Studio ID, Trendworks, Sabeti Wain and Botany Weaving have come together to launch Monova PE at AIX, a seat cover the partners tout as ”a game-changing” recyclable laminated seat cover.
The mono-material’s unique composition opens up possibilities for endless recycling, meaning the dress cover can repeatedly be reprocessed into new covers.
“We try to look at the different parts of the seating ecosystem and dress covers are something about which there’s quite a big environmental issue,” explained Daniel Clucas, founder of StudioID.
”Almost every dress cover is laminated these days. It gives them a lovely look, it stops them creasing, it means you can do nice style lines, but it pretty much always means there’s a piece of polyurethane foam glued to the fabric. So no matter what, when the fabric is worn out you can’t recycle it. You can’t separate the cover and the polyurethane layer,” he explains.
“We brought together this team, with Trendworks providing a huge amount of textile design experience. Botany Weaving had a recycled yarn made from waste textiles – it’s broken down into the monomer, re-polymerised and re-spun into yarn, so it’s a proper circular process. Sabeti Wain was the natural partner to build it all. They really want to make a contribution to sustainability and are very aware of how many covers they laminate.
“We’ve been looking at polyester non-wovens, we’ve been looking at spacer fabrics. And we’ve come up with a kind of secret blend at the moment, while we just tailor it. It’s a blend of polyester materials that Sabeti Wain has been working on for lamination,” Clucas adds.
“The good news is that it rather like plastic bottles which you can put into a recycling bin and down the line it will become a new plastic bottle. This chemical recycling process – as it spreads throughout the world – can go into that anywhere and come out of it anywhere. It doesn’t rely on Botany collecting the covers and creating a complicated ecosystem, it will be kind of generally recyclable.”
The team has first mover advantage on the product at the moment, but Clucas believes it’s good for the industry as a whole, because then aerospace can stand up and highlight this product with regards to recyclability and sustainability. “For all of us, this is a project to show how we can think differently and solve problems, and there will be refinements that make it even better as time goes along,” he says.
Interest so far has been promising, Clucas adds. “Remember, laminated covers are on something like half a million seats. So it’s a small thing, but the industry-wide it’s considerable.”
