Our world generates approximate 200 billion pounds of textile waste every year, but only 13% of which are recycled. In addition, of the recycled textiles, more than 90% are downcycled, wherein the recycled textiles are of lower quality or value than the original products. Only less than 10% go to high value products with similar or higher quality as the virgin ones.
These numbers depict an image that highlights two fundamental problems in the textile recycling industry: First, textile waste recycling remains at a low level. Most of the textile waste will end up in landfills or incineration, which not only result in a huge waste of resources but also emit greenhouse gas and leach toxic chemicals into groundwater and soil, causing excess pollution on the top of what the textile industry has already produced.
Second, recycled textiles are mostly low-quality products that partially lose their values in the recycling process. This further decreases the values and competitiveness of the textile recycling industry.
This article will discuss the reasons that lie behind this dilemma, as well the potential solutions for these problems.
Sorting Problem
The low recycling rate is partially a result of the difficult sorting process. Textile recycling usually involves several steps: collection, sorting, and recycling. In the sorting step, workers sort the collected textiles according to their fiber types and colors, remove unwanted materials, and then send the sorted textiles to the next step. The value of recycled textiles depends a great deal on the quality of sorting, as improperly sorted materials could damage the machinery or result in failed products.
Waste textiles are usually collected from three major sources: cut waste from factories, pre-consumer textiles from brands, and post-consumer textiles. Sorting pre- and post-consumer textile is often a challenge, as this process could be very time-consuming and labor-intensive.
For example, for sorting pre- and post-consumer jeans, workers should first separate them by denim constituent (cotton or blends such as cotton/spandex and cotton/polyester) and color, and then
remove metal and leather parts, such as rivets, zippers, buttons and patches, manually before sending the textiles for shredding.
Even with all these efforts, mistakes and interruption still always happen: sometimes the denim constituents are difficult to identify as the labels on the jeans are worn out; sometimes the metal or leather parts are not totally removed, which could cause problems to the machinery and following process, leading to damaged recycled batch or malfunction of production lines. Therefore, additional testing or separation devices are often needed to be deployed, which further increase the cost and complexity of the process.
On the other hand, cut waste from the factories are much easier to be divided into individual waste streams based on fabric type and color as the separation can be controlled at the source. As a result, reclamation mills often turn away from pre- and post-consumer textiles to cut waste.
This issue leads to the overall failure of recycling pre- and post-consumer textiles in many countries. According to several news reports from Chinese media, many Chinese fiber reclamation mills admitted that more than 90% of their recycled fibers were from cut waste from factories, and they had given up most of the pre- and post-consumer garment because sorting them were too laborious and even economically impracticable.
As cut waste usually account for only 10%-15% of the fabric a textile mill uses, we can easily see why the global textile waste recovery rate stays at only 13%, and understand how little the pre- and post-consumer textiles are recycled.
This has been prevailing worldwide for a long time, keeping the global recycling rate at a low level. For example, China’s textile recycling rate stays at around 15% in recent years, according to Prof. Wang Huaping of Donghua University, after a rapid growth from 5% to 15% from 2000 to 2015. In the U.S., textile recycling rates also stay at around 15% after a fast-growing period between 1970 and 2005, according to the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) – the U.S. recycled only 3% of its two million tons of generated textile waste in 1970; but the rate rose to 15% in 2005 and the recycled volume grew by a whopping 30 times to 1.8 million U.S. tons between 1970 and 2005. However, the recycling rate stagnated in the following years, and EPA’s latest number updated was 14.7% in 2018.
Even in India and Bangladesh where the labor cost is relatively low and sorting pre- and post-consumer textiles were considered possible and profitable, the economic incentive has been declining rapidly in recent years as the workers’ salaries and working conditions continue to improve.
This situation is also true for recycling denim and jeans. Each year, the world generates about seven billion pounds of waste denim, mostly pre-consumer and post-consumer jeans, and the U.S. and China contribute to, respectively, 700 million and 200 million pounds of waste denim. Although the governments, brands, and communities have put a lot of efforts to reuse or recycle denim and jeans,
most of them still end up in landfills or incineration.
Sorting Solutions
Governments, brands, and communities have been working toward reusing and recycling pre- and post-consumer textile products for decades. However, these efforts often bring new problems and the effects are discounted. For example, good quality collected clothing are sorted out to be donated to less developed countries or sold in the second-hand markets. However, a substantial amount of them would be discarded even before wearing because of improper sizes, styles, color, and other issues. In addition, these countries often suffer from a lack of recycling facilities – being reused or not, the clothing would inevitably end up without being recycled.
Another example is that brands, communities, and consumers often sort recyclables prior to collection to reduce the difficulty of further recycling. However, these sorting efforts are often proved to be inefficient, because additional sorting still needs to be done as there might be contamination from improperly sorted materials.
