29 September, 2023, 3:03 am Central - 21°C Rain

The recycling idea at Levi’s, Adidas, Zara to stop trillions in fast fashion from going to waste

The recycling idea at Levi’s, Adidas, Zara to stop trillions in fast fashion from going to waste

By Jim Dawai
Tuesday 19/09/2023
A bale of discarded jeans at Renewcell’s pulp mill in Sweden. Alexander Donka

The fashion industry has a very well-known waste problem.

Almost all (roughly 97%) of clothing eventually ends up in a landfill, according to McKinsey, and it doesn’t take very long for the lifecycle of the latest apparel to reach its end: 60% of clothing manufactured hits a landfill within 12 months of its manufacturing date.

In the last two decades, that concerning trend in clothing production has accelerated enormously with the rise of fast fashion, multinational production, and the introduction of cheaper plastic fibers.

The multi-trillion dollar fashion industry contributes significant greenhouse gas emissions, between 8% to 10% of total global emissions, according to the United Nations. That is more than all international flights and maritime shipping combined. And as other industries make progress on carbon reduction solutions, fashion’s carbon footprint is forecast to grow — it is predicted to account for over 25% of the world’s global carbon budget by 2050.

The apparel industry wants to be taken seriously when it comes to recycling, but even the simplest solutions haven’t worked. According to sustainability experts, as much as 80% of Goodwill clothing ends up going to Africa because the U.S. secondhand market can’t absorb the inventory. Even local drop-off bins send clothing to Africa due to the complexity of the domestic supply chain and overflow.

So far, refashioning old clothing into new clothing has barely made a dent in the industry. Currently, less than 1% of textiles produced for clothing are recycled into new clothing, which comes at a cost of a $100 billion a year in revenue opportunity, according to McKinsey Sustainability.

One big problem is the blending of textiles now common to the manufacturing process. With the majority of textiles in the fashion industry blended, it is harder to recycle one fiber without harming another. A typical sweater can contain multiple different types of fibers including a blend of cotton, cashmere, acrylic, nylon and spandex. None of the fibers can be recycled in the same pipeline, as has been economically done in the metals industry.

“You would have to decouple five intimately blended fibers and send them to five different recycling scenarios in order to recover most sweaters,” said Paul Dillinger, head of global product innovation at Levi Strauss &

The complexity of the fashion recycling problem is behind new business models that have emerged at companies including Evrnu, Renewcell, Spinnova, and SuperCircle, and some big new commercial operations.

Spinnova partnered with the world’s largest pulp and paper company this year, Suzano, to turn wood and waste into recycled textile fiber.

“Increasing the textile-to-textile recycling rate is at the heart of the issue,” said a Spinnova spokeswoman. “There is very little economic incentive to collect, sort, shred, and bale textile waste, which are the first steps in the recycling loop,” she said.

Textile waste, by some measures, is a bigger issue than plastics waste, and it has a similar problem.

“It is a really low-cost product where the output doesn’t have significantly high value and the cost to identify, sort, aggregate, and collect items is much higher than what you can get from the actual recycled output,” according to Chloe Songer, CEO of SuperCircle, which offers consumers and brands the ability to have a variety of finished products mailed to its warehouses for sorting and recycling — and credit towards the purchase of items from the Thousand Fell recycled sneaker brand run by its CEO.

“Impact unfortunately costs money, and it’s figuring out how to make that make business sense that’s important,” Songer said

Source: CNBC




fijivillage Straight Talk with Vijay Narayan
Latest Videos

Stay tuned for the latest news on our radio stations

CFL radio frequencies
FEATURE NEWS
Tamavua Action Group to petition against development close to Princes Road cliff edge
Members of the Tamavua Action Group who are residents in the Tamavua area are now gathering signatures to protest against the development close to the...
11 hours ago
LATEST NEWS
Fuel and gas prices to increase from Sunday
Get ready to fork out more money as fuel and gas prices will increase from Sunday. The Fijian Competition and Consumer Commission says unleaded ...
8 hours ago

One of the biggest challenges faced in relation to reporting and dealing with gender based violence is the Fiji Police - Ali
Fiji Women’s Crisis Centre Coordinator, Shamima Ali says one of the biggest challenges faced in relation to the reporting and dealing with gender ...
9 hours ago

Fiji to have $3b tourism industry by December this year
Fiji will have a $3 billion dollar tourism economy by this December, ahead of the anticipated time of the end of next year. This has been ...
9 hours ago

Qiliho maintains he did not direct officers to close investigations
Former Prime Minister Voreqe Bainimarama and suspended Police Commissioner Sitiveni Qiliho’s lawyer Devanesh Sharma and the Acting Director of ...
10 hours ago

France secures second win of Mini 7s leg 2 beating Aussie Green 28-14
The French Women's 7s side secured their second win of the Fiji Airways Mini International 7s tournament leg 2 after a 28-14 win over the Aussie ...
13 hours ago
IN DEPTH
EBayShop Online Recruitment scam
The Consumer Council of Fiji has issued a public alert about a group of individuals running a deceptive pyramid scheme known as “EbayShop Online Recruitment.”
4 days ago

7 Grace Road Group executives declared prohibited immigrants in Fiji after decisions by the South Korean Government and a request by Interpol
7 Grace Road executives in Fiji have been declared prohibited immigrants by the Fijian Government, it has been made clear through government ...
4 days ago

Bainimarama and Qiliho’s trial
The trial of former Prime Minister Voreqe Bainimarama and suspended Commissioner of Police Sitiveni Qiliho begins
42 days ago

TOP