TEXTILES.ORG
Security Matters (SMX), an Australian-listed Israeli technology solutions company, believes it can help keep some textiles and garments from being incinerated or placed in landfills.
Sorting materials so they can be recycled is the fashion industry’s greatest hurdle when it comes to creating a circular economy, a recent Knitting Industry article reported. To address this issue, SMX has developed the Intelligence on Things (IOT2) technology, which marks the molecular matter of raw materials.
The recycling process is most efficient when one type of material can be separated from the blends that make up most textiles. When each thread can be labeled, each thread, in theory, can be accurately sorted and recycled.
SMX’s technology is designed to invisibly mark raw fibers at a molecular level across life cycles: raw material to production, production to commercial, and commercial to recycling and re-use, the company explained. When textiles arrive at a recycling center, the raw materials are identified using SMX’s scanner.
The SMX technology was originally developed by Soreq Nuclear Research Centre, an Israeli government research and development institute for nuclear and photonic technologies, and used by the Israel Defence Force.
“SMX’s mark and trace technology enables an ‘equilibrium economy,’ as it covers data across three life cycles and logs the information on blockchain for authentication and proof,” said Haggai Alon, SMX’s CEO and co-founder. Alon further asserts that “with SMX’s equilibrium economy, fashion brand owners can also look at a new business stream, with credible carbon credit claim.”