According to data from McKinsey & Co, the average annual proportion of global consumers purchasing clothing increased by 60% from 2000 to 2014. According to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to reducing waste, the number of times clothing is worn before being discarded dropped by 36% from 2002 to 2016. New textile technologies, such as recycling old clothes and remaking them into fiber, are still in their infancy, which means clothes still end up in landfills or incinerators.
According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the weight of textiles in U.S. landfills increased by 67.7% from 2000 to 2015.
The apparel retail industry currently focuses on recycling used clothes. H&M and Zara place old clothes recycling bins in stores to implement old clothes recycling programs. These old clothes are sold as second-hand clothes, sent to emerging markets, or remade into other products. Recycled clothing is mostly remade into low-value products such as rags or insulation materials, but ends up in landfill. Countries such as Rwanda import a large amount of second-hand clothes from the United States and other places, causing a depression in the local textile industry. Therefore, the local government increased the import tax on second-hand clothes to protect domestic industries.
Unlike industries such as single-use plastics, apparel manufacturers face little regulatory pressure to produce waste from their products. France is the only country that requires textile manufacturers to be responsible for product recycling and disposal, and the UK is developing a similar law. Recycled clothing is mostly remade into low-value products such as rags or insulation materials, but ends up in landfill. The garments currently on the market made from recycled materials are usually made from fabrics made from recycled PET bottles, rather than old textiles.
The Ellen MacArthur Foundation states that less than 1% of the fiber used to make new clothes comes from recycled old clothes. There are some technical challenges in recycling old clothes into new clothes. The main reason is that most clothes are made of cotton or polyester fiber blends and are not easy to separate.
The impact of clothing on the environment continues to increase. Boston Consulting Group predicts that global apparel and footwear consumption will grow by 63% from 2015 to 2030, reaching 102 million tons. Studies have shown that artificial clothing such as synthetic fiber jackets and sports leggings are widely popular, and after washing, many micro-plastic particles are released into the ocean, causing pollution.
The apparel industry said that due to the threat of resource shortages and consumers’ concerns about environmental impact, they are trying to develop technology for making new clothes from old clothes. H&M said that with climate change and increasing pressure on land use, recycled materials must be developed. The H&M Foundation, a non-profit organization sponsored by the founding family of H&M, is researching ways to recycle old clothes into new fibers and process them into new clothes. The foundation recently opened a textile recycling test site in Hong Kong, using chemical and hot water technology to recycle recycled cotton and polyester mixtures into new yarn. It is still in the development stage.
Recycling supporters say that remaking old clothes into new clothes can reduce greenhouse gas emissions, reduce the amount of petroleum used in the manufacture of synthetic fibers, and reduce the time required to grow cotton. Fertilizer and water, and chemical use. Inditex Group funds textile recycling research at MIT and plans to invest US$3.5 million in the development of endless recycling technology in 2020. It will also cooperate with Austrian textile manufacturer Lenzing to transform old cotton into new fibers. The process of recycling and remaking garments must first be classified. Currently, a European company has successfully developed the Fibersort system, which can separate different fiber materials.
More and more Americans are buying second-hand clothes. Apparel industry experts believe this is due to consumers’ desire to conserve, protect the environment, and avoid social media posts such as Instagram. The media wears the same clothes over and over again. JCPenney and Macy’s said in August that they would sell second-hand clothing on the online platform thredUP Inc. thredUP said that in the past three years, the U.S. second-hand market has grown 21 times faster than the overall retail apparel market. JCPenney believes that the reason for the increase in consumer purchases of second-hand clothes is the information that high-quality second-hand goods can be purchased at low prices.
