The U.S. has the opportunity to establish itself as a front-runner in the new circular economy for textiles considering it is the second largest market for textiles in the world and currently only about 15 percent of collected textile waste in the country is being recycled. While taking advantage of this opportunity is no easy feat, the burden can be somewhat lessened by leveraging key lessons learned from how paper recycling has become mainstream in the last few decades.
By José Gonzalez and Łucja Wanicka
On a global scale, the consumption of textiles has more than doubled in the last 30 years, driven mainly by the growing world population, increasing share of middle-income citizens, and low-cost fast fashion becoming mainstream. Today, the U.S. is the second largest consumer of textiles after China, and accounts for roughly 15 percent of the total market, which is approximately 120 million tons. Interestingly, the U.S. also has the second highest textile consumption per capita (pounds of textiles consumed per person) of all countries in the world. Only Qatar, with a total population of slightly less than 3 million people, has a higher rate (see Figure 1).
Figure courtesy of The Fiber Year.
This means that in addition to brands and retailers, consumers in the U.S. are one of the key drivers of global textile markets and hold significant power and influence over the industry. And considering that clothing use (that is, the number of times garment is worn before it is discarded) has been decreasing over the last two decades, it also means that the country has a lot of textile waste that needs to be appropriately dealt with.
Handling of Municipal Solid Waste in the U.S.
According to the U.S. EPA, the total municipal solid waste generated in 2018 was 292 million tons—almost a quarter of that was paper and paperboard, followed by food and other organics for compositing. Interestingly, textile waste accounted for 6 percent of total generated waste volumes and according to Accelerating Circularity (a New York based non-profit that catalyzes new circular supply chains and business models to turn used textiles into mainstream raw materials), the U.S. East Coast generates a significant portion the country’s textile waste, owing to its high population density and existing supply chains.
However, currently more than two thirds of the textile waste generated in the country is being landfilled, some 15 percent is incinerated usually with energy recovery, while the remainder, also some 15 percent, is recycled typically into lower value items such as wipers, shoddy, and insulation (see Figure 2). Estimates by Accelerating Circularity indicate that 35 percent of the textile waste diverted to landfill and incineration is readily recyclable (composed of pure cotton, pure polyester, or polycotton blends with more than 50 percent cotton) and a further 45 percent is potentially recyclable once advanced textile recycling technologies are commercialized. An opportunity to create value is clearly being missed.
Figure courtesy of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Landfilling of textile waste is problematic because an article of clothing could take more than 200 years to decompose, depending on the fibers used and the various treatments and finishes used on the fabric. Furthermore, while this article of clothing is decomposing, it generates greenhouse gases and can leach toxic chemicals and dyes into the soil and groundwater. Landfilling of textile waste is not a long-term solution and if materials can be diverted and recycled, landfilling volumes could be reduced, encouraging longer material use and lowering the need for virgin materials. Take a moment though and consider just how suddenly and quickly the generation of vast amounts of textile waste took place over the decades. There is a clear turning point in 1980 that steered the trend towards its upward trajectory. This point coincides with the sharp increase in GDP at about the same time (see Figure 3). This, paired with the fact that fast fashion became mainstream by the 1990s, meant that the average U.S. household increased its overall consumption including that of textiles, and inevitably, generated more and more textile waste. Will this trend continue in the future?
Population and nominal GDP per capita in the U.S.
Figure courtesy of World Data and World Bank.
The Issue Ahead
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the country’s population is expected to increase by an average of 1.8 million people per year until 2060 and at this rate, it will cross the 400 million people mark by 2058. This trend is markedly different from other developed countries in the world, particularly in Europe, whose populations are expected to either barely increase or shrink in the coming decades. So, unless consumption habits of consumers in the U.S. significantly change in the next few decades, the market for textiles will increase and, inevitably, more textile waste will also be generated. Alternatives to landfilling of textile waste thus need to be urgently found and implemented in large scale. Luckily, there are some parallels one can draw to how another sector has been able to do exactly that some 50 or 60 years ago.
Lessons from Paper Recycling
In the 1960s and 1970s, more than 85 percent of generated paper and paperboard waste in the U.S. ended up in landfill (see Figure 4). In fact, landfilling was the most popular form of waste disposal in the country after World War II. However, when disposable packaging and plastics became mainstream, landfills started to overflow and run out of space. That, combined with the growing environmental movement, saw the first real changes in the industry. By early 1970s, the first curbside recycling bin for paper “The Tree Saver” was used and by the late 1980s, the first statewide universal mandatory recycling law was enacted. Lawmakers went even further in the early 1990s, passing the first ever statewide ban on landfilling of recyclable materials and by 1995. This included tires, aluminum containers, corrugated paper, foam polystyrene, plastic containers, and newspapers, as well as yard waste.
