GOING CIRCULAR

Sustainability Compendium V

An F2F Initiative

Lenzing Group
Elite Sponsor

The Lenzing Group stands for ecologically responsible production of specialty fibers made from the renewable raw material wood. As an innovation leader, Lenzing is a partner of global textile and nonwoven manufacturers and drives many new technological developments.

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From the Management's Desk

Avinash Mane

Commercial Head, South Asia

Lenzing has been pioneering the cause of sustainable and performance driven textile solutions globally. Sustainable fashion and innovation have seen a tremendous growth over the past few years everywhere.

Brands and retailers have been implementing environment friendly products and practices in their manufacturing processes, aiming to minimise carbon footprint, and eliminate the use of toxic ingredients.

This change has shown a positive uphill growth towards sustainable living. We aim to provide our expertise in global innovation through associations as we have been doing over the years.

Strategy

Sustainability Strategy

At Lenzing, we look beyond fibers and take responsibility for our children and grandchildren by standing up against the troubles of our time. This attitude is part of our strategic principles.

Our ambitious climate target represents an important component of our strategy and our responsibility to future generations. In the 2019 financial year, we became the world’s first producer of wood-based cellulosic fibers to make a strategic commitment to dramatically reducing our carbon footprint and cutting our emissions per ton of product by 50 percent by 2030. We intend to achieve our vision of climate-neutral production without net-carbon emissions by 2050. The most highly regarded organization for climate targets, the Science Based Targets initiative, has confirmed that the Lenzing Group’s climate target is indeed science-based. That kind of credibility matters greatly to us – for ourselves and for our customers.

Sustainable fibers are our passion. Together with our partners, we want to create added value for people and the environment. This idea is at the heart of our sustainability strategy and the ambitious targets associated with it. We follow three strategic principles within the context of our “Naturally positive” sustainability strategy. The focus is on those areas where Lenzing has the greatest impact to accomplish a more sustainable world.

Partnering for Change - Complex global challenges call for a collaborative approach to design systemic solutions, involving many stakeholder groups. As one of the leaders in wood-based cellulosic fibers, Lenzing has a particular responsibility and an ambition to help raise the bar as regards sustainability in the textile and nonwovens industries. Transparency is a prerequisite for fostering trust and longterm relationships. With its contributions to developing industry-wide methods, tools and approaches, Lenzing helps the industry to progress on its sustainability roadmap by overcoming critical challenges.

Advancing Circularity - The company unites the cellulosic fiber cycle of its wood-based products (biological cycle) with its innovative technologies that focus on closing loops in the production and the recovery of raw materials and chemicals (technical cycles). The biological cycle starts from the renewable resource wood, which is converted into dissolving wood pulp and subsequently into fibers. Lenzing’s biorefinery concept ensures 100 percent utilization of the renewable raw material wood. Wood material that is not used for the production of dissolving wood pulp and fibers provides the basis for valuable biobased products and energy. Subsequently, Lenzing’s customers use the fibers in different applications. This biological cycle is closed when the fibers biodegrade or are composted at their end of life. In the technical cycle, Lenzing aims to minimize the environmental footprint and to improve resource efficiency by closing the loops of fiber production technologies with state-of-the-art recovery and reuse systems. Following the net-benefit principle, Lenzing also considers the downstream value chain steps and develops new applications. Lenzing will advance its circular economy ambitions in limiting climate change to 2 °C global temperature increase as outlined in the Paris Climate Agreement.

Greening the Value Chain - Lenzing’s responsible practices and innovative products enable its customers and value chain partners to improve their environmental performance and achieve their sustainability targets and commitments. Responsible sourcing practices, water stewardship, decarbonization and sustainable innovations are the basis for Lenzing’s efforts in greening the value chain. The sustainability targets for air emissions, water emissions, pollution and climate protection are a cornerstone for Lenzing’s responsible entrepreneurship and act as a driver of innovation. With its contributions to developing methods and tools, Lenzing helps the industry to progress on its sustainability roadmap.

About

Company Background

The Lenzing Group’s high-quality fibers form the basis for a variety of textile applications ranging from elegant ladies clothing to versatile denims and high-performance sports clothing. Due to their consistent high quality, their biodegradability and compostability Lenzing fibers are also highly suitable for hygiene products and agricultural applications.

