Why Textile-to-Textile Recycling Requires ‘All Hands on Deck’
Textile waste isn’t just a missed opportunity, an initiative that seeks to create a more circular fashion industry says, it’s also unnecessary.
Earlier this month, the Accelerating Circularity project—ACP for short—flaunted the first fruit of its commercial-scale textile-to-textile recycling trials in the United States: a 100 percent cotton T-shirt that it says represents “what is possible” through a circular supply chain model.
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ACP worked with textile manufacturer Giotex, along with used clothing purveyor Bank & Vogue, to create the ecru-hued crewneck, which consists of 20 percent each of post-industrial and post-consumer recycled textiles, a mix that it dubs its “ACP blend” and 60 percent virgin cotton.
The goal is to produce something that can compete with 100 percent virgin cotton in terms of physical performance, including shrinkage and pilling.
“It’s something that we’re trying to make feasible on a scalable level, which is why we exist in the first place,” said Emmie Reilly, ACP’s communication coordinator. “A lot of the technology [to do so] doesn’t exist yet, so we have to work a little at a time to make sure the standard is being met.”
But this is only the first phase of what the nonprofit has in store. Other projects with recyclers, collectors, sorters and mills in both the United States and across Europe are hoping to show a similar proof of concept for denim, fleece, workwear and household linens by experimenting with a mix of mechanical and chemical means.
Besides cotton, ACP is also looking at polyester and man-made cellulosics.
Many of the trials that were interrupted when Covid-19 burst onto the scene are in the process of ramping back up, though Reilly expects there will be some tangible results by year’s end.
It’s appropriate that the T-shirt, a classic wardrobe staple, was the first off the production line, but it wasn’t on purpose. The initial batch is also a small one—just 30 or so.
“But what is going to happen with those T-shirts is that the brands that we work with are going to put in orders for much larger amounts to use for their own purposes,” Reilly said.
ACP boasts some big guns: Gap Inc., Target, Nike, Unifi and The North Face owner VF Corp. are on its U.S. steering committee. Over in Europe, Amazon, Zara parent Inditex, Lenzing, Recover and Zalando are among those supervising efforts. The Walmart Foundation also gave the organization a $1.2 million grant in 2021.
For its T-shirt trial, Giotex was already an old hand at making yarns using pre-consumer content. Even so, integrating post-consumer feedstock required some finessing because its content and quality are unknown, said co-founder Steven Usdan.
Ultimately, it pulled through.
“Our innovations addressed how to recover the cotton from used garments and preserve the fiber length,” he said.
It’s such multi-stakeholder collaboration that is vital to driving circularity, wrote Karla Magruder, ACP’s founder, in the introduction of the organization’s recently published playbook for how to turn textile castoffs into raw materials.
But obstacles abound. The infrastructure that will allow operations to run smoothly still needs to be put in place. There’s a need for investment: time, capital, resources—all of it. New technologies are still waiting to be commercialized. Brands need to incentivize the uptake of the finished materials. And data collection to facilitate waste aggregation and flow can still be improved.
Based on commercial and soon-to-be-commercialized recycling technologies, roughly 70 percent of apparel in today’s market can be recycled, ACP and Avery Dennison estimated in February. This is in comparison to the less than 1 percent of used clothing that currently goes into new garments, according to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation.
“We often say that circularity is a team sport—that’s one of Karla’s mottos,” Reilly said. “Even with this trial, having just one brand or one collector isn’t enough. We need all hands on deck.”
