Analysis: Could recycling go mainstream in high street fashion?

Fashion has a pollution problem and sustainable capsule collections and tours of state-of-the-art warehouses can only do so much to solve it.

Although discussion around sustainable fashion is on the rise, the statistics relating to the industry’s waste are starting to wear thin.

A rubbish truck of textiles gets dumped in landfill or burnt every second, according to the Ellen Macarthur Foundation, while more than $500bn of value is lost every year due to clothing underutilisation or lack of recycling. Less than 1% of old clothes are recycled into new garments, according to the Global Fashion Agenda. 

As Professor Tim Cooper, head of the sustainable consumption and clothing sustainability research groups at Nottingham Trent University, says: “Progress has been dire and we cannot carry on the way we are. We need to reduce the number of garments we consume but also increase substantially the amount of recycling in the industry.”

There are many smaller brands doing innovative things in the circular economy – but no initiative currently achieves the scale needed to combat the colossal amount of post-consumer waste produced by the fashion industry. 

But is it possible for fashion retailers to scale-up clothing recycling, which currently operates on the fringes of many fashion retailers’ offerings, and would doing so be the silver bullet to tackling the sector’s waste problem?

Innovation versus scale

Many retailers have launched takeback schemes for old items – recent launches include Fatface with Thrift – and brands such as H&M and Marks & Spencer have had in-store recycling schemes in place for years. 

However, only tiny amounts of old clothes in the UK are broken down and turned back into new clothing, usually via chemical recycling, which is a relatively costly and complex process with its own environmental impact.

As Sue Fairley, head of sustainability at New Look, says: “Whilst there are some innovative solutions and exciting technical advancements emerging for both mechanical and chemical recycling, the big challenges lie in scaling these solutions.” 

She explains that blended fabrics sold by most retailers, such as cotton and elastane, are more difficult to recycle to fibre. There are further challenges around the collection and sorting of textiles, which requires significant skills and investment, alongside the removal of legacy chemicals in older textiles.

Erica Vilkauls, retail and fashion industry advisor at Carbon Responsible and former LK Bennet chief executive, agrees there are lots of great ideas but says investment is needed: “On a small scale, there has been success in effectively separating natural and synthetic blends and capturing both types of fibres without losing either fibre in the process. However, scaling up this technology to an industrial scale remains the challenge. Entrepreneurs are tackling this separation issue but funding is hard to come by.” 

She points to start-ups such as Seawear, which makes a polyester alternative using seaweed, and adds: “We need significant polyester users such as Nike and Adidas to back and support these people. There is no one central place a brand can go to ‘find’ these entrepreneurs but they all have a huge social media presence, so reaching out to find these fledgling and growing technologies should be straightforward.”

H&M Group’s recycling involves multiple partnerships.

A spokeswoman for the retailer says: “Besides others, we are supporting Worn Again on their work to develop a technology to separate blended fibre garments and how to separate dyes and other contaminants from polyester and cellulose.” 

She adds the brand works with reuse and recycling logistics company I:CO to process its in-store donations. Between 50% and 60% of these items are sold as second-hand clothes, 35%-45% are recycled into products for other industries or made into new textile fibres and 3%-7% are destroyed. 

Fairley at New Look also flags the work of Swedish company Sodra, which has created a process that can transform mixed textiles back into high-quality yarn by combining them with cellulose.

The polyester problem

The use of recycled materials has increased in fashion in recent years – it is becoming more common to find fleece tops made of recycled plastic bottles, for instance. But Cooper points out that items made of plastic bottles are not recyclable, meaning the clothes still end up in landfill. Plus, using this material does nothing to reduce fashion’s own textile waste. “[Using plastic bottles] doesn’t drive the clothing sector towards using more recycled textiles. You need the old garments collected and demand for the material that comes from those garments.”

For recycling to make an impact, retailers need to use less polyester. It is hard to recycle indefinitely because each time it loses quality, it produces poor quality clothing that often cannot be resold or upcycled, it takes 200 years to decompose and it produces microfibre waste. Liz Ricketts is co-founder of the OR Foundation, which works with retailers at Kantamanto market in Accra, Ghana, where large volumes of UK clothing waste get sold. 

The foundation is developing an upcycling facility in Accra, working with local retailers on developing new ways to make use of fashion waste. But she says it is difficult to reuse polyester. “The secondhand retailers, textile manufacturers and government officials here in Accra aren’t interested in a solution for polyester, no one wants to use it. With cotton garments, retailers can rehabilitate the lower quality items. With polyester, they can’t clean and repair them.”

Wide-scale industry change is unlikely to occur without legislation leading a broader effort with improved infrastructure and the resources needed to enact real change.

The UK government is planning a 2022 consultation on waste prevention in fashion, which will explore the idea of extended producer responsibility schemes for textile waste. But the government has also shied away from setting targets for fashion – in 2019 it rejected a range of proposals from the Environmental Audit Committee, including a 1p per garment levy to fund recycling. 

Cooper says a lack of government incentive has significantly slowed progress. “The incentives for companies to accelerate progress aren’t there. Companies are not responsible for garments at end of life. The recognition of the need for ERPs is welcome but long overdue.”

Reducing impact  

Even if incentives were in place, is recycling really the answer to fashion’s environmental woes? Or will the use of chemicals and energy simply replace today’s current environmental problems with new ones? 

While experts agree retailers should invest in recycling, it is not the be-all and end-all and can only be part of a broader sustainability strategy. It is likely that legislation in the next five years will force retailers to invest more in waste management, and it remains to be seen if the government will provide the infrastructure and funding necessary to improve textile recycling nationally. But recycled fibres cannot be a straightforward swap for virgin materials without some form of broader systemic change.

Fairley says recycling needs to be part of a change in mindset and operations, while Ricketts adds that upcycling needs to be much more of a focus. She says: “One of my main concerns with the way big fashion is approaching circularity is they’re skipping upcycling. That’s very concerning because then we’re using more energy, more chemicals, skipping an important part of ‘reduce, reuse and recycle’.” 

There are lessons for UK retailers in how markets such as Kantamanto do this – for instance, Ricketts points out that second-hand retailer ThredUp’s 2020 report highlights how it has recirculated 100 million items of clothing since it was founded in 2009; by comparison, Kantamanto market does this every four months. 

Tailors, designers and retailers at Kantamanto rework old items to create something new – whether that means repairing, redesigning or simply cleaning and altering pieces. Plus, Ricketts says, it is crucial that one broken system does not replace another. The current linear system relies on extremely cheap labour: making recycling as cheap as current production processes is not currently possible and not something brands should be aiming for. 

Instead, she says a new system needs to involve better-paid workers throughout the supply chain, and longer-lasting, higher-margin items that can be resold, upcycled and eventually recycled. UK brands could introduce new revenue streams via repair and upcycling services; significantly expanding the sale of secondhand items will also be important. 

Vilkauls agrees recycling is unlikely to solve environmental problems without a more fundamental overhaul of fashion’s supply chain systems, creating items that are easier to break down into fibre. “We should now change the way we design clothes. We need to facilitate recycling. Fabrics, fibres and garments will need to be designed in ways that make them easier to recover and recycle,” she says.

The current system is too damaging for any quick answers and recycling does not offer an immediate solution. But the path ahead of mainstream fashion retailers is becoming increasingly clear: recycling needs to be one part of a broader shift towards extending the life of items. Reducing polyester, working with start-ups to fund improvements in recycling technology, and exploring new ways to extend clothing life are not quick fixes, but they are steps in the right direction. 

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