really get to a place where we want to go carbon neutrality, which is what this project came under. We looked at carbon sequestering how do we deal with things like greenhouse gas, and because we think that there will always be some need for for mitigation, that this is going to be parts of this industry and other industries in which we have to do some offsets. This project is half a project the apron deals with the first half. And it's an ongoing research project. It is not due to be finished until 2023 Because it's capturing the co2, which is the apron and then sequestering the co2, which is something we're working on right now. We want to look at carbon dioxide capturing and the first thing we asked ourselves was How do other people do it? How do other industries do it and we asked Well, how do people scrub chimneys and things like that rich sources of carbon dioxide we identified this classification of materials got a mean which captures co2 trying to figure out was there something that we can learn there so we functionalize cotton material with AMI we crosslinked and lo and behold what we found was that this new functionalized cotton absorbs carbon dioxide. So this was where we got to at the beginning of this year. And now we're working on how to keep it stable and probably in a solid form. The apron is now at a museum called fotografiska. In Stockholm, Sweden, h&m Foundation, a big research partner did an exhibition of a lot of our projects there late last year. And they happen to have a very, very nice restaurant in the museum. And so they asked the question, because they were looking at the stuff that says, I wish there was something that they can do that to sequester co2. And h&m Foundation said, Well, I think we do. And so they contacted us, and we say, Yes, we do, but we're halfway through it. And we've described this material at that point in time, we made a t shirt and the t shirt was about 1/3 to a fourth of a tree up to half a tree actually worth of co2 absorption just by you wearing it and walking around, picks up co2 From the ambient environment. But we said that's great. But once it gets saturated, we have to figure out how to then then sequester it. And we're working on a chemical solution for that right now using some sort of a carbonate turn it basically into a rock or something they tell us more about as well, right now, we found a way to release the co2 in the well, how does how do you do that, as you just heat it up, you heat it up to 30 plus degrees, and the co2 gets released into the ambient environment again, and then the loop can start over again, we were showing them what we were doing, we were basically putting a plant in a plastic box and putting a t shirt in there and put it in the sun. And then you can see that the co2 spike and then the plant absorbs the co2 Photosynthesis basically take over becames plant food and we take the t shirt out and we start the cycle again, that's how we're doing it. It's not very practical or useful. consumers aren't going to put t shirts and box, heat them up with the house plants and what have you. But they said, Hey, we have a they have a greenhouse, we grow our own herbs and salads with that work as a show. So we ran some small tests for them. And then they liked it. And we made aprons and now part of the uniform. So what happened is that their associates were the apron during the day at night, they take it downstairs to their greenhouse, it gets heated up, the co2 gets released in the morning, they come in, they take the aprons out and the cycle repeats itself. So for them, it's a very elegant loop, right, they happen to have an end to end small closed loop under one roof, not everybody is going to have their own greenhouse in the basement, we got lucky at the right place at the right time. Today we're working on functionalizing detergent, that's our our goal, right so that when you wash the t shirt, it pulls out the co2 stabilises the co2 and you can use the the the sequester co2 again. And we're also looking at what can we use it in home furnishing in curtains and sheets and towels and what have you the idea there is that consumers don't necessarily have to be victims of climate change, you can now participate and actively do something about it by using these types of materials in your environment. And they are fairly easy to understand they are not expensive, quite durable, we'll get there, we're halfway there

WTiN
Sounded very hopeful. But it's so brilliant that it was literally like a right place. Right time moment,

Edwin Keh
We tried to start about 20 to 30 new research projects every year, if you try all sorts of different things, not all of them are going to be worth something but either one, you hit on some things that are useful and to in combination with other things that you are working on, you will find these elegant solutions. And so that is our belief that if we just head in the right direction, the right people will come along, they'll be smarter than us. They'll they'll help us. And then the right solutions will come along. And that that's one of our sort of operating philosophy.

WTiN
This carbon technology, How scalable is this process?

