Innovation Amidst Crisis: Textile Recycling’s Wake-Up Call
The UK’s Textile Recycling Association (TRA) shocked the industry last week with an alarmist claim that the country’s textile recycling sector is on the brink of collapse due to global market challenges.
Juxtaposing the downfall of Renewcell with the $600 million investment in Syre, the state of the industry is challenging, at best, and baffling at worst—even innovators who have escaped the “valley of death” are struggling while capital continues to flow into new ideas.
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Sourcing Journal spoke to global leaders to weigh in on the situation.
“The TRA’s warning underscores a serious problem the UK’s textile recycling sector is facing, exacerbated by fast fashion and a lack of supply chain integration for textile recycling capabilities,” Sam Scoten, CEO of CheckSammy, told Sourcing Journal. “But this problem is not unique to the UK—not at all.”
The Dallas-based waste management company believes point-of-source diversion—capturing materials before they’re discarded—to be the most important factor in reducing waste.
“The convergence of extremely wasteful industries, like fast fashion, combined with a serious global environmental crisis is coming to a head,” Scoten said. “And while these regulatory shifts present a complex challenge, they are creating pressure for the immediate action and attention needed to prevent further, far-reaching consequences.”
As such, Scoten believes the TRA was correct in sounding the alarms. However, there is an opportunity for first movers to “capitalize” on waste-to-product solutions that further their bottom line and help to reduce costs.
Simply put, “the industry is going through changes,” Karla Magruder, president and founder of Accelerating Circularity, said. “It may not look the same, but it certainly won’t ‘go away’ because we will continue to wear and discard clothing.”
The British waste management firm MyGroup, for one, said it “recognizes” the urgency of the TRA’s alert on the textile recycling sector’s crisis and is in “full agreement” with the call for immediate action and the implementation of an extended producer responsibility (EPR) scheme to foster sustainable textile production and recycling.
Martin Stenfors, the former head of strategy and sustainability at Renewcell, also agreed that a number of problematic factors conspire to create a “tough market situation.” When transportation drives down profits, costs increase. Also, considering that the increased influx of fast fashion reduces the value of the reuse/resale fraction, the situation can become “critical.”
“The short-term situation will most likely continue to be rough,” Stenfors said. “But I always think you need to look at a problem from the perspective [of] what you can impact and what is out of your control.”
The supply chain crisis, “obviously being something that cannot be impacted by the market,” will “blow over sooner or later.” Another thing out of the TRA’s control, Stenfors said, is the share of fast fashion in collection bins, which will increase over the years.
“One way to manage this fact could be to separate collection for recycling from collection for reuse to increase the percentage of higher valued items and, in the longer run, obviously have a EPR scheme funding some of the collection and sorting activities,” Stenfors said. “In my mind, 100 percent of the EPR funding should go to collection and sorting for reuse and sorting for resale. Recyclers will still benefit from the EPR funds through lower feedstock cost.”
Magruder agreed that EPR schemes have the potential to support collectors and sorters, but “developing them so that the funds go toward supporting the correct segment of the system is going to be critical to their success,” she said. She noted that landfill bans for textiles are “critically important” to obtain the volume of feedstocks necessary to reduce the industry’s reliance on virgin materials.
But, as Constanza Gomez, co-founder and CEO of Sortile, pointed out, the rising popularity of secondhand platforms—the likes of ThredUp and Poshmark, for example—means higher value items are increasingly taken out of the feedstock, further squeezing resale margins. “Add to this that fiber-to-fiber recycling markets are still in a nascent stage; many of these companies have seen their businesses suffer.”
Furthermore, policies that limit or make sending materials to certain markets more expensive “definitely make this even more complicated,” Gomez said, especially considering the lack of infrastructure in most of these countries to deal with all those textiles responsibly.
While “everyone” should embrace any ban on the export of textile waste to countries where that waste isn’t properly managed, Stenfors said he believes banning the export of resale and reuse fractions is a “huge mistake” as it can be handled by duties in those countries that want to minimize the import of used textiles into their markets. However, changing conditions for global trade, such as increased duties, are also “out of control” and can only be mitigated by finding new markets or adapting to a lower export volume.
“I do think that the UK government should follow the EU on a number of proposed legislations related to textiles such as the EPR that would help fund the collection and sorting of textile waste,” Stenfors said. “Also to support the scale-up of recycling capacities to manage a larger flow of the non-rewearable recycling fraction.”
And it seems that the UK is trying to follow in the EU’s footsteps.
Last summer, the UK’s Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (DEFRA) laid out a roadmap outlining its ambitions to minimize textile waste—titled “Maximizing Resources, Minimizing Waste”—to be enacted over the next few years.
The organization said it will consult on several policy proposals and “remains open” to other suggestions from the industry on the most effective interventions.
Those proposals include requiring retailers of a certain size to provide a service for consumers to return their unwanted textiles to, such as an in-store take-back facility; banning separately collected textiles from being sent to landfills and energy from waste without prior sorting; and requiring non-domestic settings (like businesses) to separate their textile waste from other types of waste so that it can be collected for reuse and recycling.
Since the roadmap’s publication, DEFRA has been developing consultations on these policy proposals and engaging with stakeholders—including TRA—to “understand the challenges being faced by industry and how these will be impacted by the proposed policies.”
“We are aware of the global challenges facing the textile recycling industry and have been engaging with stakeholders across the supply chain to understand the pressures they face,” a DEFRA spokesperson told Sourcing Journal. “We will be consulting on several policy proposals set in our ‘Maximizing Resources, Minimizing Waste’ program, and we are open to the industry’s views about how to best achieve these aims, including their suggestion of an EPR scheme for textiles.”
Overall, in the coming years, the entire system—collecting, sorting, reuse, resale and recycling—will need to “find a balance,” Stenfors said, where low-quality items in the collection bins continues to increase, funding partially by EPR schemes.
“Who will be the winners in this new landscape? It’s too early to tell, but all the pieces of the puzzle will be needed,” he continued. “It’s crucial that all parts of this sector have a pathway to become profitable to create a robust system to manage the ever-growing problem of end-of-life textiles.”
And this doesn’t mean the UK’s textile recycling sector will “cease to exist,” Gomez said. Rather, “this is an opportune time for innovation and change in the space to incentivize collection, make sortation more efficient, and develop recycling infrastructure further.”
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