Circular Fashion Needs ‘Everyone to Want to Make This Work’
It takes a village to scale circular garments.
That was the key lesson that participants of the three-and-a-half-year New Cotton Project took away as the European Union-backed initiative toasted its completion at the end of March.
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The mandate of the project was simple: to leverage innovative technology to pilot the production of textile-to-textile recycled clothing that could go on to serve as a model for commercial-scale manufacturing. Its execution? Less so.
Roughly 1 percent of apparel castoffs is remade into new clothing, according to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. At the same time, the world’s largest single market continues to churn out 12.6 million metric tons of textile waste every year, the majority of which is either landfilled or incinerated.
The New Cotton Project marshaled the resources of not one or two companies but 12: South Holland-based textile mapper REvolve Waste; Dutch textile sorter and processor Frankenhuis; Finnish materials firm Infinited Fiber Company; Portuguese, Slovak and Turkish yarn and textile producers Inovafil, Tekstina and Kipas; Scandinavian institutes Aalto University, the South-Eastern Finland University of Applied Sciences and RISE Research Institutes of Sweden; retailers Adidas and H&M Group; and Amsterdam-headquartered innovation platform Fashion for Good, which acted as facilitator.
Everyone had an important role to play, said Paula Sarsama, program manager at Infinited Fiber Company, whose textile-waste-derived cellulose carbamate fiber, known as Infinna, served as a cornerstone for the project.
“As soon as one of these drops out, the circular value chain just doesn’t work,” she said of the different companies. “And it has been a really exciting project understanding how circular value chains work and altering the way we’re thinking inside companies so that we can act in these kinds of circular ecosystems.”
This wasn’t the typical EU undertaking, Sarsama said, largely because it manifested actual products—an Adidas by Stella McCartney tracksuit and an H&M jacket-and-trouser set—that consumers could snap up for themselves. Designed entirely with end-of-life in mind, the garments contained no polyester or other synthetic materials that could complicate recycling—just Infinna from post-consumer textiles and organic cotton.
Tekstina had tried to spin 100 percent Infinna but ran up against productivity issues, said Lucija Kobal, the company’s R&D manager. A 50-50 blend proved to have better machine “runability” while mitigating the greige cast that 100 percent Infinna produced in the final fabric. For industrial applications, there could be a stepwise increment in the proportion of Infinna being used if kinks are ironed out through continuous R&D, she said.
Kobal was a skeptic who doubted that they could manage more than a few thousand meters of quality textile. She’s now a convert, believing that the result feels “exactly like virgin cotton,” which was the point of the exercise. Kobal had been tripped up before when chemical recycling was still in its relative infancy. Today, it’s a “new world, really,” she said.
Still, there were challenges that would be magnified on a commercial scale, chief among which is the complication of using post-consumer waste, Sarsama said. With off-cuts obtained directly from factories, recyclers know what they’re getting and in uniform compositions. Holey tank tops and stained trousers from the hoi polloi, on the other hand, “contains all kinds of things,” including disparate, hard-to-separate components with mystery chemical profiles. Sorting isn’t well-automated because the technologies don’t exist or they’re not “trustworthy” enough to ramp up, she added.
“Something that is key for all fiber-to-fiber recycling technologies is that these sorting systems have to develop and be scaled,” Sarsama said. “They also have to be able to create business for the sorting companies because currently, they make more value out of garments that they resell to other places. It’s not part of their business model. The whole infrastructure of sorting needs to get support from the ecosystem, from society, with governmental aid to develop this further.”
The eco-design guidelines that the EU is rolling up will take a few decades, “most likely,” to start showing up in waste streams, she added. Until then, there is no knowing what people will put in clothing bins, including non-textile waste that can befoul the whole lot, making incineration the only option.
Another issue the New Cotton Project encountered was the lack of reliable data, including those involving life cycle analyses. Infinited Fiber Company, for instance, wasn’t able to compare the environmental impact of Infinna with that of cotton or viscose because it could only find aggregated averages. Equally tough to pin down is information about textile streams because of the lack of a defined, consistent methodology.
“In some reports, you see that the amount of textile waste is somehow calculated from textiles sold on the market, but that’s not really true that the amount of clothing that is sold on the market one year is the same amount that comes out as waste,” Sarsama said. “So this is some important work that’s going on in the EU right now of finding reliable ways of defining this. Having reliable data on textile waste is an essential part of the business model for fiber-to-fiber recyclers.”
Even so, feedstock composition makes up only a fraction of a textile’s impact, said Anne-Charlotte Hanning, senior project leader at RISE, which crunched some numbers using Infinited Fiber Company’s pilot plant. The electricity mix being used to manufacture the fiber matters, for instance, and the type of chemicals being used during dyeing and processing. What happens to the fiber afterward is also important.
“The research shows that even if we have a fiber with a low impact from the beginning, we still need to look at the whole supply chain to have the total lowering of the impact,” she said. “But also as the consumer, we can’t forget that we need to have garments with good quality and we need to use them longer. That also has an impact.”
Sarsama has gleaned a lot of insight from the initiative that Infinited Fiber Company will be applying to its plans for its first flagship factory, which is poised to break ground in a couple of years.
“We plan to have a factory in Finland, but in the future when this starts to scale in larger amounts, then scaling should happen in different places around the globe where there are abundant textile streams,” she said. “[But] we have to start somewhere, and Europe is a super place to start because we are at the forefront of the green transition and really supported by the EU.”
The way the New Cotton Project operated is completely different from what the textile industry is used to in a linear system, where goods travel in one direction and “you can pretty well shut your eyes from everything else that’s going on because it doesn’t come back to you anymore,” Sarsama said.
With a circular supply chain, what goes around comes around, making one person’s problem everybody’s problem. Collaborating with sorting companies was “eye-opening” for Infinited Fiber Company. Sarsama has been in too many situations where the feedstock was unsuitable because Infinited Fiber Company didn’t understand the sorters’ difficulties with meeting its specifications and the sorters didn’t grasp why there were stipulations in the first place.
“One of the big things that we did in the New Cotton Project is that we created our first official material specifications together with a sorting company,” she said. “And this has acted as a baseline for our current specifications, which we now use in our commercial partnerships.”
Transitioning away from a “linear way of working, towards circular value chains, is vital to deliver fiber-to-fiber recycling at scale,” agreed Katrin Ley, managing director at Fashion for Good. “Each actor needs to understand the requirements and challenges of all the other aspects of the value chain in order to develop shared solutions and unlock the potential for circular fabrics.”
On a wider level, however, the adoption of circular fabrics needs commitment across the entire value chain, meaning that “everyone has to want to make this work and contribute their part in the process,” she said.
The New Cotton Project will live on in different ways. Many of the partners within the consortium will continue to have commercial partnerships. Several participants, including Aalto University, Adidas and Infinited Fiber Company, are also part of another EU-funded project called Textile Recycling Excellence, a.k.a. T-Rex, which is developing a harmonized blueprint for the closed-loop sortation and recycling of household textile waste in the EU. The project website itself will remain online for another two years.
While a new “era” is starting, any paradigm shift won’t happen in a fortnight, said Hanning, who counseled the need to be “as patient as we need to be relentless.” Meanwhile, she has reason to be in a celebratory mood.
“We did it; we really have progress on the market and this is a big achievement, ” she said. “I think [it’ll take] baby steps. [But] we need to go forward in this on this path.”
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