The fundamental solution to the labor-intensive problem is automation. There are several automated identification and sorting systems that separate textile waste by color or fiber type available in the market. Devices that identify fiber types by physical or chemical properties usually use some spectroscopic techniques. These optical sorting technologies have been rapidly improving since the early 2010s, and developers often update technologies and machines every few years. IFJ’s recent articles introduce the recent development of automated systems from Andritz, Tomra, Pellenc ST, Picvisa, and Valvan, among others.
As their accuracy and efficiency improve, automated systems gradually grabbed more market shares in the last 15 years. The market drivers include global efforts to push waste recycling, the rising labor cost, and the growing demand for diversified raw materials supply; on the other hand, the inhibitors to their growth include the initial investment and maintenance cost on machinery, and the supply of alternative materials, e.g., cut waste from factories that may not have an urgent need for the automated sorting systems.
Efforts in Value Creation
While the evolution of automated sorting solutions has increased the possibility of recycling more pre- and post-consumer textile waste, the question remains if the value they create can offset the increased cost of machinery.
Recycled fibers seek to take market shares from virgin fibers. They must compete, in terms of price and quality, with the materials it will replace. Applications in which recycled materials are less expensive and of suitable quality have traditionally been successful markets.
As mentioned prior, more than 90% of the world’s recycled textiles are downcycled into low-value nonwovens or filling materials rather than re-spun into yarns to be used for new apparel or other high-value textile products. Downcycled fibers have competitive price against virgin fibers, while maintaining suitable quality, in these applications; therefore, they have grabbed a big market share from virgin fibers.
There are three main recycling methods for textiles: mechanical, chemical, and feedstock recycling. Today, most of the textile waste are recycled through mechanical method, which is usually less expensive but often shortens the fiber length and lowers fiber quality, resulting in downcycling.
These low-value products may not have enough profits to support the high sorting cost for pre- and post-consumer textile waste, no matter through automated sorting systems or intensive manual works. In this case, the industry is seeking to create new values to make the whole process more economically practicable.
One simple solution is mixing the downcycled fibers with virgin fibers. A fabric can include up to 20%-30% mechanically recycled materials while maintaining its quality not being significantly reduced – several patents published in the last two years worked on designing and making high-value textiles from a mix of recycled and virgin fibers.
At the same times, designers and artists are also trying to upcycle used jeans and other textile waste into blankets, wall hangers, and other textile products with aesthetic advantages; these efforts can be sporadically found in news reports or social media, but still are in a small scale, compared to the billion pounds denim waste and more other textile waste the world produce every year.
Currently, industry-scale solutions for making high-value and high-quality recycled textiles mainly lie on chemical recycling solutions, especially those for recycling polyester textile waste, which account for more than 50% of the world’s total textile waste produced every year. Examples include the Textile to Textile (T2T) projects from Ambercycle and Jiaren.
Even in India and Bangladesh where labor cost is relatively low and sorting pre- and post-consumer textiles were considered possible and profitable, the economic incentive has been declining rapidly in recent years as the workers’ salaries and working conditions continue to improve.
The Los Angeles-headquartered Ambercycle provides cycora®, a recycled polyester fiber that offers the same strength and performance as virgin polyester fiber, at less than half the CO2 emissions associated with petroleum-based fibers. The Zhejiang, China-based Jiaren has launched its first T2T factory, with capacity of treating 40,000 metric tons of polyester textile waste and producing 30,000 metric tons of recycled polyester fibers per year; unlike most of other recycling lines, which produce recycled polyester through downcycling bottle-grade polyester waste, Jiaren’s factory turns used polyester garment and home textiles into high-quality polyester fibers, which are re-spun into yarns to be used for new apparel or other high-value textile products.
A recent notable development came from China’s Amino. The company has developed a biomimetic enzyme targeted catalysis technology, which can accurately detect polyester and disaggregate it to monomers at a temperature below 90°C. Amino has successfully developed a series of systems to reclaim polyester/spandex, polyester/cotton, polyester/wools, and polyester/spandex/cotton blends based on this technology. The reclamation rate of each fiber has all exceeded 99%, at less than 60% the greenhouse gas emission by virgin fibers. Last September, Amino has launched its first pilot factory for recycling polyester/spandex blends.
These solutions are still expensive. Recycled fibers made through these methods may not be able to compete with virgin fibers in terms of price and quality. However, recycled materials could earn a substantial share from the market even if they are, initially, more expensive than the material they seek to replace. They offer some performance or lifecycle advantage which can be turned to real economic incentive through governmental regulations and public awareness. For example, the Chinese government provides a tax break for fiber reclamation mills, and the European Union has set its 2030 Strategy for Textiles to encourage textile products to be durable, recyclable, and made of recycled fibers, among other goals.
Another example is that reclamation companies partner with brands to promote their recycled fibers as premium products so as to secure a profit to support their long-term operations. Currently, Jiaren has partnered with Decathlon, H&M, Zara and Puma for its T2T project; Ambercycle has signed agreements with Inditex, the owner of Zara, and Ganni, a Danish womenswear brand, to supply cycora® for making high-value garment; and Amino had also announced that they have begun to build an alliance with brands to bring their technologies and products to the public.
