Project Details
Description
Cashmere Circle is a pioneering business offering garment repair, revival and recycling services that extend the lifecycle of cashmere. By keeping apparel in circulation longer, they reduce the need for new resource-intensive manufacturing and divert waste from landfills. However, the full environmental impact and carbon offsetting value of our model has not yet been rigorously quantified.
This Proof of Market project will map the Cashmere Circle process for one type of garments, monitor the resource and energy flows involved and assess the overall environmental impact. Through that process, the PoM will allow to:
Compare the performance of the service offered by Cashmere Circle with conventional textile waste treatment and quantitatively confirm the “green” nature of the circular cashmere process; and Identify the environmental hotspots, i.e. the stages of the Cashmere Circle process that have the highest share of the environmental impact.
At the end of the product, a demonstrator Microsoft Excel-based toolkit will be created and provided to the company. This will enable Cashmere Circle to formulate the necessary arguments that can be used to support an application for a larger follow-up research project. It will also provide (a) initial insight on which processes need to be improved to increase the overall environmental impact of their offerings; and (b) the required (quantitative arguments) to promote their process to their clients, based on its sustainability performance.
The main envisaged risk with a Life Cycle Assessment, in general, is the lack of primary or secondary data. For this specific project, primary data will be provided by our industrial partner, so we do not expect any lack of data for this aspect of the inventory. However, the accumulation of secondary data will be based on information available on commercial LCA databases, involving a relevant risk. This project will, thus, allow us to test if such a product can be modelled using these databases, and, therefore, if it is worth implementing the same approach to a wider range of products.
This Proof of Market project will map the Cashmere Circle process for one type of garments, monitor the resource and energy flows involved and assess the overall environmental impact. Through that process, the PoM will allow to:
Compare the performance of the service offered by Cashmere Circle with conventional textile waste treatment and quantitatively confirm the “green” nature of the circular cashmere process; and Identify the environmental hotspots, i.e. the stages of the Cashmere Circle process that have the highest share of the environmental impact.
At the end of the product, a demonstrator Microsoft Excel-based toolkit will be created and provided to the company. This will enable Cashmere Circle to formulate the necessary arguments that can be used to support an application for a larger follow-up research project. It will also provide (a) initial insight on which processes need to be improved to increase the overall environmental impact of their offerings; and (b) the required (quantitative arguments) to promote their process to their clients, based on its sustainability performance.
The main envisaged risk with a Life Cycle Assessment, in general, is the lack of primary or secondary data. For this specific project, primary data will be provided by our industrial partner, so we do not expect any lack of data for this aspect of the inventory. However, the accumulation of secondary data will be based on information available on commercial LCA databases, involving a relevant risk. This project will, thus, allow us to test if such a product can be modelled using these databases, and, therefore, if it is worth implementing the same approach to a wider range of products.
| Status | Finished |
|---|---|
| Effective start/end date | 1/02/25 → 31/08/25 |
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