While the industry touts producing clothes from “recycled materials”, most of them are made from recycled plastic that can never be recycled, NGOs say the only solution is to buy less clothes.
At H&M’s Paris flagship store, it’s hard to find any clothing that claims not to be made from “recycled materials.”
Last year, 79% of the polyester in the company’s collections was made from recycled materials, and the company hopes to make it all recycled next year.
The Swedish fast fashion giant told AFP that recycled materials “will help the industry reduce its reliance on virgin polyester made from fossil fuels”.
The problem is that “93% of recycled textiles today are made from plastic bottles, not from old clothes”, says Urska Trank of campaign group Changing Markets.
That is, from fossil fuels.
While a plastic bottle can be recycled five or six times, a T-shirt made from recycled polyester “can never be recycled again,” Trank said.
Nearly all recycled polyester comes from PET (polyethylene terephthalate) plastic bottles, according to the nonprofit Textile Exchange.
In Europe, most textile waste is dumped or incinerated. Only 22% is recycled or reused, mostly as insulation, mattress stuffing or cleaning cloths.
“Less than 1% of fabric used to produce clothing is recycled into new garments,” the European Commission told AFP.
Lenzing, an Austrian manufacturer known for its wood-based fibres, says recycling fibres is “much more complex than recycling other materials such as glass or paper”.
Not recyclable
First, clothing made from more than two types of fibre is currently considered non-recyclable.
Recyclable clothing must be sorted by color and materials such as zippers, buttons and studs must be removed.
Lisa Panhuber of Greenpeace said pilot projects were starting to emerge in Europe, but experts said they were often costly and labour intensive.
But Trunk said the technology is still in its “early stages.”
Reusing cotton may seem like an obvious solution, but experts say that recycled cotton loses a lot of its quality and is often woven with other materials, bringing us back to the blending issue.
To make the recycling cycle easier, fashion brands have started to use recycled plastics, but this has angered and frustrated the food industry, which foots the bill for collection of used PET bottles.
“Let’s be clear: this is not circular,” the drinks industry wrote in a scathing open letter to the European Parliament last year, condemning the “alarming trend” of the fashion industry making “green claims about the use of recycled materials”.
Recycling polyester is also a dead end, according to Laurie Veillard of the Zero Waste Europe (ZWE) network.
She argued that it was often impure and mixed with other materials such as elastane and lycra, making it “impossible to recycle.”
Jean-Baptiste Sultan of the French NGO Carbone 4 was equally scathing about polyester: “From its production to its recycling, polyester pollutes water, air and soil.”
In fact, according to Textile Exchange, environmental groups are calling on the textile industry to stop producing polyester altogether, even though it accounts for more than half of the industry’s production.
Carbon Footprint
So where do mountains of non-recyclable polyester and blended fabrics go after Western consumers have dutifully tossed them in the recycling bin?
According to 2019 statistics from the European Environment Agency (EEA), almost half of the textile waste collected in Europe ends up on second-hand markets in Africa, most controversially in Ghana, or is often dumped in “open landfills”.
It added that 41 percent of the EU’s textile waste is sent to Asia, most of it to “dedicated economic zones where it is sorted and treated.”
“Most of the post-consumer textiles are either downcycled into industrial rags or stuffing, or re-exported for recycling in other Asian countries or reuse in Africa,” the agency said.
New EU rules adopted in November aim to ensure waste exports are recycled rather than dumped.
However, the EEA acknowledged that there is a “lack of consistent data on the quantities and fate of post-consumer textile and textile waste in Europe.”
Indeed, NGOs told AFP that much of the discarded European clothing sent to Asia ends up in “export processing zones”, which Paul Rowland of the Clean Clothes Campaign said are “notorious for being ‘lawless’ enclaves where even the poor labour standards of Pakistan and India are not met”.
“Exporting clothes to countries where the labour costs for sorting are low is a terrible thing from a carbon footprint perspective,” said Marc Minassian of PellencST, which makes optical sorting machines used in recycling.
Recycling “myths”
Greenpeace consumer expert Panhuber argued that the frightening truth is that “clothing recycling is a myth.”
But other companies are turning to new plant-based fibres, with German brand Hugo Boss using Pinatex, made from pineapple leaves, in some of its trainers.
But some experts warn that we could be falling into another trap. Thomas Ebel of the SloWeAre label questioned the way these nonwoven fibers are “most often” secured together with thermoplastic polyester, or PLA.
That means that while clothing “may decompose,” it can’t be recycled, he said.
“Biodegradable does not mean compostable,” he warned, saying some of these fibres need to be decomposed industrially.
But beyond that, “the biggest issue is the volume of clothing being produced,” said Carbone 4’s Celeste Grillet.
For Panhuber and Greenpeace, the solution is simple: buy less clothes.
“We need to consume less,” she said, urging repair, reuse and upcycle.
EU countries prepare for textile recycling big bang
Recycling textiles isn’t easy because the industrial process is still in its infancy, but recyclers say looming mandates in European Union countries to collect and sort used textiles will help the budding industry take off.
Read more at Euractiv
Welcome to the next phase of the European Green Deal. This week marks the start of what many in Brussels consider to be the next phase of the European Green Deal – a new era focused on actually delivering on the EU’s goal of reaching net-zero emissions by the middle of the century.
