Grant: Applied Research and Development Grants - Level 1

There is actually a great diversity of hair ties products on the market. Unfortunately, many such hair ties are made totally or partially with synthetic polymers that may take decades to decompose. Current estimates show that 15 million hair ties are tossed or lost daily in North America and most of them are made from plastic-based ingredients, meaning they may take many years to break down. For example, nylon fabrics takes approximately 30-40 years to decompose in the environment. The proposed hair ties solution offers a functional and fashionable solution to a large environmental problem. The current product manufactured by the partner is one of the very few commercially-available plastic-free hair tie on the market. They are made from a flat woven organic cotton fiber (75%) and elastomeric fiber (25%). The product has a growing demand and efforts are made to scale its production to keep up with the demand. The partner has been looking for an alternative to labor intensive joining procedure for its hair ties. Actually, the joining procedure involves manual sewing (stitching) of two ends of a woven elastic band. The present challenge with the product is how to seal the two ends of the elastic fabric together. The basic solution right now involves a cotton label and bar-tack stitching. The problem with this solution is that it often gets caught in the hair and also does not scale to smaller applications (their current elastic fabric is 11mm wide and they are developing a 5mm version and a 4mm diameter round version). The proposed project consists in the development of an ecological, plastic-free bonding solution for hair ties to replace the sewing/stitching procedure. Provided the expertise and reputation of CTT Group with polymers and bonding systems, a new bonding system and procedure will be developed for hair ties, such procedure could be eventually used and scaled-up to meet current product specifications.