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Low Carbon Life Cycle Fashion: Textile And Clothing Recycling Business Opportunities

2023/3/16 20:16:00 53

Clothing Recycling


It is estimated that the global annual production exceeds 100 billion Of which 65% were buried within 12 months. Landfills release the same amount of carbon dioxide and methane - the latter's greenhouse gas is 28 times more effective than the former in 100 years. According to United Nations estimates, fashion industry accounts for 8-10% of global carbon emissions.

The world's first commercial scale textile recycling plant is a milestone in solving the huge waste problem in the fashion industry.

On the Swedish coast of the Baltic Sea, a group of scientists, chemists, entrepreneurs and textile manufacturers are celebrating a landmark birthday in Songzwar, the birthplace of the country's pulp and paper industry. The banner reads "Solutions Are Sexy".

Swedish pulp producer Renewcell has just opened the world's first commercial scale textile to textile chemical recycling pulp mill after spending 10 years of technological development.

Although the recycling of mechanical textiles to textiles, which involves manually cutting clothes and pulling them into fibers, has existed for centuries, Renewcell is the first commercial factory to use chemical recycling, enabling it to improve quality and scale production. The goal of the new factory is to recycle more than 1.4 billion T-shirts annually by 2030, which marks a major change in the ability of the fashion industry to recycle old clothes on a large scale.

"The linear model of fashion consumption is unsustainable," said Patrick Lundstr ö m, CEO of Renewcell. "We cannot pump oil to produce polyester, cut down trees to produce viscose or grow cotton, and then use these fibers only once in the linear value chain ending in the ocean, landfill or incinerator to exhaust the earth's natural resources. We need to make fashion cycle." This means that textiles can be converted into new raw materials through the development of collection plans or technologies, Limit fashion waste and pollution, and use and reuse clothing as long as possible.

It is estimated that the world produces more than 100 billion pieces of clothing every year, 65% of which are buried within 12 months. Landfills release the same amount of carbon dioxide and methane - the latter's greenhouse gas is 28 times more effective than the former in 100 years. According to United Nations estimates, fashion industry accounts for 8-10% of global carbon emissions.

Only 1% of recycled clothes are re made into new clothes

Although the "recycling" plan of charity stores, textile banks and retailers helps keep donated clothes wearable and circulating in circulation, the ability to recycle discarded clothes is currently limited. Many high street stores with recycling plans, including Levi Strauss and H&M, use a three pronged system: resale (for example, sold to charity stores), reuse (converted to other products, such as cleaning cloths or mops), or recycling (into carpet padding, insulation or mattress padding - clothes are not listed as an option).

Most of the technical difficulties in recycling old clothes into new ones are due to their composition

According to the data of the global non-profit textile exchange, most of the clothes in our wardrobe are made of blended fabrics, of which polyester fiber is the most widely produced fiber, accounting for 54% of the total global fiber output. Cotton ranks second with a market share of about 22%. The reason why polyester is popular is the low cost of fossil based synthetic fiber, which makes it a popular choice for fast fashion brands. These brands put the price first - the cost of polyester per kilogram is half of that of cotton Although the plastic industry has been able to decompose pure polyester (PET) for decades, the blending properties of textiles make it challenging to recycle one fiber without degrading another. (Read more about why clothes are so difficult to recycle.)

By using 100% of textile waste, mainly old T-shirts and jeans, as raw materials, the Renewcell factory produces a biodegradable cellulose pulp, which they call Circulose. The textile is first chopped and buttons, zippers and dyes are removed. They are then mechanically and chemically treated to help gently separate tightly tangled cotton fibers from each other. The rest is pure cellulose.

The dried pulp feels like thick paper. Then the viscose manufacturer can dissolve it and spin it into a new viscose fabric. Renewcell said that it uses 100% renewable energy to power its processes, which is generated by hydropower from the nearby Indus ä lven River.

