Pocket Conversation 4.1 - Dempstah / Guy with Holly

August 22, 2024

Following a decade working in the fashion and textiles industry across New York, Sydney and China, Guy Dempster felt a growing need for a shift in the industry's approach to textile production and consumption. From this grew Dempstah, an Australian design practice exploring textile waste circularity and recycling.

Between his ongoing collaborations with textile mills in Hong Kong and mainland China, Guy is working towards establishing his own fibre recovery micro mill in North West Tasmania, to recycle fashion industry and post-consumer waste into yarn for knitwear production. Earlier this year Dempstah won eBay Australia’s Circular Fashion Fund – a $100k award to bring this idea to life.Connecting over shared ideas and values from different corners of the industry Holly and Guy sat down for a Pocket Conversation chat.

Gaining an insight into China's manufacturing industry

HB: I’m gonna look at what I have written for you, should I just read you some of my dot points and we can go where you wanna go?

GD: Yeah, please.

HB: So I wrote “Clear up… [where you’re from]”

*Both laughing*

GD: Sydney. Born and raised in Sydney.

HB: You’re not from Tassie, you’re not from Melbourne!

GD: I moved to New York when I was nineteen, and then I was overseas for about six or seven years. And then I came back. It was really interesting to see that cross section. I mean of life, but also industry. Going from New York and interning for these high end designers and it was all very luxury focussed and design-y and then going to hardcore manufacturing in the heartland of manufacturing in China and seeing how it was made -

HB: Were the people there really fascinated by you? Or were they like “it is what it is, another worker is here.”

GD: The offices were in Hong Kong, which is so metropolitan, but then we’d go to the factories in southern China, where I’d do some knitwear programming or work on design projects and oftentimes, yeah a factory worker would be like, “What are you doing here? Where are you from? What’s this all about?”. But that’s pretty typical of even just travelling around China in general.

I was the only non local/white person at the company at the time, other than a consultant that would come in, a British lady, that would help with design stuff. But I just loved that coz I felt like I was getting unprecedented access. Like I remember they had a huge Chinese New Year celebration at the company’s factory and we all went, it was like a campus. So there were all the factory workers and all these round tables laid out in the middle of the factory courtyard. And they had a stage, and they’d give out awards for things and then people would get up and sing, groups that had been rehearsing things all year to perform. And they served all these amazing dishes. And I was the only white person there and I remember being like “Fuck! This is awesome! What an insight into the realities of the manufacturing [industry] in China!”

HB: Did each person have mainly one job? Like in the factories there’s just one specific job that you work on?

GD: Yeah there were departments.

HB: Did they move you around to learn everything?

GD: My work was pretty focussed. But yeah you had the machine techs that manned the spinning machinery. You’d have the team in the colour lab, that’d be sent colour samples by clients and then have to match the dye make up perfectly, you’d have the people in the dyeing space running the vats and all that, so all different departments and sections, and people doing all of it.

But I guess after studying in New York and the UK, and coming from Australia where we do so little manufacturing of this type, I was so thirsty for understanding. And so to be like, “Oh here’s where all the skill is, here’s where all the know-how is. Finally!” It was really exciting and fascinating.

Mechanical fibre recovery and Dempstah business plans

HB: Do you wanna talk about the process that you told me about?

GD: So mechanical fibre recovery is what we’re focussed on. You use these specialised machines alongside milling equipment. It starts as an aggressive cursory tearing up of the fabrics, and then as you feed it through these machines it teases out the fibres, and it depends on the machines, some of them are really aggressive and they cut it up until it’s so short that it becomes un-spinnable, and then there are better shredding machines that are a bit more sensitive and can retain the fibre length.

HB: Would those be good for synthetics - if it’s recycled polyester I assume you need to do the chemical process again?

GD: That’s a totally different process again. Here’s the thing, when people talk about recycled polyester, it’s almost always rigid plastics that have been melted down and then extruded through a spinneret into long filament fibres that can then be spun back into yarn. Recycling synthetic fabrics is much less common as far as I’m aware and also much more complicated.

HB: Do you think it would also then be much more expensive to buy and use if it was actually recycled from clothing into clothing again?

GD: Yeah – and that's always the thing, "what’s the economic argument for this?". Especially for recycling synthetics, which are used because they’re so cheap.

HB: They may as well just buy a natural fibre. Like a virgin natural fibre.

GD: I do know that EPSON, I had a meeting with their managing director in Australia.

HB: Like EPSON ...

GD: - the printers. Who have developed this - it’s called dry fibre recycling. I think they are using it for their inks and certain machine components, but they're now working with HKRITA which is the Hong Kong Research Institute of Textiles and Apparel to use that same recycling tech to recycle clothes. Specifically things that have elastic blends in them.

HB: Woooah!

GD: And that’s one of the few times I’ve heard of synthetic clothing being able to be recycled. I think there are some other companies, like Blocktexx in Queensland. They focus on cotton and polyester.

