Can clothes ever be fully recycled?

 The world's first commercial-scale textile recycling plant is an important step in solving the fashion industry's huge waste problem.

On Sweden's Baltic Sea coast, in the town of Sundsvall, home of the country's paper industry, a group of scientists, chemists, entrepreneurs and textile manufacturers celebrate a milestone anniversary with the slogan "#SolutionsAreSexy ".

Swedish pulp producer Renewcell has just opened the world's first commercial-scale textile-to-textile chemical recycling pulp mill after spending 10 years developing the technology.

Mechanical textile-to-textile recycling, which involves manually shredding clothes and turning them into fibers, has been around for centuries, but Renewcell is the first commercial plant to use chemical recycling, which improves quality and adapts production. The new facility aims to recycle more than 1.4 billion T-shirts per year by 2030, marking the start of a major shift in the fashion industry's ability to recycle used clothing on a large scale.

“The linear model of fashion consumption is unsustainable,” says Patrik Lundström, CEO of Renewcell. "We can't deplete the planet's natural resources by pumping oil to produce polyester, cutting down trees to produce viscose, or growing cotton, and then those fibers only come up the chain once. linear value and end up in the oceans, landfills or incineration". This means limiting fashion waste and pollution while using and reusing clothes for as long as possible by developing collection systems or technologies that transform textiles into new raw materials.

It is estimated that more than 100 billion items of clothing are produced worldwide each year, 65% of which end up in landfill within 12 months. Landfills release equal amounts of carbon dioxide and methane - the latter produces 28 times more greenhouse gases than the former over a 100-year period. According to the United Nations, the fashion industry accounts for 8-10% of global carbon emissions.

Only 1% of recycled clothes are transformed into new clothes. While charity shops, textile banks, and retailer "take-back" programs help keep donated garments in good condition and in circulation, the ability to recycle end-of-life garments is currently limited.

Many malls with recycling programs, including Levi Strauss and H&M, use a three-pronged system: resale (such as selling to charity stores), reuse (converting into other products, such as cleaning or mops) or recycling (made into carpet, underlay, insulation or mattresses – clothing is not listed as an option).

Many of the technical difficulties encountered in recycling old clothes into new ones are due to their composition. Most of the clothes in our closets are made from a mix of textiles, with polyester being the most produced fiber, accounting for 54% of all fiber produced globally, according to the International Textile Exchange Association. 

Cotton takes second place with a market share of around 22%. The reason for polyester's popularity is the low cost of fossil-based synthetic fibers, making it a popular choice for price-conscious fast fashion brands – polyester costs half as much per kilogram as cotton. While the plastics industry has successfully broken down pure polyester (PET) for decades, the hybrid nature of textiles makes it difficult to recycle one fiber without degrading the other.

Using 100% textile waste (mostly old T-shirts and jeans) as raw material, the Renewcell factory produces a biodegradable cellulose pulp they call Circulose. The textile is first shredded, then the buttons, zippers and dyes are removed. They are then subjected to mechanical and chemical treatments, which help gently separate the tightly wound cotton fibers from each other. What remains is pure cellulose.

Dried pulp skin looks like thick paper.

Viscose manufacturers can then dissolve it and process it into new viscose fabrics. Renewcell claims to use 100% renewable energy to power its process, which comes from hydroelectric power from the nearby Indalsälven River.

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As the most common synthetic cellulose fiber (MMCF), viscose is valued for its lightweight and silky qualities. MMCF's market share is approximately 6% of total fiber production. According to Textile Exchange, the textile industry uses soluble cellulose pulp to make approximately 7.2 million tons of cellulose fabrics each year. But much of that comes from wood pulp, where more than 200 million trees are felled each year, according to Canopy, a US nonprofit whose mission is to keep forests from being exploited for manufacture packaging and textiles such as viscose and rayon.

Renewcell's technology not only helps keep forests intact, but also increases pulp production. "A tree is made up of different parts, including cellulose, but around 60% are non-cellulose components, and there's not much you can do with it," says Harald Cavalli-Björkman, chief strategy officer at Renewcell. "Apart from a small loss, all of the cotton waste we use is turned into paper pulp."

The factory has a 40,000 tonnes per year contract with Chinese viscose producer Tangshan Sanyou Chemical and is in talks with other major viscose producers, including India's Birla and Germany's Kelheim Fibers. Swedish fashion brand H&M, which produces 3 billion pieces of clothing a year and was an early investor in Renewcell, has signed a five-year deal with the pulp mill for 10,000 tonnes, the equivalent of 50 million t-shirts. Zara is also launching a capsule collection with Renewcell in 2022.

"We want to build more factories," Cavalli-Björkman said, adding that Renewcell hopes to be able to recycle 600 million T-shirts a year, the equivalent of 120,000 tons of textile waste, and double its current capacity. "But that's still small compared to the global textile fiber market. By 2030, we're aiming for a capacity of 360,000 tonnes.

