How was the shirt made? Where did the fabric come from? Companies aren't hiding anything — or at least that's the idea behind the pilot project.
The tags are designed to help brands tell a "garment's story," said Sarah Swenson, the global sustainability manager at the manufacturing giant known for designing labels and adhesives.
The push comes as more consumers expect clothing brands to expose how and where their apparel is made. Avery Dennison pitches the tags as a way for companies to transparently display that data and stay in touch with customers online.
Inside the QR portal, customers are guided through the materials used to make the item and how to best wash it. There's also a guided how-to for disposing of clothes so that years from now, ambercycle can respin the materials into new fabric.
"This label ensures your garment is ambercycleable," reads the special tag, printed above the startup's logo.
It's a savvy solution for textile recyclers like Ambercycle CEO Shay Sethi, who is often left guessing about which materials and dyes were woven into the donated shirts he sifts through at work. His job gets even harder when that white care label has been ripped out.
"We know this problem really intimately," Sethi said. "It's not going to be scalable to do what we do unless we know something about the material."
The partnership with Avery Dennison is a big get for the CEO, who founded Ambercycle after college with government grants from the National Science Foundation and the Department of Defense.
He's already scored investments from the H&M Foundation, Y Combinator and the Lemelson Foundation for his patented technology that breaks down the molecules of textile waste into small pellets that are spun into polyester.
Ambercycle
"The same polyester pellets that you would otherwise make from oil, we're just making from this textile waste," co-founder Moby Ahmed said in a video about the product, dubbed cycora.
Local designers are already using the polyester and the L.A. startup has hinted at a project to manufacture apparel with H&M. The company started selling a small batch of its own designs — just 40 shirts — but plans to sew the special tags into more pieces.
If all goes according to plan, those items will find their way home to Ambercycle's L.A. factory. But the process of collecting old clothes is still a logistical puzzle.
"Essentially you have clothing all over the place, all across cities in people's closets," he said, "and you have to figure out the best way to get them to central locations."
For now, any of his customers living in L.A. can scan the QR code on their new shirt and request a pick-up.
"I don't know how we're going to get the New Zealand one back," Sethi said. "But we'll figure that out."
On Friday, five years after launching, the manufacturing business debuted a clothing line with local designer Come Back As A Flower partly made with their recycled polyester. Their model is Aleali May, the first female to design a unisex sneaker for Air Jordan.
"We started with this idea of 'can you take an old t-shirt and use those materials to just make a new t-shirt, instead of using materials from the earth like cotton or polyester'," he said.
Clothing retailers from Zara to H&M have slowly been trying to reduce their massive waste as pressure mounts from consumers, policymakers and activists.
Cheap, fast fashion has fueled Americans consumption of clothes. A sizable amount of that ends up in landfills — about 11.3 million tons of textiles in 2018, according to the most recent figures from the Environmental Protection Agency.
Sethi said he is working with several large clothing retailers that are trying to figure out how to cut waste.
"I haven't found a single place that says, 'oh, we're not interested in moving to a more sustainable fashion industry'," he said.
Ambercycle was founded with government grants from the National Science Foundation and the Department of Defense, which lists environmental sustainability as a national security threat. A few angel investors and funds, including Y Combinator, the Lemelson Foundation and H&M Foundation, also backed ambercycle's initial $4 million round.
It's attracted the interest of Swedish clothing giant H&M, an investor that's also looking to utilize ambercycle's technology in future collections.
Sethi and his co-founder Moby Ahmed began working on the idea as undergraduate students at UC Davis. Back then, the pair planned on selling their technology to big chemical companies. But they noticed that recycling and garbage processes in the textile and fashion industries were lagging behind. So they started a business instead.
But it's not easy. Their patented technology breaks down the molecules of textile waste to generate small polyester pellets. First, reactors built in their factory downtown separate the fibers of each item while removing dyes and stains. Those pellets are then spun into polyester yarn used to make new clothes.
Ambercycle's patented technology breaks down the molecules of textile waste to generate small polyester pellets.
The startup's factory downtown can process about 50 garments a day, mostly old shirts and textile waste or excess from big name businesses. It's hardly enough to make garments in mass. Even ambercycle's own clothes are 90% virgin polyester. To make 100% recycled polyester, Sethi would need a new factory.
Sethi has plans to build a large commercial plant that can eventually manufacture 50,000 tons of material each year, the amount large garment factors typically produce. If he succeeds, it would be a rarity. Few clothing companies produce and source in the U.S.. Most instead rely on cheap overseas labor and material.
But the fundraising for that factory doesn't appeal to venture capital or other traditional sources, he said.
"The idea of building a plant is seen as unsexy," he said. "We haven't gotten too much interest from the traditional technology investor. This is not in vogue yet."
So, Sethi is looking elsewhere for funding as consumer interest in sustainable fashion brands grows.