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As the most common man-made cellulose fiber (MMCF), viscose is popular because of its lightness and silky quality. MMCF's market share accounts for about 6% of the total fiber output. According to the data of Textile Exchange, the textile industry uses dissolving pulp cellulose to produce about 7.2 million tons of cellulose fabrics every year. But most of them come from wood pulp. More than 200 million trees are cut down every year. According to the American non-profit organization Canopy, its mission is to protect forests from being cut down to make packaging and textiles, such as viscose and rayon. The technology of Renewcell not only helps to keep the forest intact, but also improves the pulp output. "A tree is composed of different parts, including cellulose, but about 60% of them are non cellulose, so you can't deal with them too much," said Harald Cavalli Bj ö rkman, strategy director of Renewcell. "Except for a little loss, all the waste cotton we use has become pulp."

The factory has signed a contract with Tangshan Sanyou Chemical, a Chinese viscose manufacturer, with an annual output of 40000 tons, and is negotiating with other large viscose manufacturers such as Birla in India and Kelheim Fibers in Germany. Swedish fashion brand H&M produces 3 billion pieces of clothing every year and is an early investor of Renewcell. It has signed a five-year, 10000 ton agreement with the pulp mill - equivalent to 50 million T-shirts. Zara also launched a capsule series in cooperation with Renewcell in 2022.

"We hope to build more factories," Cavalli Bj ö rkman said, adding that Renewcell hopes to recycle 600 million T-shirts within a year - equivalent to 120000 tons of textile waste, twice the current capacity. "But compared with the global textile fiber market, this is still very small. By 2030, our goal is to reach 360000 tons of capacity."

However, the technology of Renewcell has limitations: it can only recycle cotton clothes, and the non cotton content can only reach 5% at most. "Part of the reason is that it is difficult to separate polyester. Too much polyester will affect the product quality, and we want to ensure that we can obtain considerable output from the other end," Cavalli Bj ö rkman said. "The only reason to use polyester is because it is cheap except for things that need special durability (such as work clothes) or special properties (such as waterproof clothes) - but it has caused a huge cost to the environment. We want to reverse this trend to obtain clean materials and reduce the mixing cycle."

Cavalli Bj ö rkman said that fast fashion's dependence on low-cost synthetic fibers affected consumers' attitudes towards the value of clothing. "Before we realize the industrialization of textile production, people will take care of their clothes," he said. "They repair clothes because clothes are an investment. Today, clothes are too cheap. People's view is that you can always grow more cotton and pump more oil - which is much easier than trying to make high-quality products from them. Things that already exist and can continue to circulate."

Natasha Radclyffe Thomas, professor of marketing and sustainable business at the British Fashion Institute, agrees that this is a value issue. "We often think that we can get rid of waste through recycling. Although recycling is a key part of the solution, it is not the starting point," she said, pointing out that the overabundance of production and consumption is the root cause of the waste problem in the fashion industry. Cheap, low-quality clothes mean that consumers are often cheaper to buy new clothes than to repair items.

But other companies are focusing on synthetic and hybrid materials widely used by fast fashion brands.

Worn Again Technologies, headquartered in Nottingham, England, raised 27.6 million pounds (US $34.2 million) in October to build a textile recycling demonstration factory in Winterthur, Switzerland, to produce hard to recycle blended fabrics, such as clothes made of polyester and cotton. Worn Again (H&M also invested in it) is not running its own commercial scale factory, but is developing a process, which will be licensed to large plant operators around the world, and this process will be launched in 2024.

As its raw material, Worn Again uses textiles made of pure polyester or polyester cotton blend, with a tolerance of up to 5% for other materials (such as zippers and hardware) except metals. There are two output streams. One is PET particle, which has the same chemical structure and composition as the original PET and can be made into recycled polyester. Another is similar to Renewcell: once cotton is separated from polyester cotton blend, cellulose will be purified and recaptured in the form of pulp or cellulose powder to make viscose.

Only 1% of recycled clothes are re made into new clothes

Worn Again's technology is different from that currently available because it uses chemical rather than mechanical recovery to recapture polymer chains and restore them to their original equivalent molecular weight. This can improve the quality of polyester and polyester cotton blends and large-scale recycling. Another key difference of chemical recovery of this technology is that it can recycle textiles back to textiles.