The business model of the Lenzing Group goes far beyond that of a traditional fiber producer. Together with its customers and partners, Lenzing develops innovative products along the value chain, creating added value for consumers. The Lenzing Group strives for the efficient utilization and processing of all raw materials and offers solutions to help redirect the textile sector towards a closed-loop economy..

Sustainability

Focus Areas

Within the three principles described above, Lenzing identified seven focus areas where the Lenzing Group substantially contributes to creating positive impacts and benefits:

Vardhman's sustainability framework follows a holistic, balanced and practical approach in addressing all three facets of sustainability — environmental, social and economic. The sustainability framework has been built on three pillars that the Group describes as:

Raw material security
Decarbonization
Water stewardship
Sustainable innovations
Partnering for systemic change
Empowering people
Enhancing community wellbeing

In order to credibly implement the sustainability strategy, supply chain transparency is a prerequisite. Lenzing sets targets in these areas to further advance its performance and positive impact. These focus areas contribute directly to Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) described on page 25 and 26. Management approaches for all material topics are listed in each chapter of the corresponding focus area.

Viewpoint

Overall Circularity Viewpoint

The Lenzing Group strives for the efficient utilization and processing of all raw materials and offers solutions to help redirect the textile sector towards a circular economy. The Lenzing Group’s business model goes far beyond that of a pure raw material producer. Together with its customers and partners, Lenzing develops innovative products along the value chain, creating added value for consumers.

The technologies developed by Lenzing aim to optimally utilize all the raw materials and to recover chemicals, water and energy, preferably by using closed production cycles. The Lenzing business model is generally based on the use of wood as a renewable raw material. Lenzing is therefore almost predestined to pioneer the circular economy as a concept of the future in industry. The Lenzing biorefinery concept has proven to be a commercially successful trend-setter for decades.

Innovation and sustainability are at the heart of Lenzing’s sCore TEN strategy. Every innovation, whether it be process-, product-, or application-related, is evaluated from the very beginning in terms of sustainability. At Lenzing, innovation is driven by sustainable thinking and paying due regard to both the life-cycle perspective and the net-benefit principle. Sustainable innovations include continuous improvement of Lenzing’s existing technologies and processes as well as the driving of systemic change through forward-looking solutions and business models on a large scale. Limited resources are driving solutions to a circular economy. Lenzing is continuously innovating to contribute to a resilient and circular industry.

Lenzing strives to identify and develop cross-industry business cases to make progress in instituting circularity at Lenzing and throughout the industry. With its contributions to developing methods and tools, Lenzing helps the industry to progress on its path towards a more sustainable future.

Climate change and circular economy Lenzing has an approved science-based target (SBT) and will reduce the CO2 emissions from its operations and supply chain in line with the Paris Climate Agreement. Circularity and climate change are two sides of the same coin. Lenzing strives to find synergistic solutions similar to the successful Lenzing biorefinery concept so that innovations and solutions to circular economy challenges would mitigate climate change simultaneously. With the REFIBRA™ technology, for example, fibers are produced with 10 percent less CO2 emissions than Lyocell standard fibers from Lenzing.

Planned

Circularity Initiatives Planned

Collaboration is a key prerequisite for the transformation to a circular economy. Partnering for systemic change is one of the basic principles of Lenzing’s “Naturally positive” sustainability strategy for jointly achieving targets with Lenzing’s major stakeholders. Regarding the circular economy, the Ellen MacArthur Foundation is one of Lenzing’s key stakeholders. Further collaborations in 2019 included projects such as “Jeans Redesign” or the “#WearNext”-campaign.

The “Jeans Redesign” project, which aims to provide a framework for the industry to design clothing for a circular economy was launched by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. Working together with a group of leading brands and manufacturers, guidelines were developed in order to provide minimum requirements for jeans on durability, material health, recyclability, and traceability. Lenzing contributed to developing these guidelines with its experience in sustainable fiber manufacturing and recycling. Jeans that meet the guidelines will be collectively produced at scale by May 2021.

The Make Fashion Circular initiative joined forces with the New York City Department of Sanitation and the New York City Economic Development Corporation, along with collectors, recyclers, such as Lenzing, and resellers to launch the #WearNext campaign as an effort to encourage all New Yorkers to keep clothes in use and out of landfills. An online map was created marking more than 1,100 collection points across the city where people can return clothes they no longer wear.