Edwin Keh
It's quite scalable. It's a fairly simple cross linking process. It's quite doable. These aprons that are in Stockholm, we went and contacted a factory and said could you help us? Do you need this in a hurry? Here's the formulation go for it. That's how we got there faster?

WTiN
What is the wash ability of the technology? Does this wash out for instance? And is this why the detergent that you're working on is so integral or does it just keep on going forever?

Edwin Keh
Keep on going it's permanent. That's part of the characteristic of the fibre after a couple of washes. We haven't done a proper LCA on it or impact assessment. But after a couple of washes and I don't know if it's three, five or 10 washes, it's a carbon negative product, right? Because it's absorbed war more carbon dioxide than it cost him to make. So yeah,

WTiN
That's amazing. A lot of the textile industry relies on very polluting methods to create the end product, not just the chemicals and the power but water usage, too. I read that you're currently trialling a material in India that is extremely water absorbent. Can you give me a rundown of what is happening there and what the possibilities might be with that?

Edwin Keh
Yeah, this is the super absorbent polymer that we created, and one of our other technologies. And by the way, our belief is there's no silver bullet technology. There's no one thing that's going to save the world. It's probably a combination of a lot The changes so a couple of years ago we started working on a method to separate blended materials. Most of the materials that we use are blended and blended materials. If you mechanically recycle them you can only down cycle them they can only become insulation or carpeting or something like that because you have to separate the materials before you can properly treat them and dye them and what happened we were able to do a separate cotton and polyester using just heat and pressure it was really cool and it was a fibre to fibre solution polyester side is shipping already to commercialise the cotton's solution that the cotton fibres were too short for us to use as is. So we were looking at what applications do we have for this. So we came up with a couple we're making it we're using it as a raw material for a new type of high performance viscose. We're functionalizing that right now we want it to be UV protection, moisture management or more management properties. And it's it's pretty good. It's coming out probably the next year, we made a PFC free DWR treatment with the cellulose been able to make a cotton water repellent using the cellulose then the third thing we did was this super absorbent polymer we crosslinked it. And we found that this is a material that can absorb about 30 times its weight in moisture from the ambient, and it releases that and it repeats the process. So we asked the question, well, maybe that is something we can use in growing of cotton, so that we can reduce the use of water in irrigation, because instead of water running off, when you irrigate, it just hangs on in the soil. So we did a small experiment came out the results in December 2019. And it surprised us cotton grew faster, cotton fibres were longer and the yield per acre improved. And what we found is that this material is very, very good at finding moisture in the ambient environment and hanging on to moisture. And if you put it in the root of the plant, the overall health of the plant is improved. We now think maybe we can work directly with farmers, you know, it's growing faster, maybe we can add another growing season. So you have to x the yield because like in India, you grow in the wet season, the monsoon season and not in the dry season. But hey, with this, maybe we can we can try some growing something in the dry season. And then to places like India are experiencing extreme climates drier, their droughts or floods, places where they grow cotton are are shrinking with this type of material, can we actually extend the areas where you can grow cotton, they're excited about that. We're excited about that. In the meantime, we're working on second generation, the material in which we're putting micronutrients into the polymer and say, what if we can do this without using fertilisers. And then we have a third generation behind that in which we are making the manufacturing process a lot more cost effective so that it can be made on site locally. So we're excited about it. We're working on it. It's one of the many things that I wish we had more space, which we have more hands to work with.

WTiN
It sounds truly fantastic, as everything has been best fire that you've told me sounds like you've got some incredible things going on over there. Moving on to the last round of questions. Now, I like to kind of talk to our guests about any trends or insight they might be seeing in the industry, as well as what is coming in the future. Let's start with something on brand for you sustainability. Where do you think the biggest advancements are going to be over the next decade or so. And it might not just be things that affect the industry, but like consumers,

