Textile recycling

Chasing the Holy Grail of circularity

Check out most pieces on textile recycling and chances are that you’ll come across the following statistic: only 1% of textiles produced globally are currently recycled.

Typically, that statistic is used to set up the argument for textile recycling. Self-evidently, it would seem, there needs to be much more textile recycling. Without it, so proponents argue, the world risks drowning in the clothes it’s over-producing and over-consuming.

In this post I’m going to be pouring a fair bit of cold water on this argument. So, heads up to any avid fans of textile recycling. This one isn’t for you. I don’t see textile recycling as a panacea for the world’s clothes problem.

To see why, I’ll start by laying out some core principles about recycling as an economic activity. I introduced some of these in the Clean Energy series on solar panels but because these are principles they transcend goods. So, they’re as applicable to used clothing as they are to knackered solar panels.

Fundamentally, recycling is always about materials, the economics of their recovery and demand for what can be recovered.

Beginning with the materials end of this. Materials are only worth recovering for recycling if there is actual demand for them. This means that recycling is intimately connected to manufacturing industry. Or, said slightly differently, recovery itself is actually economically worthless unless a manufacturer somewhere procures the recovered material and incorporates it into a production process. Sans this, you’re left with a large volume of material with no market. This is basic. But it’s a basic that so often gets overlooked, because so much of the focus in the recycling domain is on policy and innovation i.e. on the (unchallenged and assumed) desirability of stimulating recycling activity, the challenges facing that, and the technical possibilities with respect to problem wastes and what might be recovered from them. The effect is to leave economics, and particularly business economics, as an after-thought. To say the least, this is unfortunate.

Drilling down into manufacturing industry shows why.

All manufacturers have what’s known as ‘acceptance criteria’ for the materials that enter their production processes. These criteria prescribe the physical characteristics of input materials. The criteria matter; a lot. Not only do they ensure the quality of the finished good/s that emerge, they also preserve long term investment in capital goods and processing. Material that doesn’t pass threshold tests has the capacity to do a very great deal of physical and reputational damage. So, it’s tested prior to entering processing, and, if it fails, it’s rejected. This is where things get interesting for recovered materials.

In general, many recovered materials struggle to pass manufacturers’ acceptance criteria. There are some very good reasons for this but two stand out. One is that the physical qualities of recovered materials are often inferior to their ‘virgin’ counterparts; not always, for sure, metals being the obvious exception, but often is certainly true. This is because use, plus further processing, have effects on physical characteristics. The second is that the quality of recovered material is only as good as the sorting and processing that produced it. Poor or low grade sorting results in poor quality or contaminated recyclate. This no manufacturer wants. So manufacturers can, and will, refuse to accept materials from certain types of materials recovery processing. The classic example in the UK is paper mills, which will not accept any recovered paper derived from local authority collections which also include glass.

Which brings me to recovery and its economics.

Now, obviously, processing for materials recovery costs. One of the major barriers facing recycled materials is that the costs of their production often exceed the costs of virgin material production, making recovered materials more expensive. That problem isn’t insuperable. For example, if regulators (governments) push mandatory recycled content then it levels the playing field somewhat. But high materials costs are certainly a problem where markets are dominated by mass produced goods made from cheap raw materials sold in high volumes (think plastics).

In capitalist conditions, recovery needs to work just like any other form of business. Revenue needs to exceed costs, preferably by a comfortable margin. How that’s achieved varies and has a big effect on what recovery for recycling looks like in different parts of the world.

Look at recycling in any of the advanced economies and it’s mostly a matter of ‘big kit’ and/or high volume processing, with minimal labour involvement. Elsewhere in the world, cheap labour does the vast majority of the sorting and grading work. The first version of recovery struggles to produce material that’s of value for domestic manufacturing industry. Consequently, it tends to rely on export markets. The second produces outputs that realise markets in domestic manufacturing industry.

Looked at this way, we can see why solar panel recycling in France has worked at scale: it’s targeted a very high value metal (silver), which has a vast array of applications in European manufacturing, and its tie-in partnerships with other manufacturers ensure that the material that results from processing passes acceptance criteria.

Now let’s think about what’s going on when we try to use ‘post-consumer’ used clothing as the precursor for recycling into new textile fibre, yarn, fabric, and ultimately garments.

What we have in this instance as the input material is huge volumes of low value textile fabric, in the shape of garments of various types, material, sizes, shapes and colours. This is what would need to be made into fibre and yarn, and then into clothing goods.

Of necessity, any recycled material produced would be competing with markets dominated by mixed synthetic fibres and yarns, and fabrics, and with garments fuelled by fast, cheap fashion sold at rock-bottom prices. Chances are what would result from recycling used clothing would be higher cost fibres and yarns which translates to higher cost fabrics and then higher cost garments. That’s not a promising economic starting place, at least for the mass clothing market.

Then, add in that used clothing is characterised by very large volumes of highly mixed fibres, comprising multiple synthetics, which may, or may not, be blended with cotton. High levels of mixing spell higher recovery costs, because the processing required to cope with mixed input is always more complex.

So, not only is the baseline market economics not promising, it’s also the case that the economic costs of recovery are likely to be high.

Then add in two further conditions:

1) the sorting/grading infrastructure in the major used clothing exporting countries relies on further sorting and grading in export markets (see last week’s post for more on this). It’s highly unlikely, in my view, that this infrastructure will be able to sort ‘post-consumer’ used clothing into the input mixes required by advanced tech materials recovery facilities.

