The second hand clothing industry is facing changes. This industry consists of collecting post consumer textiles; the majority of the organizations in this industry are charitable. The collection method is via containers in public places. The primary changes lie in exportable clothing. First of all the percentage of the overall collection of second hand clothes that can be re-worn is decreasing, secondly the export markets (Eastern European and African countries) are receiving cheaper first hand clothing e.g. from China.

One of these second hand post consumer textiles companies in the Netherlands is KICI. KICI is aware of this change in the sector and to respond pro-actively, has initiated investigations into sustainable innovations regarding non re-wearable textiles. To support that process KICI has among other things asked Enviu to recruit students who can develop various feasible products from the non re-wearable textiles.

Alexander Regeer, Matthijs Pepping and Sander Jongerius were amongst others recruited by Enviu as interns and graduation students for KICI. Since then Enviu has followed these university graduates through to their final products giving supervision and guidance. The interns are all contributing in their own way to realizing the ambition of KICI: finding new sustainable ways to re-use old clothes as part of the overall strategy of making their chain (collection, sorting, exporting or recycling) more transparent, sustainable and innovative. Each of them is exploring solutions to increase the life time of non re-wearable textiles.

Matthijs, is taking his masters in industrial design and was accepted for a graduation assignment at KICI. He has been exploring various sustainable consumer product designs made from the material of second-hand clothing. Several brainstorms with volunteers and Young Professionals were organised to generate ideas. Matthijs’ ambition was to create products that are Cradle to Cradle (C2C) label worthy, meaning that each product can be disassembled into various materials that can be re-used for a new lifecycle (in the biosphere, or techno-sphere). As Matthijs found out, this proved a difficult aspiration to attain because the material used (non re-useable clothing) for the products are not originally based on C2C standards. So far Matthijs has realized that in general within eco-design, most products are far from C2C worthy. Despite this he believes that the future of C2C and sustainable products is feasible as it lowers costs by re-using old materials, thus becoming more efficient.