REFIBRA™ technology - After extensive research and development work, Lenzing in 2019 achieved a breakthrough in the development of post-consumer textiles as a raw material for the production of high-quality cellulose fibers by using Lenzing’s REFIBRA™ technology. Up to this point, its REFIBRA™ technology solely used cotton scraps from the garment making textile industry (post-industrial) to be converted into dissolving wood pulp, which partly replaces virgin pulp for use in the production of TENCEL™ Lyocell fibers. REFIBRA™ technology enables the production of high quality lyocell fibers from upcycled material and wood pulp.

The technology successfully combines lyocell technology, which is widely acknowledged to be the most environmentally responsible wood-based cellulosic fiber, with a closed-loop production process and the upcycling of cotton materials.

One of the challenges of processing post-consumer textiles is that they differ greatly in quality and composition from cotton scraps from garment making. To use these materials, new technologies had to be developed to separate fiber blends and remove textile auxiliaries and dyestuffs. Implications of the use phase of the textiles must also be taken into account.

These were the major milestones in the development of the REFIBRA™ technologoy:

2017: When it commercially launched the REFIBRA™ technology in 2017, Lenzing achieved an unprecedented milestone for the circular economy in textiles. It initially blended wood pulp with 20 percent of pulp produced from cotton scraps. These fibers are available under the Recycled Claim Standard (RCS) certifying that all the production processes in the supply chain have undergone sufficient steps to ensure the integrity of the final product. The fashion industry quickly adopted TENCEL™ fibers with REFIBRA™ technology.
2019: The share of recycled content (pulp from cotton scraps) was increased from 20 to 30 percent. Vast progress has been made in using post-consumer waste as raw material. As lyocell is itself upcyclable, Lenzing has also filed a patent on the recycling of lyocell for use as a raw material for lyocell production. The lyocell fiber portfolio with REFIBRA™ technology was also enlarged allowing for further applications for home textiles and knitwear.

Lenzing’s extensive promotional activities contributed to the education of many value chain partners, raising their awareness about the challenges the industry faces in implementing the circular economy.

Italian denim manufacturer Candiani SpA won the 2019 ITMA Sustainable Innovation Award for its Re-Gen: Creating Circular Denim project with Lenzing. This innovative product is a circular denim fabric created from regenerated and recycled raw materials. Upcycling technology was also introduced for nonwoven products.

VEOCEL™ with Eco Cycle technology enables the use of recycled content in sensitive applications that have the same fiber properties and fiber quality.

It is Lenzing’s vision to make textile waste recycling a common standard process like paper upcycling. This includes recycling of fabrics and garments from Lenzing’s own materials, Lenzing fibers produced with REFIBRA™ technology shall contain up to 50 percent recycled content

sustainable Apparel Coalition (SAC) - Lenzing is a founding member of the SAC, which is the apparel, footwear and home textile industry’s foremost alliance for sustainable production. In 2019, Lenzing became a member of the policy-hub on the circular economy for the apparel and footwear industry and actively contributed to the understanding of the industry with regard to barriers and challenges to the circular economy in areas such as product design and recycling technology development. Lenzing has also contributed to the refinement of methods used to assess environmental footprint of products via life-cycle assessments. In the reporting year, Lenzing was named a “Leading Contributor” by SAC.

Make Fashion Circular (an initiative of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation)

The Make Fashion Circular initiative was established by Ellen MacArthur Foundation in 2018 with the aim of accelerating the transition to the circular economy. Lenzing contributed to this ambitious initiative by providing an industrial perspective and insights and drawing on its experience in the textile industry and its pioneering TENCEL™ Lyocell fibers with REFIBRA™ technology.

POV

Products from Sustainability POV

Net-benefit Concept: Lenzing’s net-benefit concept brings all the three strategic principles together. It guides and shapes all major decisions. Lenzing’s net-benefit products offer positive impacts and benefits to environment, society, and value chain partners that exceed those of most competing alternatives in the market. Net-benefit products take a life-cycle perspective and thus include both upstream and downstream value chain processes. Customers can replace resource-intensive and polluting products with Lenzing’s alternatives, thus improving their product footprint and reducing supply chain risks.