HB: Ohhh Bassike work with them. I heard it on a podcast. They send them their cotton and polyester and they said that originally they would give their offcuts [from production] to mechanics to use. And they’re like “now we use Blocktexx” which I found so interesting. I wrote a note down. They talked about how they still don’t have an answer for their other fibres.

GD: Nup.

HB: It’s weird that it’s cotton AND polyester.

GD: It’s because they've developed a method to separate those two specifically. So the polyester – I think they can turn it into pellets or something that can be used for subsequent manufacturing of anything plastic. The cotton could be used for rayon production or in agricultural.

HB: Don’t they make the big road blocks for traffic with it?

GD: I’m not sure. You might be thinking of Red Cycle. They were like “we’re taking all these soft plastics and we’re making it into infrastructure projects and park benches and all this”. But of course, the capacities didn’t really exist to keep up with the input.

What we do [at Dempstah] is called mechanical fibre recovery. People call it more old school compared to chemical – with chemical you can recycle cottons chemically into really fine, long rayon style fibres and so you can achieve fine yarn, and then fine rayon fabrics. With mechanical fibre recovery often the machinery is older. Sometimes you’ll only be able to produce a woollen spun yarn with it, because the fibres will get cut up too short. And the thing that determines if you can spin a really fine yarn is long fibres. But there are new players who are trying to develop the tech to be more sensitive in how it recovers and therefore retains fibre length, which means that you can produce finer yarns and finer textiles. So yeah! It’s all evolving.

We’re aiming to buy our own fibre recovery machine, and we’re talking to - it’s an Italian company, who we met with when we were in Istanbul at this big trade show that we went to. They produce really small versions of a lot of different milling machinery, like spinning machinery, or plying machinery, or like, combing and carding machinery. And not too long ago they released a fibre recovery mini machine.

HB: Really?!

GD: Yeah! It’s not massive, they market it for just sampling and research and development but as I was probing they said at its fastest it can process up to a kilo a minute.

HB: That’s good for you! Coz you’d be - what were you thinking of focussing on? Working with small local designers to recycle their stuff?

GD: Yeah. So we were doing a run of a few hundred kilos – a kilo a minute, so sixty kilos in an hour – you could get that done over a few days and that’s enough to spin into a consignment of yarn. I’m much happier with it being really small. And that’s the thing that we found at the trade show. These were the only guys doing something smaller, and then you jump straight to like eight hundred kilos per hour/ million dollar machinery. At the trade show when I met with these companies, I’d say: “we’re really small, we have ninety square metres of floor space to work with in Tasmania and that’s max. So we need a really a compact setup, it can be slow - or slower than what you’re used to at least - with smaller yields, but it’s about the space and the expense. Could you configure your machine line to those specifications?” And they’d be enthusiastic in person but then I’d get ghosted... the thing that I really liked about the Italian machine is that although it’s smaller, it has a computer console attached to it so you can vary all the components of the machinery in terms of how they operate. You basically come up with a whole bunch of settings that you can save as a recipe, depending on the type of fibre that you’re recovering. We know from the runs that we’ve done with our mill in Hong Kong, with some waste if it’s really good quality you can just run it through at full speed and you’ll get a really good fibre yield on the other side -

HB: Ahh!

GD: - But if it’s like linen, which is notoriously dry and brittle (which is what gives it its beautiful feel), you’ve gotta be a lot more sensitive with how you’ll recover that. You might have to slow the machine down and mix different types of waste fibre. So the fact that this Italian one is sooo customisable… that’s really sick.

HB: Were they similar to the knitting people who you posted about the other week? With the smaller machines? Coz it sounds like it’s the same idea in both of these machines.

GD: No no, not at all. They’re from two different players. Kniterate; their whole ethos is to make industrial-quality knitting machines smaller and more affordable, make the programming and everything easier so that indie designers and smaller makers can reclaim the means of production in house.

HB: Yeah.

GD: The Italian fibre recovery machine guys, they’re like a big milling machinery company. They make these for research, development, and sampling, for uni’s or for other textile mills that just wanna do a little sample trial something to better understand how they’re gonna process things, so that they can calibrate the bigger machines to do a huge batch of it. As I wanna use it for a micro mill operation we'd be pretty atypical of their usual customer. But you could still use it for production. There’s ways to configure your setup so you’re getting more efficiency; adjusting to conveyor belt length and the size of the receptacle that catches the fibres.

HB: Would you buy it with some of the eBay prize money or is that kinda of -

GD: What we’re gonna do is –

HB: You’ll have to do more grants?!

GD: I'm looking at a Tasmanian government grant. Coz I think what we’re doing is legit and we really are trying to learn and understand and run a small scale fibre recovery operation on-island.

What we’re doing first is getting together some sample fabric waste to send to Italy to test on their machine - actually I might ask you for some – just small batches of a whole breadth of different types of textiles. Not a lot, just like 200 grams of each.

HB: Yeah yeah, I’ve got a box!