Paper and paperboard waste management in the U.S.
Figure courtesy of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Regulations and legislation did certainly push innovation, however funding and financial support for these initiatives was crucial. In the mid-1970s, for example, Massachusetts secured the first ever EPA recycling grant to implement a weekly multi-material curbside collection program in two cities and use the first ever residential recycling truck (Northeast Recycling Council, 2019). Without this financial support that proved such a system would be possible, and without further advancements in recycling technologies, we may still be having to sort and transport recyclable materials to central recycling hubs ourselves.
Opportunities for Textile Recycling
There is a strong case to be made for the U.S. to step up and establish itself as a front-runner in the new circular economy for textiles. While there are already some regulations and legislations being passed to address this topic, such as California’s new Responsible Textile Recovery Act of 2023 that will require an extended producer responsibility (EPR) program for recycling textiles in the state as well as New York’s proposal for an EPR system, country-wise infrastructure for handling textile waste still seems to be missing. At present, the small fraction of textile waste that is being recycled in the U.S. is performed mechanically via cutting, tearing, and shredding, which shortens the textile fiber length (an essential property needed for strong, high quality spun yarns) with each recycling loop. While mechanical recycling of textile waste back into new textiles is commercially available, virgin fibers always need to be blended with the recycled fibers to produce strong yarns. That being said, innovation is taking place—“soft” mechanical textile recycling, for example, can preserve much of the textile fiber length and achieve length reductions of only 10 to 15 percent.
There are also more advanced textile recycling methods on the horizon, particularly those using chemical pathways. This innovation is taking place on a global scale including in the U.S. Ambercycle, a California-based textile recycling startup, uses a molecular regeneration process with enzymes to breakdown textile waste into its constituent molecules. Regenerated polyester is then extracted from its process, further purified, and reconstituted into virgin-grade cycora® pellets. Another U.S.-based start-up called Circ, headquartered in Danville, VA, uses a slightly different approach called hydrothermal processing. In this process, water, pressure, and responsible chemistry is used to separate polycotton textile waste into a cotton fraction that can replace dissolving wood pulp in the manufacture of man-made cellulosic fibers such as viscose and lyocell, and purified terephthalic acid (PTA), which can be used to make polyester fibers. And then there is Evrnu, a start-up based in Seattle, WA, that has developed Nucycl® technology capable of converting cotton-rich textile waste directly into Nucycl® lyocell fiber.
This bring us back to the remaining components urgently needed for change to materialize—grants, funding, and other investment schemes are critical to jumpstart the industry and allow innovative approaches to textile waste management to be realized. To help speed up time-to-market, close partnerships and collaborations between all textile value chain players and waste and recycling industries will also be required.
With these concluding thoughts, we asked Karla Magruder, President at Accelerating Circularity, what her and her organization’s views are on the main opportunities for textile recycling within the U.S. Her response was, “We all like to think about the exciting new recycling technologies, however, it is essential that we work on the sorting, aggregating, and preprocessing of feedstocks for the recycling process. The U.S. has approximately 12 million tons of textiles going to landfill and incineration annually. These materials have the potential to be our biggest resource and opportunity for transitioning to a circular textile-to-textile system. The materials need to be diverted to collectors, sorted by fiber and potentially color and fabric construction and then preprocessed into recycling feedstocks. Without these feedstocks, the recyclers will not have the necessary inputs for making recycled fiber.” | WA
José Gonzalez is part of the AFRY Management Consulting team based in Atlanta, GA. He has more than 25 years of experience in the bioindustry sector and has significant knowledge in business analysis and strategic direction for Wood Products, Packaging, Hygiene and Fiber-based companies. He is also the liaison with AFRY’s in-house engineering teams and holds a master’s degree from Institute of Paper Science and Technology at Georgia Tech. José can be reached at [email protected].
Łucja Wanicka is based at AFRY Management Consulting’s Helsinki office and currently leads the textile industry competences at the division. She has more than eight years of work experience in the bioindustry sector and holds a master’s degree in chemical engineering. Łucja can reached at [email protected].
AFRY provides engineering, design, digital, and advisory services to accelerate the transition towards a sustainable society. The company has 19 000 devoted experts in industry, energy, and infrastructure sectors, creating impact for generations to come. AFRY has Nordic roots with global reach, net sales of 24 BSEK and is listed on Nasdaq Stockholm. For more information, visit www.afry.com.
Resources
• Northeast Recycling Council (2019) “A Brief History of Recycling”. Online article accessed on July 17th, 2023 (https://nerc.org/news-and-updates/blog/nerc-blog/2019/11/19/a-brief-history-of-recycling).
• Accelerating Circularity (2020) “Research and Mapping Report”. Online report accessed on July 17th, 2023 (https://www.acceleratingcircularity.org/research).