Pulp: Dissolving wood pulp is the raw material for Lenzing’s fibers, produced in the company’s own biorefineries14. Lenzing’s biorefinery process ensures that 100 percent of wood constituents are used to produce dissolving wood pulp for fiber production, biobased products, and bioenergy. All pulp produced at Lenzing pulp production sites, including the future pulp production in Brazil, is totally chlorine free. The biorefineries at the sites of Lenzing and Paskov contribute to the Group’s carbon footprint reduction and consequently also enable Lenzing’s customers to obtain low-carbon products.

Lyocell: Lyocell fibers from Lenzing are derived from the renewable resource wood and produced in a closed-loop process, which transforms wood pulp into cellulosic fibers with high resource efficiency and low ecological impact. This solvent-spinning process recycles process water and reuses the solvent at a recovery rate of more than 99 percent. Lenzing’s lyocell fibers show around 50 percent less greenhouse gas emissions than generic lyocell (according to Higg MSI scores).

Lenzing fibers with recycled content : These fibers use pre-consumer cotton scraps, post-consumer garments and wood from sustainably managed forests as a raw material. The cotton material is recycled into pulp which is blended (up to 30 percent) with wood pulp to produce a high-quality lyocell fiber. This technology diverts tons of cotton scraps and post-consumer garments from entering landfills or incineration. Based on Lenzing’s own calculations.

TENCEL™ Lyocell fibers with REFIBRA™: Technology require 95 percent less water to produce than conventional cotton. They are produced with high resource efficiency and avoid CO2. Therefore these fibers have a low environmental impact. Products and technologies with a net benefit

Modal: Modal fibers from Lenzing are produced using an integrated production process in which the raw material pulp is manufactured at the same site as the fiber itself. 100 percent of the raw material beechwood is converted into cellulose and other biobased biorefinery products. Beech forests grow naturally without the use of chemical fertilizers or artificial irrigation. The pulp production is self-sufficient in terms of energy while supplying a significant amount of bioenergy for the entire fiber production at the production site. Therefore TENCEL™ Modal production causes around 80 percent less greenhouse gas emissions than generic modal (according to Higg MSI scores).

TENCEL™ Luxe : TENCEL™ Luxe branded filaments produced with Eco Filament technology avoid conventional yarn spinning, which is energy-intensive and predominantly based in regions with very high share of fossil-based electricity. For example, at industry level, spinning processes contribute to 28 percent of the total CO2 emissions of the textile value chain (excluding use phase)

LENZING™ Web technology: The LENZING™ Web technology is an innovative R&D development technology platform that allows producing a wide range of novel sustainable nonwoven materials from the raw material wood. The patented nonwoven web formation process – Lenzing holds more than 25 patent applications - starts with dissolving wood pulp and produces a directly formed cellulosic nonwoven fabric made of 100 percent continuous lyocell filament. This technology enables fiber and nonwoven production in only one step and sets new standards in the field of cellulose nonwoven fabrics with respect to efficiency, circularity and ecological sustainability. The flexibility of this technology and possible integration with other nonwoven technologies will enable the development of a wider range of new cellulosic materials and composite structures for highly engineered end use applications.

Modal Eco Color technology: Fibers with this technology incorporate pigment during fiber production and thus help avoiding energy-intensive conventional dyeing steps. A fabric made from this product has 60 percent lower CO2 emissions than conventionally dyed fabrics.

LENZING™ ECOVERO™ viscose and LENZING™ Viscose Eco: LENZING™ ECOVERO™ branded viscose (for textiles) and LENZING™ Viscose Eco (nonwovens) have 50 percent less greenhouse gas emissions than generic viscose (according to Higg MSI scores).

LENZING™ Acetic Acid Biobased: Lenzing’s biorefinery technology converts wood into pulp, biobased biorefinery products and energy. One of the biobased biorefinery products is LENZING™ Acetic Acid Biobased which has an 85 percent lower carbon footprint than conventional fossil-based acetic acid on the market. LENZING™ Acetic Acid Biobased causes significantly lower greenhouse gas emissions than average global, and also EU production. This was the conclusion of a recent study conducted by an independent Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) consultant.

GOING CIRCULAR

Lenzing Group
Elite Sponsor

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GOING CIRCULAR

Lenzing Group Elite Sponsor

Contact Us

Our Location

Lenzing Group
Elite Sponsor