From tights to tables

Swedish Stockings
Sweden (Stockholm)

Swedish Stockings is the first and only sustainable stocking company that is closing the loop by converting its recycled nylon stockings to tables.

 

The documentary “The light bulb conspiracy” lists light bulbs and iPods as examples of products designed to be used and discarded within a limited useful life to promote consumerism. But the example of women’s tights was the one that attracted the most attention from Linn Frisinger, who decided to found Swedish Stockings, a line of high-quality hosiery made with recycled nylon.

What Linn did not expect was that buyers would show interest in being able to return their tights to convert them into new ones. Wanting to provide a solution to this waste, she accepted the old tights even though it was not feasible to separate the nylon fibres from the elastane to convert them into the same product.

“In recycling, we tend to believe that a plastic bottle will turn into a new plastic bottle, but that is usually not the most effective way to close the loop. You have to look for other options.”

The option Linn found was to turn them into… tables! Her father works in a factory making fiberglass tanks, so they had access to large cylindrical moulds. After several tests, they arrived at a formula that uses a mixture of between 25 and 65 per cent of tights and recycled fiberglass: the darker the table, the more tights it’s made from.

Today, it is the first and only sustainable hosiery company. It aims to encourage and influence other companies to close the loop through recycling and to drive cross-border collaboration to keep learning and come up with new solutions. “By collaborating with specialised and smaller industries, more innovative solutions can be found.”

AtlasAction: You can recycle tights of any brand by taking them to any Swedish Stockings collection point.

Written by

Caitlin O'Rorke (10 August 2020)

Project leader

Linn Frisinger, founder

Partners

This project has been selected as part of FashionFutures, a new  content channel that maps the work of people transforming the fashion sector: the designers, craftspeople, social innovators, educators, community leaders and communicators. Atlas of the Future is excited to partner with Makerversity, with the support of The J J Charitable Trust and their network of fashion friends.

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