COLOURizd Joins The Denim Deal

COLOURizd is now an Innovation Member of the Denim Deal International Foundation. Here's why.

The Denim Deal has set itself a target that aligns perfectly with COLOURizd: one billion pairs of jeans with at least 20% post-consumer recycled cotton by 2030. Not a pledge. Not a roadmap to a roadmap. A number, with a deadline.

And here's why that target speaks to us: the thing holding recycled content back isn't ambition. It's the yarn.

Mechanically recycled fibre comes back to us shorter, weaker, and more variable than it went out. Then conventional wet processing — the scouring, the bleaching, the dye baths, the re-dyeing when the shade misses — degrades it further. So the industry quietly caps recycled content at whatever percentage still survives the process. That cap is not a design choice. It's a process problem wearing a design costume.

This is exactly where we live. QuantumCOLOUR™ applies colour to yarn without the stress — no dye bath, no fibre reaction, approximately one litre of water per kilogram, zero wastewater discharge. And because we deliver pigment to the fibre rather than reacting with it, we don't care what's in the bale. Polyester sewing thread? Spandex in the mix? We're not trying to react with any of it.

But the part that made the Denim Deal the right home for us is this: our process gives strength back. We consistently measure yarn strength gains of up to 20% — and the gain is largest where the yarn starts weakest. In our trials with mechanically recycled denim at 20%, 30%, and 50% recycled content, the 50% yarns gained the most. The weaker the input, the greater the return.

So the fibre everyone is trying to use more of — short, variable, fragile — is the fibre our process helps the most. That's not a coincidence we could ignore.

And this is why we didn't just join — we brought a pilot. Together with the Denim Deal, we're launching a programme to push post-consumer recycled content past the ceiling it keeps hitting. It starts with mill interviews: what's actually stopping you from going higher? No commitment required — your answers shape the trials. Then yarn trials, with mills bringing their yarns and their production expertise while we bring QuantumCOLOUR. And then a retail pathway, because the goal is not a lab result. The goal is the first commercially available denim at 50%+ post-consumer recycled content that actually performs at retail.

We have written before about how the industry's biggest carbon lever sits in wet processing, not fibre choice. The Denim Deal is where those two conversations finally meet — because raising recycled content and reinventing coloration turn out to be the same project. You can't scale one without fixing the other.

If you're a Denim Deal mill and you've hit that recycled-content ceiling, I'd love to talk. If you're a brand or retailer who wants to take the resulting fabric to market, even better. Reach me directly, or contact Laura Vicaria, Programme Director at the Denim Deal.

Let's push recycled content past the ceiling.