PARIS — Italian legwear and swimwear brand Calzedonia is taking on one of fashion’s most overlooked waste problems — discarded tights — with the launch of Life Re-Tights, a textile-to-textile recycling project that aims to transform used tights into new, high-quality yarns through an industrial-scale fiber separation process.

Backed by the European Union’s Life Program and developed in partnership with several European logistics and textile players, the initiative enables Calzedonia to chemically separate nylon, aka polyamide, and elastane from old tights and recover recycled nylon comparable in quality to virgin fiber.

It’s a move that could mark a significant step toward decarbonizing one of fashion’s most wasteful categories, with millions of pairs of tights ending up discarded in landfill each year after just a few wears.

That is due to the complexity of recycling mixed fibers, which has long been the bane of making textile-to-textile recycling a reality.

Under the Oniverse umbrella, the Calzedonia brand benefits from a vertically integrated production model which will allow tights production to move to a “closed loop” model — the holy grail that is the hope of the textile industry.

“We produce most of our garments, and especially the tights that we sell,” said Oniverse Group head of sustainability Federico Fraboni. “We started the project because we are constantly looking to move toward a circular economy and to reduce the amount of waste,” Fraboni said. The aim is to get to zero-waste on tights production in three years.

The project began three years ago in Calzedonia’s R&D department, where a technician discovered a method to chemically separate elastane from polyamide, which has been a consistent challenge for the industry.

“We understood immediately the potential was pretty high, and we wanted to pursue it,” Fraboni said. The company saw how this could not only be used in their own production facilities, but grow into an “economically feasible business model that will be expanded.”

The technology, now being industrialized, will allow each machine to recycle up to 1.6 million pairs of tights a year, the company said. Calzedonia aims to scale the system gradually, starting with its bestselling tights.

Blind trials of the recycled tights yielded positive results, Fraboni said.

“Practically speaking, [testers] were not really able to tell which one was recycled. And that is exactly our goal,” Fraboni said. “The potential is very high in terms of satisfaction.”

Calzedonia will collect tights — from their brand as well as others — in store through the program. Collection points will be paired with a communication campaign aimed at educating consumers about the potential of recycling, urging them to shop more responsibly, while actively contributing to reducing textile waste.

Key to the project’s development was also solving the issue of polyamide identification — distinguishing between nylon 6 and nylon 66, which must be recycled separately. To do so they partnered with an outside company to develop a scanning technology.

The company estimates that the nylon portion, which makes up 85 percent of each pair of tights, is recyclable through their own production chain. The remaining 15 percent, comprised of elastane, will also be developed into new yarns, which can be sold on to other clothing manufacturers and external partners. New garments, such as synthetic leather, are potential applications.

The company said it operates three production facilities dedicated solely to tights and two others that manufacture both tights and socks, located between Italy and Croatia.

The vertically integrated model across the value chain supports Calzedonia’s zero-waste, textile-to-textile ambitions. While the program is still in its early industrialization phase, the company hopes to hit that mark within two to three years.

Accepting tights from other brands could ultimately position the company as a sector-wide circular textile partner, not just a closed-loop recycler for its own products, and its long-term ambition is to develop a reproducible model that could apply to other complex textile products. It’s all aimed at helping high street brands move toward circularity at scale.

The company’s moves on R&D and its potential to position itself as an industry-wide partner place it in a good position to grow as the EU regulations on textile waste and extended producer responsibility fees are set to roll out over the next four years.