Making new jeans out of old ones – more sustainable fashion labels have been dreaming of this for quite some time. However, as the recycling process is very complex, development is progressing slowly. Dutch labels Mud Jeans and Kings of Indigo have been working on making sustainable denim for about a decade and are now providing insights into their journey towards 100% recycled jeans.
Strong fibers
Both brands are already on the right track. Kings of Indigo already makes denim from 100 percent recycled materials. For this, 80 percent Pre-Consumer Materials or post-industrial materials used, these are mainly leftovers from the production facilities. “When cutting patterns, there are always leftover pieces of fabric or there may be a production error. This material is then recycled,” explains Nikki Bosboom, CSR officer at Kings of Indigo.
According to Bosboom, the label is working hard to increase the stake Post-Consumer Materials to increase. This means returning the clothing already worn by the customers to the cycle. “The material is of lower quality because it has been worn a lot and is therefore more worn. If the fabric has been used in a product before, the fiber will become shorter. But the longer it is, the firmer it is.”
Mud Jeans already uses 40 percent of consumer waste and supplements it with organic cotton. “This is the waste that fills our landfills and pollutes our planet,” says Lea Landsberg, Mud Jeans CSR Officer. “We want to tackle the problem at the source.”
Chemical and mechanical recycling
According to Mariska Stolwijk, product manager at Kings of Indigo, mechanical recycling is currently the most common method: First, the collected textiles are sorted by material and colour. These are then in the form of small pieces of fabric, so-called clippings, sent to the recycling company, where they are torn into fibers and then converted back into a thread. To compensate for the short fiber length, a recycled thread is twisted with several new cotton threads.
However, Mud Jeans may have found a way around this step. “Together with Saxion University, we developed the combination of mechanical and chemical recycling. The resulting fiber can be any length and you can directly combine the different physical properties – chemical recycling makes the fiber feel very soft, mechanical recycling makes it feel more like a typical rough denim.” The first jeans sample made from 100% recycled material post consumer-Denim is already a reality.
In chemical recycling, old fibers are converted into viscose using a chemical solvent – the result may not be cotton, but the fibers are robust.
But if the technology is there, why isn’t it deployed on a larger scale yet? “The waste that is fed into the system has to be very pure,” explains Landsberg, “but we don’t have enough of that.” For the pilot, Mud used his own jeans, made from consistent raw materials and good quality. But that’s not how old clothes collection works in the real world, emphasizes Stolwijk from Kings of Indigo: “All the old trousers are simply thrown together: our jeans, but also the 20-euro jeans from H&M and that results in a different quality. It’s very frustrating.”
Uniform fabrics
According to Landsberg, it is important for the recycling companies that the waste consists of uniform materials as far as possible, with a minimum of 96 percent cotton. Manufacturers often add elastane or other fibers to increase the elasticity of the fabric. Metal parts such as buttons make the process even more difficult. Then the upper part of the trousers has to be removed and 20 to 30 percent of the fabric that could have been recycled is lost.
Kings of Indigo has been actively promoting the use of single source materials for over a year. Stolwijk explains: “When scanning, the recycler recognizes exactly: there is still polyester in here, there is still wool here, this is cotton and this is yellow – this gives you clear groupings. But if we throw different materials in everywhere, those groups get smaller and smaller and recycling companies have to do all sorts of tests.”
Not only does this cost time and money, not every recycling company has such sophisticated technology. As a result, the fabrics are often inevitably downcycled into insulating material – a sheer waste, according to those responsible at Kings of Indigo. According to Bosboom, discussions are currently being held with other brands to start a joint collection. “You need a lot,” she says. “I think that’s a bit of wishful thinking at the moment.”
World Travel
Fiber length, capacities, scale and purity are the major challenges holding back widespread recycling expansion. But transport should also be on this list. Mud Jeans has a partner in Spain who recycles the pants and sends the recycled materials to Tunisia where they are made into new denim. Kings of Indigo does not source its own denim, but buys recycled material from a partner in Turkey, where the organic cotton used by the label is also grown.
“Certainly we see a lot of greenwashing here too,” says Stolwijk. “Brands like to say they have production facilities in Europe, but now half of them don’t even know where their fabrics come from. For example, India, America and Brazil are very large cotton countries. If you want to produce in Europe, there is a good chance that the product has a long way to go. Recycling is then an extra step.”
double payment
There’s another catch with recycling: what do you do with a pair of recycled jeans after their second life? According to Landsberg, chemical recycling is theoretically repeatable indefinitely, but currently only mechanical recycling is commercially viable. “We still have a lot to try to keep denim alive longer,” says Stolwijk.
This experimentation is not yet financially rewarded. “If we incorporate 20 percent recycled material into our garments, we usually don’t pay extra for it,” says Stolwijk, “but with some suppliers you have to pay an extra 20 to 50 cents. Denim costs between three and ten euros, which is quite a lot.”
“The costs for the logistics and the additional recycling step definitely add up,” says Landsberg. “And then there is the problem of double taxation. Our CEO is committed to changing this. If you take back a product that you made at your own expense for recycling, you pay taxes on it instead of receiving a financial incentive. A tax cut could actually convince people to shop sustainably because they could save money by choosing recycled products.”
Despite all the obstacles, Bosboom is positive: “We believe that we should lead by example and firmly believe that the industry can change. We signed the denim deal and just found out that we’ve already recycled 3 million jeans with 20 percent this way Post-Consumer Materials brought into the world. Those are very nice numbers.”