Meet Aida Rafat, founder of Dyerecyle, reducing fashion industry’s water usage by 65%
Aida Rafat in her lab where she developed Dyerecycle at Imperial College London.
Born and raised in Qatar, Aida completed most of her education there before deciding to pursue a PhD at Imperial College London in 2016. She has previously worked with ConocoPhillips and Chrysalix Technology, now Lixea Limited. Driven by her love for sustainability, Aida co-founded a start-up to combat the challenges caused by fast fashion by using recycled dye from textile waste. Better known as Dyerecycle, Aida helped develop a patent-pending recycling technology that enables the reuse, and the recycle of dyes. Through this initiative, Aida and her team have received support from Climate-KIC, as they recently participated in The Climate Launch Pad. This is the world’s largest green business idea competition with a mission is to unlock the world’s cleantech potential that addresses climate change. Aida Rafat sat down with Global Engineering Futures to discuss Dyerecycle and the inner workings of the fast fashion and textile industry.
Aida Rafat is a chemical engineer researching sustainable chemical processes, CEO and Co-Founder of Dyerecycle, and has since became an ambassador for Qatar within the Global Engineers Network. Aida’s work has won international competitions led by Global Engineering Futures as part of the UNESCO World Engineering Day where engineers were invited to submit proposals and present their ideas that address the UN Sustainable Development Goals. More than 400 engineers from more than 70 countries participated in a global competition led by Global Engineering Futures with support from WFEO Young Engineers/Future Leaders Committee, Institution of Chemical Engineers (IChemE) UK, Imperial College London, and the Nankai University, Tianjin. The next Global Engineering Futures competition is currently open for early registration.
Aida explains how the very idea of the Dyerecycle had an odd beginning. Her PhD was unrelated to textiles or dyeing – it is actually related to biomass and bioenergy. At the time, Netflix had released a few documentaries on the impact of fast fashion. Aida, completely blown away about how ill-versed society was on the subject and the harsh effects it has on the environment, sought out to make a change. Her lab and research are mainly related to developing sustainable chemical processes. How could Aida and her team then relate the two topics together, and how could they develop a new chemical technology to tackle fast fashion?
“I did an experiment where I took a piece of textile from the lab, left it in a solvent, came back a few hours later and I realised that all the dye extracted from the solvent. I got really excited and experimented on other textiles. I discussed it with my supervisor, and he started to realise that this actually has great potential.”
Essentially, Aida and her team are trying to create a closed-loop supply chain for the textile industry. Aida’s project is the result of research that solves two grand challenges in the textile industry: textile waste and polluting conventional dyeing technologies. This has been achieved by an innovative technology that enables the reuse and recycle of dyes from textile waste. The technology aims to divert the textile waste from landfill while also eliminating the use of virgin dyes derived from petrochemicals and instead uses textile waste as the source for dyes. The de-coloured textile fibres can also be upcycled to produce new fibres via the fibre-to-fibre recycling technologies. In the UK alone there are 300 thousand tonnes of textile waste that goes to landfill every year, and this is just the post-consumer waste that people discard.
“There is huge demand for innovation and circular technologies that tackle the entire supply chain of the textile industry, from waterways pollution, to the overwhelming textile waste that currently goes to landfill. The technology has great potential to change the way fabrics are dyed and coloured in the future and is a significant innovation that addresses the goals of sustainable development”.
Often the textile waste that is discarded is subsequently sent to Eastern Europe and parts of Africa. These African countries are overloaded with the amount of textile waste that they are receiving worldwide. Several African countries have banned the importing of any textile waste because it kills their local textile industry. Further, they have such an excessive amount of textile waste that they end up burning it.
Aida discloses how there is a lack of transparency and a lack of traceability when it comes to the textile industry. The Dyerecycle team spoke to fashion brands to find out more about the dynamics of the industry and discovered that many brands do not know where their textiles are produced as the supply chain is highly disintegrated. The fashion industry is the second-largest polluter industry in the world after oil and gas. Over the past few decades, the fashion industry has gotten away with it. She believes that the textile industry needs to be put under much more pressure to become sustainable and transparent about their logistics, methods, materials, and waste.
What would be the solution for traceability and ways to make textiles more traceable? Aida describes how the label in your clothes right now, for example, might say 75% polyester and 25% cotton. However, they never actually tell you what dye was used and what the name of that dye is. In the future, it will be important to have more comprehensive labels that include all the chemicals and dyes that were used in the manufacturing and production process. This would facilitate more effective sorting and recycling at the end-of-life of the garments.
Aida’s definition of sustainability is continually changing. Sustainability to Aida means asking where a product originated. The history and future of a product need to be addressed by consumers. She asks us to challenge the brands that we support, whether in-store or via social media. She subsequently encourages us to support small businesses. Generally, the fast fashion business model is built on bulk production for lower prices. However, if you were to see a boutique or small brand with slighter higher prices, it may mean it was produced more sustainably.
“According to a study I read, the lifetime of a garment in the UK, Germany, Japan, for example, is approximately three years. My advice is to think about all the resources going into clothes and to love your outfits more.”
The Dyerecycle team is currently conducting more comprehensive market research and further developing the technology. Their next steps will include conducting large-scale experiments to produce minimum viable product to showcase for their potential customers.