Why we can’t just recycle our old clothes.

What are the current challenges stopping the textile and fashion industry from recycling our old clothes more effectively?

January 14th, 2022

Written by FibreTrace®

Less than 1% of all garments are recycled to a high quality.

This statistic from Ellen MacArthur Foundation is thrown around a lot when discussing the challenges of textile recycling for the global fashion and textile industry and why it isn’t just as simple as it sounds.

Aside from that small 1 percent, the rest of our old clothes are generally either downcycled, incinerated or sent directly to landfills. According to the Ellen Macarthur Foundation, this translates into a loss of USD 100 billion worth of material annually! 

That shirt you bought from H&M made of recycled polyester? That’s a product of recycled plastic bottles - not old textiles.

So what is stopping us from recycling our old clothing more effectively?

The problem

To put it plainly, most existing textile collectors and business models are not equipped to deal with the high-value recycling needed to sort and separate our textiles appropriately.

The fashion industry accounts for an estimated 92 million tonnes of textiles waste globally - the equivalent of a rubbish truck full of clothes ending up in a landfill every second. By 2030, this number is expected to rise to 134 million tonnes of textiles a year.

We are producing more than we can consume. 

Fashion and textiles rely heavily on non-renewable sources and must turn to more circular alternatives to keep our existing resources in a closed-loop system. Greater transparency will be crucial here to ensure we can better utilise existing resources, make smarter and more informed decisions about our supply chain and understand our impact at a raw materials level.

Existing recycling systems

Most sorting processes for post-consumer recycling is done by a manual process (i.e. by hand), meaning it is time, labour and cost intensive. Clothes must be first disassembled, removing trims, buttons and zips before taking the garments apart. 

Blended materials can also pose a problem. A lot of fast fashion and modern clothing will often be a blend of materials like cotton and polyester, which are difficult to separate manually. A lack of transparency in the global fashion and textile industry also means that we don’t have 100% certainty what the fibres are in our final garments or their composition.

This is where high-value recyclers are required to separate clothing even further, down into composition, colour, wax coatings, and so on.

To achieve this at scale in an economical way, new technologies, innovations and processes are needed. Whilst these technologies do currently exist, most are in early development, research and pilot stages. To also make these processes viable, strong capital investments are critical.

There are two main recycling processes: mechanical and chemical.

Mechanical recycling refers to the process of shredding a garment into small pieces before mixing it with virgin material to be turned back into clothing. As the mechanical recycling process requires the fibre to be shortened, this dramatically reduces their performance, durability and quality. To ensure the recycled material is suitable to make new garments, it must be mixed with a virgin (new) material to strengthen the recycled fibre.

Chemical recycling refers to the process of using chemical solvents to break down old garments into virgin-quality fibres. Chemical recycling is most effective in separating blended fabrics whilst maintaining the same or even a stronger level of fibre integrity. However, this can be more costly compared to mechanical recycling.

Designing for a circular economy

Some of these current challenges may be mitigated by applying circular design (i.e. designing for recyclability strategies). Designing for cyclability can reduce the number of unrecyclable fibres and fabric blends used in the value chain, and better align the fibre composition of garments with the specifications required for available recycling technologies.

It is important to note that finding industry-wide solutions for garment recycling will still not be enough to solve the industry’s overall overconsumption problem. More transparency is still needed to ensure brands have full custody of supply, justify responsible fibre choices and effectively mitigate risks and increase operational efficiencies.