Clothing Recycling Is Taking a Giant Leap Forward – Reasonstobecheerful

According to estimates by the European Environment Agency, the fashion industry is responsible for 10 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. The production of textiles consumes huge amounts of water, cotton, wood, fertilizer and petroleum-based plastics, and contributes to deforestation and agricultural waste.

Yet textile recycling has largely been limited to turning old clothes into simple products like cleaning cloths or upholstery fillings, not new high-quality clothes. “People have been asleep for a long time when it comes to textile recycling,” says Sabrina Mauter, a scientist at the Niederrhein University of Applied Sciences Textile and Clothing Technology. But the industry is starting to wake up. The university is working with start-ups and established companies on innovative processes for recycling textiles into new high-quality clothing.

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Its research helped launch the startup Eeden, which uses chemical recycling to break down polyester into its basic components and obtain cellulose from cotton wool. A pilot plant is planned for 2025. In Braunschweig, in northern Germany, the established recycling specialist Rittec has developed its own method for removing polyester from blended fabrics. And the French company Carbios is involved in the fiber-to-fiber recycling of polyester using enzymes. (It’s no coincidence that many processes deal with polyester –– at 55 million tons per year, it is now the main raw material in textile production, more than twice as common as cotton.)

There are basically two processes for recycling textiles: mechanical and chemical. Mechanical separation can work, but the process damages and shortens textile fibers. After being recycled two or three times, the fibers “are so short that they can no longer be reused for the production of textiles,” says Sabrina Mauter. Chemical processes break down the raw materials into their basic components, such as monomers and polymers, allowing them to be recycled again and again.

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Start-ups are sprouting across Europe, like the Dutch company Circularity, whose recycled t-shirts are worn by police in Berlin and employees of a large mobile phone provider in the Netherlands. But the big players in the textile and chemical industry are getting involved, too. At the beginning of 2024, the German company BASF teamed up with fashion giant Inditex to introduce a nylon material recycled from textile waste. Since then, Inditex subsidiary Zara has been selling a jacket made entirely from this material.

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