Industry must avoid recycled polyester

When you see a piece of clothing made from “80 percent recycled polyester,” do you think, “Aha, that’s good?” Unfortunately, yes…

In 90 percent of cases, this recycled polyester is made from RPET (recycled polyethylene terephthalate) from collected soft drink bottles. This sounds like a wonderful way to create sustainable clothing, but after that clothing wears out, we often can’t do anything with it (with current technologies). An RPET bottle, on the other hand, can be recycled into an RPET bottle forever. Once again, the clothing industry is linear, while recycling from RPET bottles to RPET bottles is circular.

Undoubtedly, the fashion industry does this with the best of intentions. It is also being steered towards this path from outside, for example through the 2025 Recycled Polyester Challenge, an initiative of the Textile Exchange. However, some fundamental elements of this “circular” strategy are wrong: the beverage bottle industry is now a circular chain, abruptly interrupted by the fashion industry. Aside from PET bottles being recycled into low-quality clothing, the unprecedented popularity of RPET in the fashion industry is leading to a shortage of RPET in the beverage industry. The result: prices rise and the beverage industry has to use more new material in order to achieve its own production figures.

In addition, consumers get the impression that they have bought a circular product and, even worse, that the manufacturing company is very sustainable. The pressure on the company to bring a truly circular product onto the market is therefore reduced. In the long term, this strategy will not help us win the battle because in the end we will not build a circular economy but a linear economy again. Time and energy that, in my opinion, manufacturers should better invest in a true circular strategy.

The fashion industry needs closed systems

Manufacturers should therefore concentrate on setting up a so-called closed system. But how exactly does it work? From the outset, you should aim to produce clothing that lasts a long time and can be reused or rented out. Product design should focus on easy repair, remanufacturing and recycling. One problem is that manufacturers like to work with blended fabrics (e.g. cotton and polyester). Until recently, these so-called “blends” were difficult to recycle. Recycling involves breaking down clothing items into homogeneous yarn, which can then be used to make new clothing. Companies like the US company Circ are now making this possible. Zara mother Inditex has invested heavily in this process.

Why is clothing made from RPET difficult to recycle? That’s because when making low-quality clothing, after recycling it is often left with low-quality yarn, should the clothing really end up in the recycling machine and not the incinerator. Each time you use it, the quality of the yarn gets worse, so that in the end you can only use it to make stuffing material. The circular economy focuses precisely on this closed system, where cotton clothing becomes cotton clothing and polyester clothing becomes polyester clothing.

Polyester technologies are still in their infancy and do not yet have the scale to allow large retailers to work with them. However, with more attention and money, these new techniques will spread more quickly. In addition, there are already enough examples on the market where a closed system is successful, such as Mud Jeans, New Optimist and Martan.

These brands actively take responsibility for the whereabouts of their clothing. For example, they work with deposit systems or you can rent jeans, with Mud retaining ownership and responsibility for the jeans and ensuring that they are made into new jeans.

Fortunately, there is a silver lining. With Extended Producer Responsibility (UPV) introduced in the Netherlands in 2023 (the EU will follow shortly), things will hopefully change. From 2025, manufacturing companies must prepare 50 percent of the textiles they put on the market for reuse or recycling, of which at least 25 percent for fiber-to-fiber recycling. By 2030, this share will rise to 33 percent. While we are still a long way from that, it is a significant improvement over the 1 percent recorded in 2021.

This article originally appeared on FashionUnited.nl. Translated and edited by Simone Preuss.