Less Than 1% of the Material in Clothing is Recycled into New Garments

Less Than 1% of the Material in Clothing is Recycled into New Garments

Less Than 1% of the Material in Clothing is Recycled into New Garments

Most garments that are recycled are down-cycled.

The biggest issue holding garment-to-garment recycling back is fibre quality, fibres are damaged during both wearing and washing.

You can’t take a well-used T-shirt, mechanically tear it apart and then make the fibres into a new one, because they have lost so much fibre quality that the garment will not be of enough quality to fit into the market.

Most of the recycling that can turn fibers back into fabric requires that the feedstock is based on mono-material.

Less Than 1 of the Material in Clothing is Recycled into New Garments

One option is to mix mechanically recycled fibres in with virgin fibres.

Another possibility is to chemically break fibres down into their chemical building blocks and then rebuild them into new fibres with indistinguishable characteristics than virgin fibres.

Only with a chemical approach we can get the raw materials back and close the loop on textile recycling.

Levi’s and H&M just launched clothes that are made of secondhand jeans, through a process of chemically breaking down cotton and turning it into a new fiber.

Retrieving 50,000 pounds of cotton denim required sifting through one million pounds of jeans.

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  • Adam Hayes

    Fashion companies can turn unwanted garments into something more useful.. They just need to act....

  • Nick Casey

    They use high volumes of non-renewable resources

  • Carla Sierpinski

    Even consumers are careless. We only care about the brand and the design.

  • Dan Smaller

    Thoughtful piece

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Susanna Koelblin

Commercialization & Sourcing Leader Focused On Circularity

From blockchain to recycling, Susanna talks about emerging technologies and circularity topics in the fashion industry.

   
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