Before heading to Dairago – right at the outskirts of Milan in the middle of the textile district between Milan and Varese – for visiting the headquarters of Tessiltorre, the production core of the textiles manufacturing company, I took a look at the company’s website www.tessiltorre.com.
Besides emphasising the company’s history and its values that inspire it, I was pleasantly impressed by the video on the “endlessly winding red thread: the plots are intertwined and ideas become projects…new relationships are born”. A thread that represents the company’s history but at the same time synthesizes the warp and the weft of the weaving process and the extraordinary end product, for the restaurant, the room and the bathroom.
“Everything revolves around quality, Tessiltorre is committed to offer a countless diversity of articles along with a wide range of products as a company policy; the goal is a high customisation degree to meet the most demanding customer requirements. Quality is standing out in the selection of raw materials. Continuous research of the yarns. Experimenting. With the goal of offering uniqueness, novelty and originality. Quality is synonymous with Made in Italy, that also means the capability to select the best raw materials that are rigorously and thoroughly tested before being chosen and becoming a Tessiltorre product.
A quality path that has driven us to be, today, a benchmark in the sector. All these years, our priority has never changed: to make every small gesture of the daily routine a special moment, in terms of quality and image. Closely related to the quality concept is the concept of longlastingness, which is related to the quality of the fabric, but also with the synergy created with the customer (industrial laundry); to study and design a product with characteristics that are more compatible with the increasingly advanced washing cycles.
The textile industry is the central point when it comes to respecting the environment and from the beginning of the last year, there has been adopted a regulation in Italy on the disposal of textile waste outside the ordinary circuit… How is your company organized in this sense? “We are having this practice already for 15 years now, since we are disposing the fabric scraps and waste resulting from the production cycle in the appropriate manner. Textile waste has a specific code and they are disposed by specialised companies”. Still in the framework of respecting the environment, why should fabric be preferred instead of paper in the food and catering industry, in the restaurants? “It would be necessary to make a wider reasoning on circular economy and not only on re-use.
We are starting from a study carried out a few years ago on “Life Cycle Assessment”, a product life cycle analysis. Briefly, according to this analysis, the overwhelming superiority of textiles over paper disposables on the crucial issue of environmental impact becomes evident. Comparing an average life span figure of 94 washes of a textile tablecloth with the ecological impact of 94 disposable tablecloths, the textile tablecloth proves to be more sustainable than paper in all the parameters surveyed. There is a constant record for renewable and non-renewable resources, water consumption, global warming, ozone depletion, acidification, hazardous waste, etc.
But there is no comparison either from an aesthetical point of view: with a nicely decorated table, we find ourselves to another level, is the genuine Made in Italy that goes hand in hand with the tradition of Italian cuisine. Finally, roaming around the high-tech textile looms of Tessiltorre, immersed in the production frenzy, for me it was a moment to recall two centuries ago when the Industrial Revolution and the Manchester mechanical looms created a productive and social upheaval all over the West.
A revolution that turned upside down the individuals lives and their families, as Ken Follet has well illustrated in his latest book “The Armour of Light”, where the latest huge chapter in the saga started with “The Pillars of the Earth”.
It passed so much time since then… •
TESSILTORRE S.r.l.
Via Giuseppe Verdi 34 20020 Dairago (MI)
T. +39 0331 432466
tessiltorre@tin.it
www.tessiltorre.com
by Marzio Nava
DETERGO Magazine # October 2023