But Renewcell's technology has limits: it can only recycle clothes cotton, not Cotton content can only increase to 5%. "Part of this is because polyester is difficult to separate and too much polyester can affect product quality, but we want to also make sure we get a decent return on the other side," says Cavalli-Björkman.

"The only reason to use polyester, other than things like workwear that require extraordinary durability or special properties like waterproof clothing, is because it's cheap - but at a huge cost to environment. We want to reverse this trend to get materials that are clean and mix less in the loop."

Cavalli-Björkman says fast fashion's reliance on cheap synthetic fibers has affected consumer attitudes about the value of clothing. "Before we had industrialized textile production, people took care of their clothes," he says. "They fixed them because clothes were an investment. Clothes are so cheap today that you think you can always grow more cotton, you can always pump more oil - that's a lot easier than putting the effort into making a quality product out of something that's already exists and could remain in circulation."

Natascha Radclyffe-Thomas, professor of marketing and sustainable business at the British School of Fashion, agrees that it's a matter of value. "We often feel like we can recycle to get rid of waste, and while recycling is a key part of the solution, it's not the starting point," she says, pointing to overproduction and consumption as the main causes of the fashion industry's waste problem. Cheap, low-quality clothing means that it is often cheaper for consumers to buy new clothing than to have the item repaired.

However, other companies are focusing their efforts on synthetic and blended materials, which are widely used by fast fashion brands.

Nottingham, UK-based Worn Again Technologies raised £27.6 million ($34.2 million) in October to build a textile recycling demonstration plant in Winterthur, Switzerland, for hard-to-recycle fabric blends such as clothing made from polyester and cotton . mixtures. Rather than running its own mill on a commercial scale, Worn Again (in which H&M has also invested) is developing a process to be licensed to large mill operators around the world, due to launch in 2024.

As a starting material, Worn Again uses fabrics made from pure polyester or polycotton blends with up to 5% tolerance of other materials excluding metal, such as zippers and fittings. There are two output streams. One is a PET pellet that has the same chemical structure and composition as virgin PET to make recycled polyester. The second is similar to Renewcell's: once the cotton is separated from the polycotton blend, the cellulose is cleaned and recaptured as pulp or cellulose powder to make viscose.

Only 1% of recycled clothes are turned into new clothes

Worn Again's technology differs from those currently available because it uses chemical rather than mechanical recycling to recover polymer chains and reconstruct them into unusual equivalent molecular weights. This improves the quality and scalable recovery of polyester and poly-cotton blends. Another key difference from chemical recycling technology is that it can recycle textile after textile.

Radclyffe-Thomas said the approach could help address the fashion industry's systemic circularity in synthetic fibers. Many brands often tout claims of recycled and repurposed textiles when touting their recycled polyester collections, but the clothes aren't actually "circular" because they're made from recycled plastic bottles, not textiles, a-t she declared.

"The majority of recycled polyester in fashion comes from an entirely different supply chain: the plastic bottle industry," she says. "Originally, when brands started making clothes from plastic bottles, it was seen as a very positive step. Now we see that this is not a circular model."

According to a report by the campaign group Changing Markets Foundation, "turning plastic bottles into clothes should be considered a one-way ticket to landfill, incineration or disposal". Not only is polyester taken out of the closed-loop system, where it would normally be recycled back into bottles, the report says, clothing made from it also releases microplastics into the environment and often cannot be recycled.

"When we first started, we thought we'd be recycling pure polyester, but we realized there wasn't a lot of pure polyester in the global pool of used textiles," says Cindy Rhodes, Worn Again Technologies. "A high percentage of textiles are made of blends, so we knew that if we wanted to create a solution for textile recycling, it had to be able to deal with blends."

According to Rhodes, the aim is to have 40 licensed plants by 2040, each operating at an output of 50,000 tonnes per year, the equivalent of two million tonnes of polyester and cellulosic raw materials going back into the supply chain to make new textiles such as viscose and recycled. Polyester

But she says there also needs to be regulatory policies in place. Rycroft refers to European Commission proposals to tackle textile waste by making it more sustainable, reusable and recyclable. The EU Strategy for Sustainable and Circular Textiles will call for all textiles on the EU market to be "sustainable and recyclable, made as much as possible of recycled fibres" by 2030. In addition, the EU will need to collect textile waste. separately, like paper or glass, by 2025.

Kate Riley, fiber and materials strategy lead for synthetics at the non-profit Textile Exchange, says companies will need to develop business models that focus on repairs, rentals and subscriptions.

"This is the key to working towards closing the loop and moving away from reliance on traditional fossil-fuel derived synthetics towards textile feedstocks," she says.

Textile Exchange describes the increase in textile-to-textile recycling as the "holy grail" of circular fashion. With a slew of companies ready to scale their proven technologies, that goal doesn't seem so elusive anymore.

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