2) A pattern of global apparel production where fabric production and garment manufacturing is concentrated in South and South-east Asia. So, any fibre and yarn recovered would be being produced thousands of miles away from where the demand actually is. As significant is that what demand there is from European fibre and yarn manufacturers mostly pertains to high value, premium, often heritage, cloth used in high-end couture and tailoring. Think Harris Tweed, or quality woollens and worsteds. This is not the sort of activity that is going to be in the business of stuffing recovered fibres into their cloth.

Then there’s the final, proverbial ‘nail in the coffin’. This comes in the form of an at scale, source of recovered PET (rPET), which comes from plastic drinks bottles. rPET derived from plastic bottles has been used in clothing manufacture for several years, particularly in the outdoor apparel market. Widely available, and consistent in their material composition, plastic drinks bottles are cheap to recover for recycling. They’re everything that used clothing isn’t.

Look at this list of points, and it’s possible to see, why recycling used clothing in this part of the world is very much up against it economically, if not technically. It’s for these reasons that I think of achieving an at-scale version of textile recycling in Europe as chasing the Holy Grail.

And, sure enough, when we look at attempts to get textile recycling off the ground here, a consistent message is of early technological progress which then hits the buffers of harsh economic reality.

The case of Infinited Fiber, in Finland, provides a good illustration. The company has had two pilot factories since 2018, producing its patented fibre, Infinna™. This fibre can be used in ratios of 50-100%, to produce a range of widely used fabrics: denim, single-jersey, French terry, woven and prints. Infinna produces fabric that looks and feels like cotton; it’s so good that the company advertises it as impossible for consumers to know that they’re dealing with recovered fibres. So, where’s the snag?

As is so often the case, it’s all happened at scale-up. Notwithstanding having secured a factory site (an old pulp/paper producing mill in Lapland), progress towards getting production onstream has been slow – so slow, that even the company’s promotional material says that it’s still ‘working to build a first commercial scale factory’. A timeline that should have seen the factory operational by 2025 has slipped to an unspecified future date.

Some of that slippage will, inevitably, have been about the challenges of bringing investment finance onboard. Equally though, I’d suggest, it’s about the difficulties of sourcing input material at scale. Look at Infinited Fiber’s published acceptance criteria and what their processing technology requires is cotton-rich textile waste, with a minimum threshold for acceptance of 88% cotton. As anyone working in the textile recycling sector will tell you, that’s a threshold that the vast majority of used clothing these days would struggle to get anywhere near. Just take a look at the labels inside some of your own clothing if you need convincing. My wardrobe is full of 40:60 blends (or much worse), and has very, very few items that would meet those acceptance criteria. I’d hazard an informed guess that my wardrobe wouldn’t be that unusual. So, what we have here is a processing technology that is going to struggle to source sufficient input material to run at scale.

Infinited Fiber’s processing technology is a form of chemical recycling. More recently, interest has turned to the potential in biological recycling to tackle the world’s used clothing mountains. Taking its inspiration from the ecological role of insects as the world’s decomposers, the question now being asked (at the experimental scale) is whether commercially-available larvae (Galleria Mellonella) can decompose post-consumer textile waste.

The answer to that question is that the jury’s out, because – whilst the larvae certainly chomp away – it’s not entirely clear if they’re actually metabolising the textile waste, or whether they’re just fragmenting it into smaller pieces, ingesting it and then excreting it. That distinction really matters down the line, because what’s left after this kind of processing is large amounts of biowaste, in the form of dead insects and poo. What can then be done with that output very much depends on its material characterisation. Dead insects + poo probably will qualify as a biofertiliser; but dead insects + poo + large amounts of micro plastics derived from chomping used clothing? Well I’m not optimistic that’s going to pass any qualification trials any time soon. We’re back with another version of the problem with anaerobic digestion plants.

And then there’s the scale question. How many larvae would it take to get rid of our used clothing mountains? Well, the ball park figures in the scientific literature suggest a chomp rate of 1.84mg of polyester/larvae/day. Scale that up and 1 million larvae chomping every day would ‘eat’ roughly 700kg of used clothing. Now obviously, a biorefinery involves many millions of larvae in continuous production, but when one recalls that the UK alone generates 1.45 million tonnes of used clothing per annum … well, that’s an awful lot of ultra expensive biorefinery capacity required to turn used clothing into a biowaste.

So, we’re back with the technologically possible but economically challenging conundrum.

Is there anything out there that offers more optimism?

The short answer is a qualified ‘yes’. There’s another Finnish company – Pure Waste – which provides an example of how and where textile recycling can work economically, and not just technically. Pure Waste has built its brand on fashion fabricated from recovered yarn. It’s target market is the archetypal ethical consumer in the global North, willing to pay (and display in wearing) the ‘recycled’ premium: T-shirts at €26, sweatshirts at €45 and hoodies at €55.

Pure Waste’s production facilities are located not in Finland, or even Eastern Europe, but in the heart of India’s primary textile manufacturing sector, in Tamil Nadu. Here over 3k sewing factories generate consistent volumes of cutting room floor textile waste. The input material for these garments, then, isn’t used clothing; it’s production waste. And, the recovery process for these fibres is one that’s remarkably similar to that used in India’s historic textile recycling capital, Panipat, in that it’s dependent on the manual colour sorting of fibres and mechanical recycling. In this instance, the labour doing the work isn’t Indian; it’s Nepali migrants.

Turns out that, in capitalist economies, turning a profit from turning recovered textile fibre into garments happens in proximity to textile manufacturing, where the costs of labour and processing are low and where there’s a plentiful supply of cheap, or zero cost, textile waste.

This is textile recycling, but not as circular economy proponents imagine it.