Anyone with a passing interest in recycling will have seen at least one article or report in the past few years of the huge environmental impact of the fashion industry, with 'fast fashion' and micro-plastics being starting points for those wishing to highlight the problems created by the industry.
There have been a number of ideas proposed for how to fix fashion's waste problem. 'Reduce, reuse, recycle; in that order' has been doing the rounds online for all forms of consumption for some time. Buying less is certainly a sensible place to start, but as we all know, habits are hard to break and the push to change behaviours is tougher when unsupported by the businesses looking to sell you more.
In the UK we have a list of companies hailing their sustainability credentials and ethics – whether through lower environmental impact or through better working conditions at their suppliers. For one I'm a big fan of the products coming from Rapanui - their products are designed to be returned once worn out, pulled apart and rewoven into new yarn and products. If more businesses adopted this approach then it would make a big impact in the waste issue.
Not many things are repeatedly recyclable, and even the best recycling process will eventually wring all use out of a material. That's why the work of ReNewCell in Sweden is so interesting – they take old textiles and rather than recover the fibres to be rewoven, they break it down to recreate the fibres afresh. Cellulose is a building block in natural plant fibres, and is also commonly used to create synthetic and semi synthetic threads and fabrics. ReNewCell's Circulose® are regenerated cellulose and can be used to create new fabrics. If you check your clothing labels you'll probably find plenty of fabrics which contain a blend of the semi-synthetic viscose or lyocell already, maybe soon those will be sustainably sourced. Hopefully we'll see lots more large scale systems for stripping the fabrics back to its raw ingredients to be reused and re-worn all over again.
The article below from The Guardian is well worth a read and will give you the gist of the process. If you want to know the details, there's plenty of information which can be found in ReNewCell's patent portfolio. EP2632957 is a great place to start, with the document describing the alkaline treatment of the cellulose starting materials and subsequent precipitation. The observant will spot that this patent was originally filed over ten years ago and that the same inventors have applications older than that too. This represents a typical lifecycle for innovative technologies and is always worth considering when planning for R&D and new product launches. Reaching the market at scale may take many years, and its wise not to rest on your laurels – innovation is commonly iterative with many small developments eventually leading to a much greater change. A much newer application from ReNewCell, WO 2023/139168 A1 was published this summer, and relates to the recycling of mixed textiles, the clear next step in approaching the growing volumes of fabric waste.
The EU and Switzerland generated 7m tonnes of garment waste in 2020. By 2030, this figure is expected to be more than 8.5m tonnes.
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