Radclyffe Thomas said that this method may help solve the problem of systematic circulation of synthetic fibers in the fashion industry. She said that many brands often tout the statement of recycled and reused textiles by promoting their recycled polyester series, but in fact, these clothes are not "recycled" because they are made from recycled plastic bottles, not textiles.

"The vast majority of recycled polyester in fashion comes from a completely different supply chain: the plastic bottle industry," she said. "At first, when the brand started to make clothes from plastic bottles, this was seen as a very positive step. We now see that this is not a circular model."

According to a report of the event organization "Market Change Foundation", "turning plastic bottles into clothes should be regarded as a one-way ticket for landfill, incineration or dumping in nature". According to the report, not only are polyester taken out of the closed-loop system, in which they are usually recycled back into bottles, but also the clothes made from it will discharge microplastics into the environment and cannot be recycled many times.

"At the beginning, we thought we would recycle pure polyester, but soon we realized that pure polyester is not

"At the beginning, we thought we would recycle pure polyester, but soon we realized that there are not many pure polyester in the global waste textile pool," said Cyndi Rhoades, who is a re abrasion technology. "A large part of clothing is made of blended fabrics, so we know that if we want to create solutions for textile recycling, we must be able to handle blended fabrics."

According to Rhoades, the goal is to have 40 licensed factories by 2040, and the annual output of each factory is 50000 tons, which is equivalent to 2 million tons of polyester and cellulose raw materials returning to the supply chain for manufacturing new textile polyester fibers such as viscose and regeneration.

This is an area where more and more innovators use different technologies to recycle mixtures, including Evrnu and Cir c, headquartered in the United States, which recently raised $30 million (£ 24.2 million). They are part of 30 technology driven companies working with Canopy.

Canopy also cooperates with fashion brands, including Transformation headquartered in the United States, where viscose accounts for nearly 50% of all fabrics. Earlier this year, the brand restarted its Ref recycling program.

Kathleen Talbot, Chief Sustainability Officer and Vice President of Operations of Transformation, said, "Our goal is to reduce the use of viscose by 2025, and transition to using alternatives from recycled, recycled and renewable fiber sources." "We started by recycling shoes, sportswear, sweaters, coats and denim because we already have textile recycling solutions for these categories and materials."

The brand cooperates with SuperCircle, an American technology company, to manage the logistics of the recycling process from waste to reusable materials, and classify and summarize used transformation products by fiber type. It then sends them to recyclers to make fibers that can be used in future products.

Talbot said that in order to expand the recycling fashion model, it is necessary to have appropriate infrastructure and services to promote recycling and recycling plans and make them available.

Before we realize the industrialization of textile production, people will take care of their clothes - Harald Cavalli Bj ö rkman

Nicole Rycroft, the founder of Canopy, recalled the incredible conversation about the potential of textile recycling in 2013. "Many traditional manufacturers tell us that we are crazy and the next generation solution cannot reach commercial scale," she said. "Renewcell has proved that anything is possible. By 2030, we hope that at least half of the man-made cellulose textiles will come from recycled materials."

But she said regulatory policies also need to be developed. Rycroft refers to the recommendations of the European Commission on the disposal of textile waste by making textiles more durable, reusable and recyclable. The EU sustainable and recycling textile strategy will call for all textiles on the EU market to be "durable and recyclable, and made of recycled fibers as much as possible" by 2030. In addition, the EU will require the collection of textile waste by 2025, which will be separated like paper or glass.

Kate Reilly, strategic director of synthetic fibers and materials at the non-profit textile exchange, said that the company needs to develop a business model focusing on maintenance, leasing and subscription.

"This is the key to achieving closed-loop efforts and shifting from dependence on traditional fossil fuel derived synthetic materials to textile raw materials," she said.

Textile Exchange describes the increase in textile recycling as the "Holy Grail" of circular fashion. With a group of companies ready to expand their mature technologies, this goal seems no longer so distant.


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