The recycling of textiles is improving. The EU will require textile waste to be collected separately, like paper or glass, by 2025. H&M says it tripled the use of recycled materials in its products to 17.9% in 2021 and aims to reach 30% by 2025. And in June, Goldman Sachs led a $100 million investment roundin the Spanish company Recover, which uses textile waste to create cotton fibers for new apparel.
The world is progressing on this front because it’s become cheaper to recycle and reuse polyester and cotton. But textiles made by combining the two materials—poly-cotton blends—continue to vex the process.
“We don’t currently have a scalable means of recycling poly-cotton blends…back into textiles,” says Peter Majeranowski, CEO of Circ, a Virginia-based textile recycling startup. “The plastics industry has known how to break down pure polyester [PET] for decades. When a synthetic fiber like polyester is intentionally blended with a natural fiber like cotton, however, it becomes a huge challenge to economically recycle one without degrading the other.”