Is it possible to recycle clothes?

In the last 20 years, global clothes production has doubled. The industry now makes 100 billion new garments every year.

With this increase comes the inevitable rise in waste. Altogether, humanity discarded 92 million tonnes of clothing in 2023.
That means that every second of the day, there’s a truckful being dumped in an incinerator or landfill.

Because Europe doesn’t have enough room for this much landfill, it outsources a lot to other countries. In Chile there’s a clothing landfill “mountain” which is visible from space. Like all the others, this landfill dump is producing tonnes and tonnes of greenhouse gases.

The UN says that the fashion industry causes 8-10% of global carbon emissions and 20% of all waste water. Clothing consumption has become a huge problem. But the good news is that research and innovation in recycling is progressing quickly.

It doesn’t fit you, the colour has faded, or the zipper is broken - when your clothes have become unwearable, what can you do with them?

We have three main options including resale, reuse, and recycling:

Global fibre production hit a record 124 million tonnes in 2023. It’s more than doubled since 2000. 57% of that is polyester, and only 7.7% is recycled fibres (mostly from plastic bottles).

But why does every garment need brand new fibres in it? Isn’t it possible to recover fibres or fabrics from our unwanted wardrobes?

Often not. Clothing - with zips, elastic, buttons, and blended fabrics - can be very challenging to recycle.

If you look at the label in your clothing, you’ll probably see that it contains a mixture of fibres. Cotton fabrics are often made with a little elastane; wool is blended with polyester to make it washable.

Even after someone has removed the buttons, zippers and labels by hand, those fibres have to be separated if they are to be reused.

Blending happens not just at fibre level (wool reinforced with nylon), but also at yarn level (sparkly yarns in a fabric, or contrast topstitching applied to jeans), and at fabric level (clothing with different fabrics, such as patchworked coats or reinforced shoulders).

Mechanically recovering the fibres is a very intensive process. In Prato, Italy, an entire community has formed a giant wool recycling hub which processes around 15% of all recycled clothing.

They’ve been recycling wool since the 19th century. The sorting specialists, or cenciaiolis (artisans), are so skilled that they can sort wool clothes just by touching them to ascertain the fibre and blend. They build piles by colour, which means the final wool comes in a rainbow of shades without the addition of any more dye. The processed textile emerges as ‘fluff’, gets spun into yarn, and woven into woollen fabric under the name MWool.

However, this mechanical (and human) process is expensive and time-consuming. That's where chemical recycling sometimes comes in.

For instance, it’s possible to dissolve or melt one fibre while extracting the other. PET (polyurethane) can be extracted using heat, and Cellulose (used to make rayon, Cupro or Lyocell) can be extracted through dissolution.

The dream is to build a circular textile economy, where clothes are recycled into new clothes, instead of being dumped (which is known as a linear economy). 

Published in 2022, this report contained targets to ensure that “textile products are long-lived and recyclable, made as much as possible of recycled fibres, free of hazardous substances, and produced in respect of social rights and the environment.”

The Commission has already introduced the EU Ecolabel, and other standards to improve the quality of clothes. Both will make it easier for recycling plants to manage textile waste.

There are some other goals in the Strategy too, like reducing the amount of microplastics that our clothes release into the environment, and reducing taxes on companies working in the ‘reuse and repair’ sector. Plus, one of the main targets in this report is for textile waste to be collected with our paper and glass recycling, everywhere, by 2025.

We’re already making informed choices about the packaging we buy (can it go in the recycling afterwards?). Now it’s time for that consideration to filter into our clothes purchases, too.