In the UK alone, it is estimated that the value of unused clothing in wardrobes is around £30bn, and that £140m worth of clothing goes into landfill each year, according to the Waste and Resources Action Programme.
All this waste is not helping the environment. In fact, the annual footprint of a household’s newly bought clothing, along with the washing and cleaning of its clothes, is estimated to be the equivalent to the carbon emissions from driving an average modern car for 6,000 miles, or the water needed to fill over 1,000 bathtubs.
But now the textile industry is attempting to step up its game, with numerous technological, manufacturing and retail companies getting involved to help reduce textile and material waste.
Retailers
Some high street and online stores have been introducing recycling strategies to encourage customers to recycle their unwanted items.
John Lewis is pushing its customers to recycle by buying their unwanted items off them. The company is piloting an innovative service in which customers can have any unwanted clothing, bought from its shops and website, collected from their home, and be paid immediately for each item regardless of its condition.
The app-based service links to data on what the customer has bought from John Lewis over the past five years to value items. Customers then select the items they want to sell and are shown the amount they can get for them. Once a customer has a minimum of £50 worth of clothing, a courier will collect the products within three hours. After the items have been collected, the customer is emailed an e-gift card for the value of the items. The products are then either resold, mended so they can be resold, or recycled into new products.
“We already take back used sofas, beds and large electrical items such as washing machines and either donate them to charity, or reuse and recycle parts, and we wanted to offer a service for fashion products,” says Martyn White, sustainability manager at John Lewis.
Other stores such as H&M, Asos and Marks & Spencer have also initiated garment collection schemes, whereby customers hand in their unwanted items and then the companies organise for the garments to either be resold or reused. For example, you can recycle last season’s unwanted but wearable threads with Asos, Doddle and fashion re-use charity TRAID.
Additionally, if your favourite handbag or pair of shoes is sitting in the waste pile because they’re broken or worn out, you can now take these to Harvey Nichols in Knightsbridge to have them restored. The department store has introduced a service in partnership with The Restory. This is an on-demand shoe and handbag restoration service that is trying to extend the lifecycle of luxury products and bring fashion repairs ‘in’ again. Customers can bring any products here and have them touched up, including items that are not from Harvey Nichols.
Manufacturers
Now, it is all well and good that retailers are encouraging their customers to recycle but what happens to these items once they’ve been turned in? Well, these days textile manufacturers can recycle these old garments and other materials into fibres and fabrics which can be used to make something new.
Global textiles solutions provider, Unifi, recently partnered up with the PGA tournament the Wyndham Championship, to raise awareness around the importance of plastic recycling during the 79th annual Wyndham Championship in Greensboro, North Carolina, US, on 13-19 August 2018.
The partnership encouraged thousands of golf fans to be even more sustainable, on and off the golf course. This effort included a limited-edition line of Wyndham Championship hats and T-shirts, made from Unifi’s REPREVE recycled fibres, which sold out at the tournament’s Ralph Lauren Merchandise Pavilion.
“When consumers understand that just one plastic bottle can be transformed into a pair of golf socks, it truly brings the power of recycling to life,” says Richard Gerstein, executive vice president of global branded premium value-added products and chief marketing and innovation officer at Unifi.
“Like sports, recycling has the power to bring people together in support of a cause,” he adds. “People feel empowered when they’re part of something bigger like creating a better tomorrow.”
Unifi makes its REPREVE performance fibre from 100% recycled materials, including plastic bottles, preventing billions of bottles from ending up in landfill every year. To date, Unifi has transformed more than 12 billion recycled plastic bottles into REPREVE products and the company has a goal to recycle 30 billion bottles by 2022.
Nike Grind has been around for quite a while now, but it continues to do its bit for the environment by recycling surplus manufacturing materials and athletic footwear into new materials. Rubber, foam, fibre, leather and textile blends are separated and ground into a wide range of granules. Different Nike Grind materials are incorporated into performance products, ranging from new Nike footwear and apparel to sports and play surfaces.
Stepping out of the sporting world and into the aviation industry, upcycling company Looptworks has recently partnered with Delta Air Lines. On 29 May 2018, 64,000 Delta employees headed to work in their new uniforms, yet this meant that over one million pieces of old uniforms were retired. To prevent those garments from being sent to landfill, more than 350,000 pounds of clothing was donated to Looptworks to be upcycled or repurposed.
“The amount of textile waste generated each year in the US has doubled over the last 20 years, and we don’t want to add to that number,” says Ekrem Dimbiloglu, director of uniforms at Delta. “By partnering with Looptworks, we found a creative way to give the old uniforms new life.”
In the UK, there is a company called Anglo Recycling Technology, which is based in the Pennines in Lancashire. The company philosophy is ‘our business exists for more than profit’ and it helps to divert textiles away from landfill. The company manufactures many felts from recycled fibres, and a few years ago it installed a recycling plant which diverts approximately 600 tonnes of carpet from going to landfill.
Some manufacturers have been involved with recycling for decades. Take the Yorkshire-based company John Cotton Nonwovens, for example. It has been recycling textile waste for over 60 years and works with the carbon trust to achieve a zero-to-landfill initiative. The company recycles around 500,000 garments a week, converting them into products such as insulator pads for use over the spring unit in a mattress. So far in 2018, John Cotton Nonwovens has managed to recycle around 42 million plastic bottles.
Being able to break down textile waste for it to be recycled into other products is a crucial step of the recycling process.
So crucial in fact that Worn Again Technologies has hit its £5m investment target to accelerate its polymer recycling technology. The company was founded in East London in 2005 and it has led the way to solve part of the world’s plastic and textile waste crisis.
The cash injection has come from several investors, including global fast-fashion giant H&M, and angel investor Craig Cohon, previously a senior executive of The Coca Cola Company and owner of Cirque du Soleil Russia.
“There are enough textiles and plastic bottles ‘above ground’ and in circulation today to meet our annual demand for raw materials to make new clothing and textiles,” says Cyndi Rhoades, CEO, Worn Again Technologies.
“With our dual polymer recycling technology, there will be no need to use virgin oil by-products to make new polyester and the industry will be able to radically decrease the amount of virgin cotton going into clothing by displacing it with new cellulose fibres recaptured from existing clothing,” she adds.
The process can separate, decontaminate and extract polyester polymers and cellulose from cotton from non-reusable textiles, which can go back into new products as part of a repeatable process.
Additionally, Texyloop in France can recycle polyester textiles that are coated in PVC by crushing and separating the PVC fibres before re-granulating using solvents and additives to enable PVC precipitation. This process means that 100% of the input is recycled and PVC granules and polyester fibres are created as the output. Synthetic fibres are less environmentally-friendly compared to natural fibres, so being able to recycle this fibre is important. These products can then be used to make fabric, nonwoven insulation and waterproof membranes for ponds. Texyloop can also recycle tarpaulins and sheets made of PVC-coated polyester and off-cuts from the manufacture of these materials.
Other companies have joined forces to create efficient recycling methods. For example, Starlinger technology has recently joined the COIN-project TEX2MAT, which is led by the Plastics Cluster of exoplus, the business agency of Lower Austria and funded by the Austrian Federal Ministry for Digital and Economic Affairs. The project aims at efficient recycling that yields a product with virgin-like characteristics. Three universities and eight Austrian companies are also involved.
The textile industry still has a long way to go for it to significantly make a difference. However, the initiatives outlined above are just a few ways in which companies are acknowledging the problem and attempting to do something about it.
Source: www.wtin.com