Edwin Keh
I think the biggest opportunity for us is to create value other than by selling products. Fundamentally, we are you know, this fast fashion or what have you, we are consuming too much material, we're using too much resources are there ways in which we can sell services. So rental, leasing models, other ways we can do wardrobe in the in the cloud or other other services like that, so that we don't have to sell so much. And yet, at the same time, continue to engage the consumer continue to grow and continue to make money. I think that's the opportunity. The flip side of that is that for that to happen, the fashion industry becomes a binary winners and losers, we can't consume more. And we have too many brands as it is the way to grow is you take market share a wave from somebody else. They're healthy brands, the brands that have aligned with consumers that basically create a good story about their sustainability and invest in all of the things that we've talked about, will take more and more market share away from other brands. And then they will do that by selling and engaging the customer in all sorts of different ways. And I don't know what these particular services are, but certainly there's a lot of experiment retail experiments that you see. And alongside with that would be intelligence. I think this is the sort of where we go in industry 4.0 which is that that stock and inventory errors and inventory risks in inventory exposures, big problems for for everybody a wrong product in the wrong marketplace in the wrong colour in the wrong price that consumers won't buy. So how do you how do you reduce that era, more predictive tools more forward looking tools make after you sell custom, more custom technologies.

WTiN
Definitely agree on the full point now.

Edwin Keh
Yeah, we did a we did a experiment a couple of years ago, using for what we call forward looking tools. Most brands today, purchasing decision is our all backward looking regression analysis. What sold last season is what I will buy next season and in a turbulent marketplace. And as you grow your international markets, that accuracy goes down. It's very hard to do those types of predictions anymore. So we say what did we abandon regression analysis completely? And look at more forward looking tools. We did a small experiment just by harvesting comments on social media and use that to do predictions about what the big trend colours and what are the big trends silhouettes 90 days from now. And we did an A B experiment with a specialty retailer to you by using your current system, these stores let us use our model to do the purchasing, we were double digits better, they bought less and sold more at full price. And so there's something there, we need to as soon as we have time, we need to go back to say hey, there are some digital things that we need to focus on. And those may be more useful to a lot of people.

WTiN
On topic of innovation. So have you seen any new innovations from other companies that you're excited about? And can you tell me about any that you've seen?

Edwin Keh
Everybody seems to be doing doing new on the material side, there's there's a lot of alternative sources of materials. So all the excitement about new sources for cellulose based materials and that maybe lab grown solutions for leather and materials like waterless dyeing technologies. So lots of interesting things. I wish I can nail one that we think are the coolest, but there's just so many going on right now. It seems like there's there's a whole explosion of efforts to do things a little bit differently.

WTiN
So final question for those who have listened to the podcast before will know that this is my favourite question to ask people. What big things can we expect to see from the institute in the future? And what are you most excited personally about getting out into market?

Edwin Keh
Some things that we're very excited about is we are working currently on several machine vision machine learning robotic systems for sortation separation and processing of post consumer waste? How do you do it at scale? How do you de trim products? How do you separate things that could be sold secondhand and things that you need to process with developing systems like that, and we are working on how you grow things and materials that we use. We're building a lab where we have all these things going on. And one of the projects that we're working on is what we call the world's shortest supply chain. I want one that our engineers telling me to 40 foot containers we're gonna grow from cotton to garment from cellulose grow the thing, Jen, the thing, Ben and weave in all happens. And the reason for that is we can grow cotton anywhere or other jute and other materials everywhere. So yeah, we were throwing a lot of stuff in the air. Yeah, you've got a lot on your plate that we try, we try. It's fun, right? You know, you're you, you get up, you go to work, and you say, oh, let's do something fun. And that's kind of sort of what happens with us.

WTiN
It sounds wonderful. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak to me. This has been truly fantastic speaking with you, thank you so much.

Edwin Keh
Thank you. It's very kind of you to make time and thanks for the chance to talk about some of the things that we're doing.

WTiN
If you have any questions for WTiN, then you can reach out over Twitter, find us at WTiN_comment or you can contact me directly at WTiN and if you fancy sponsoring an episode of the podcast, please email sales@wtin.com. Thank you so much for listening, and we'll see you next month.