Textile Recycling Could Save Apparel From its Dirty Ways
Apparel has been called dirty and wasteful and most likely to contribute to the overflow of landfills. But the industry is trying to give itself a better name and textile recycling might be its ticket.
At a Texworld USA seminar this week, expert panelists discussed latest efforts in using recycling to help create a more closed loop apparel process—essentially using recycled materials and giving them new life in new garments.
Wasting no time getting the point of apparel’s waste predicament across, Sourcing Journal senior editor Arthur Friedman said the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says 26 billion pounds of apparel and textiles end up in landfills each year. This despite the fact that the Council for Textile Recycling says 95 percent of used clothing could be recycled.
The apparel industry has no small problem on its hands, but the solution could yield big results.
As Isaac Nichelson, founder of fashion sustainability agency Sustainable Source, explained citing a Boston Consulting Group study out in May, “If we stay with status quo manufacturing, we’re going to see a net 3 percent loss in EBITDA [earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization] across the entire space by 2030. If we go the other direction toward circularity, it’s estimated that we’ll see a $162 billion upside for the industry by 2030.
Facts like that are way closed loop and circularity are buzz words quickly becoming business practices for companies interested in seeing the future.
Recognizing the need to play an even bigger role in minimizing its footprint, Lenzing started collecting cotton scraps from cutting room floors and combining it with wood pulp from trees to create its new Refibra™ branded lyocell fiber, saving those scraps from their landfill destiny.
As Tricia Carey, director of business development for denim at Lenzing, explained, the fiber is made from 100 percent cotton post industrial waste and blended using 80 percent pulp from wood and 20 percent pulp from cotton waste, then add a solvent that goes through a closed loop process, which is then extruded to create Refibra™ lyocell.
“With this latest innovation, Lenzing is the first manmade cellulosic fiber company to commercially produce fiber from recycled waste product,” Carey said.
Garments are already available at retail using Refibra™ lyocell, and knit and woven garments using the fiber.
Refibra™, according to Carey, still has the performance of TENCEL® and the ability to blend with other fibers and dying isn’t an issue either.
“It’s not just about the recycling, but to offer a quality product too,” Carey said. “Ultimately, our goal is to go to post consumer recycling…but this is our first step in reducing the waste that we have even at a post industrial level.”
Recover, a brand of Italian firm Hilurtas Ferre, which Nichelson also works with, has been recycling cotton for 70 years.
Using a mechanical recycling system, Recover works with 100 percent ringspun cotton generally from T-shirt or fleece production to make new yarns for the textile sector. The process is not only closed loop, but very environmentally friendly.
“We’re able to blend the existing colors to match Pantones without dying the cotton,” Nichelson explained. “This is one of the really amazing aspects of the Recover process. So because we’re not dying the cotton, this means 1 kilogram of Recover recycled cotton is about a 15,000 liter water savings compared to a virgin dyed cotton.”
Nichelson added, “It’s a huge solution for pre and post consumer waste streams to go into high value textiles in a really seamless way…These [garments using Recover yarns] do represent arguably the lowest impact garments available in the market right now because of that water, energy, chemical savings from not dying cotton, not cultivating cotton.”
For Ashley Gill, Textile Exchange standards business development manager, the key in advancing textile recycling will be being able to create quality product that, hopefully, won’t end up in a landfill later down the line anyway.
“One big question that still needs to be answered is: ‘how do we take post consumer textiles and put them back into a closed loop system where you’re creating a high value product that can be recycled again that you’re not just creating a valuable product that ultimately doesn’t have any ability to be recycled again?’, Gill posed.
Textile Exchange has created an rPET working group that’s looking at lagging technology in coming up with high value products from synthetic material, recycling technology that could go back to the exact same quality and characteristics of virgin polyester—because that’s what it’s going to take for greater uptake.
“The strategies that they are pushing toward, these big companies like H&M and Inditex, is to come up with that circular system where there’s value on the products that are at the end of their life,” Gill said.
At the end of the day, textile recycling is about resource efficiency.
“What’s really interesting is recently we’ve seen a massive acceleration in interest around circularity because there’s new information on the streets that if we don’t head this direction, it’s going to be a very big problem with resource scarcity and basically with the economics of fashion not working out,” Nichelson said. And, he added, “If we don’t have resource efficiency, we’re going to have a lot bigger problems than just the scarcity of fiber for textiles.”