When you see a garment made of '80 percent recycled polyester', do you
think; 'Aha now I'm making a good choice?' Unfortunately, this may not be
the case…
In 90 percent of cases, this recycled polyester consists of RPET
(recycled polyethylene terephthalate) from collected soft drink bottles.
Sounds like a wonderful way to make sustainable clothes, but after these
clothes are worn down, we often can't do anything with them afterwards
(with current technologies). This is all while an RPET bottle can forever
continue to be recycled into an RPET bottle. The clothing industry is once
again acting linearly, yet the reuse of RPET bottles into RPET bottles is
circular.
About the author:
Florentine Gillis is founder of Circle Closet - the largest fashion
rental platform in BeNeLux and a speaker on circular business models.
No doubt the fashion industry is doing this with the very best of
intentions. They are also being steered down this path by outsiders, such
as the 2025 Recycled Polyester Challenge, an initiative of Textile
Exchange. However, some fundamental parts of this "circular" strategy are
wrong: The beverage bottle industry is now a circular chain and is being
brutally interrupted by the fashion industry. Besides PET bottles being
downcycled into low-quality clothing, the unprecedented popularity for RPET
in the fashion industry creates a shortage of RPET in the beverage
industry. Consequence: prices go up and the beverage industry has to use
more virgin new material to meet their own production numbers.
In addition, the consumer has the idea that they have bought a circular
product and worse; that the producer is very sustainable. So less pressure
for the producer to really put something circular on the market. In the
long run, this strategy does not help win the war, because in the end we
are not building a circular economy, but once again a linear economy. Time
and energy that producers would be better off putting into a truly circular
strategy as far as I am concerned.
## We are not building a circular economy, but a linear one
Producers should focus on establishing a so-called ‘closed-loop system’.
So how exactly does this work? From the outset, consideration should be
given to producing clothes that last and are suitable for reuse or rental.
The design of the product should aim for easy repair, remanufacturing and
recycling. One issue is that producers like to work with mixed fabrics
(e.g. cotton and polyester). Until recently, these so-called 'blends' were
difficult to recycle. In recycling, you want to break down the clothes into
homogeneous yarn, from which new clothes can be made. Companies like
US-based Circ are now making this possible to do. Inditex (the parent
company of Zara, among others) has even invested heavily in it.
But why can clothes made of RPET be difficult to recycle? This is
because in the production of low-quality clothes, low-quality yarn often
remains after recycling, if the clothes already end up in the recycling
machine and not in the incinerator. Each time, the quality of the yarn gets
worse and so at the end you can only make stuffing material from it.
Circularity focuses precisely on that closed system, turning cotton clothes
into cotton clothes and polyester clothes into polyester clothes. Yes,
polyester techniques are still in their infancy and do not yet have the
scale to allow large retailers to work with them. However, attention and
money will allow these new techniques to scale up faster. Moreover, there
are already enough examples in the market where a closed-loop system does
succeed, such as Dutch brands Mud Jeans, New Optimist and Martan.
These brands actively take responsibility for the downstream of their
clothes. For example, they work with deposit systems or you can lease your
jeans, with Mud keeping ownership and responsibility for them and making
sure they are made into new jeans again.
Fortunately, there is light on the horizon. With the Extended Producer
Responsibility (UPV) introduced in the Netherlands in 2023 (and coming soon
to the EU), things are hopefully going to change. From 2025, producers must
prepare 50 percent of the kilograms of textiles they put on the market for
reuse or recycling, at least 25 percent of which must be fibre to fibre
recycling. By 2030, that rises to 33 percent. We are far from there, but it
is quite an improvement from the 1 percent measured in 2021.
Read more:
* How sustainable is recycled polyester?
* Turning plastics into products
* Project TexCircle upcycles old textiles into new clothes
and accessories
http://dlvr.it/T2dBqG
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