Eyewear brand MYKITA, and material technology steel maker Alleima, have joined forces in a new collaboration. The leftover steel scrap from the production of eyewear frames is now returned to Alleima to be recycled steel to be sold back to MYKITA. A win-win collaboration and an important sustainability partnership for the future.
Text & images by Alleima
Steel can be reused indefinitely. Today steel is the most common metal found within the scrap metal industry and about half of the worldwide steel production recycles steel to a large extent of their production.
A century of recycling
Alleima, a leading developer and manufacturer of advanced stainless steel and alloys, bases its production on 83% recycled steel and in addition uses an electric arc furnace that runs almost entirely on fossil-free electricity. Alleima has been recycling steel for more than 100 years. The company differs process-wise and has a more low-carbon process compared to many traditional steel manufacturers that base their production on iron ore smelted in a blast furnace heated with fossil fuels.
MYKITA is an independent eyewear design and manufacturing company combining handcraft with high technology. All frames are handmade at the MYKITA HAUS in Berlin. The Alleima-produced stainless steel that MYKITA uses is a highly recycled product: approximately 90% of the content is recycled with 10% raw material added to achieve the medical-grade quality demanded by the products.
Achieving full circularity
Since the beginning, MYKITA has been recycling its pre-consumer scrap locally. Recently MYKITA started to explore the possibility of further optimising this material cycle, aiming to achieve full circularity. The metal scraps are now returned to the Alleima raw materials yard and go directly back into the recycling process and to the steel grade MYKITA uses in their production. It represents the start of a closed-loop production.
“We have had a close partnership with MYKITA for many years. Today we are proud to say that we have deepened our partnership to also include circularity and become a closed-loop operation. Sustainability is present in all aspects of our operations today, and we continuously work to further minimise four environmental impacts,” says Mikael Silver, Sustainability Manager, at Alleima.
“We can only make true sustainability progress with close partnerships along our value chain. Alleima is a highly progressive player in this field, and we are proud of our 20-year partnership – we share the belief that innovation in materials and engineering is essential to advancing the industry and protecting the environment,” says MYKITA founder and creative director Moritz Krueger.
