Textiles account for 10 percent of global carbon emissions. The industry is the world’s second-biggest industrial polluter, behind oil. In Australia, an estimated 3m tonnes of textiles goes into landfill each year. The ability to recycle fabric is, say industry veterans Adrian Jones and Graham Ross, a “holy grail … for the industry and the planet” that will help close the loop between resource-intensive fabric production and fast-growing piles of textile waste.
Jones and Ross have pioneered and trademarked – with input from the CSIRO and the Queensland University of Technology – a small-scale and environmentally friendly process that takes blended fabrics and reduces them to their raw components. “We often seem to care more about old plastic bottles than we care about our favorite T-shirts,” Jones told Guardian Australia.
The immediate benefit of fabric recycling is to divert increasing amounts of waste from landfill. Trends such as fast fashion and minimalism have the unintended consequences of increasing fabric waste. In Australia, 75% of people throw textiles away each year, a 2017 YouGov survey found; 30% tossed out more than 10 garments.
“The nature of the fashion industry is you start out with the best fiber or the best fabric you and make it into a garment,” says Jones, who has worked in fashion for big retailers in the UK and Australia for 30 years. “There is such intrinsic value in the fibers. But the way we value them doesn’t reflect that. The retail prices don’t reflect that. In the industry now we spend half the year marking [the prices] down as quickly as we can”
Long-term, recycling can reduce the industry’s reliance on resource-intensive production methods used to make new fabrics. Cotton requires vast quantities of water. Polyester is made from petroleum and takes up to 1,000 years to biodegrade.
Ross, a former endurance athlete who launched a sustainable athletic clothing line, says major apparel companies now have a stake in ending those wasteful production practices. Companies such as Nike now make products from large quantities of recycled waste, while H&M is increasing embracing recycled polyester.
But while textile recycling is not itself new, studies show many existing large-scale processes provide negligible benefits and can be as environmentally harmful as the production of raw fabrics. It also remains uncommon.