15 - Textiles: the perfect fit for a circular economy – part 1

In this week’s episode of TOMRA Talks Circular, we talk to Louisa Hoyes, Business Development Manager, Textiles at TOMRA, about the current state of affairs across the textiles value chain, and the solutions that exist to help close the loop and shift to a true circular economy for textiles. 

Listen to the episode below, or use your favourite platform (Apple Podcast, Spotify, Google Podcasts)

Show Notes

• A tipping point for the textile industry [01:35]

• The urgent need for textile waste collection systems [07:09]

• Why textile waste is a global problem [8:34]

•  The EU strategy for sustainable textiles [10:28]

• What is textile recycling and how does it work? [13:40]

• Dual-method approach: Mechanical and chemical recycling [18:03]

• What happens after old clothing is collected?  [19:28]

• Textile feedstock explained [23:11]

   

Transcript

Mithu: Welcome to TOMRA Talks Circular, where we explore how businesses, municipalities, and governments are collaborating towards a circular economy. In the last few months, we've been reading and hearing a lot about how clothing brands and retailers are planning to do their part in moving towards a circular economy. Things like takeback efforts or sneakers, handbags and clothing made from recycled materials. But how much of these efforts are genuine and how much is greenwashing? What is actually happening in the world of textiles these days? 

I am very excited about this episode in which we will be talking about one of the hottest topics in recycling these days, and that is textile recycling. Joining me today is Louisa Hoyes, Business Development Manager Textiles at TOMRA. Having started her career with Veolia in 2015, Louisa joined TOMRA in 2019, where she has taken full responsibility for developing the textile sorting application. As textile recycling continues to gain attention, Louisa engages with diverse stakeholders across the entire value chain and supporting the move towards a new circular economy for textiles. Louisa, welcome to the program. 

Louisa: Thanks very much, Mithu.

Mithu: So, let's get into this. Why are we hearing and seeing so much about textiles these days?

Louisa: So, the textile sector is a really exciting sector at the moment. There's a lot happening and there's a big shift in the textile sector from what we've seen for the past up until now. We're really at a tipping point for the textile sector. Until now, it's been a very polluting, high consumption, very low recycling sector. It's been a very polluting material on our planet. 

The World Economic Forum identified fashion and its supply chain as the planet's third largest polluter after food and construction. The European Environment Agency recently stated that the sector is the EU's fourth largest cause of environmental pressures after food, housing, and transport. So, when we think of the biggest polluters on the planet, we don't necessarily automatically think of textiles or the clothes that we wear as being one of those. [Mithu: No, no we don’t.] 

But it's an incredibly linear economy for textiles. It's a very-take-make waste economy that we have. Since the year 2000, clothing production has approximately doubled while the clothing utilization or the time that we use that clothing for has seen a drop in 40%. So, we're buying a lot more textiles and we're using them for a lot less time. 

They're becoming waste a lot quicker, and we haven't had solutions to account for that waste. We haven't had outlets for that waste. Approximately 85% of the textile clothing that we produce today and directly in landfill or incineration. Less than 1% of the textiles that we produce today are fed back into closed-loop, fiber-to-fiber, textile recycling solutions. That means less than 1% of the textiles that we produce once they become waste, actually end up being made back into new clothes.

Mithu: Less than 1%? That's just dismal.

Louisa: It's a really staggering number when you think of it. [Mithu: Yeah.] And it's it just highlights the trend that's been happening in the last years of fast fashion. We're overproducing very low-quality, cheap textiles and we're over consuming them. And it's a very linear, take-make-waste value chain.

Mithu: Okay. So we know where we are. Where do we … where do we start? Where do we begin to actually battle this make-take-dispose (behavior)? And how do we do it right now? 

Louisa: Yeah, so it can be quite a doom and gloom picture if you look at the state of fashion and the state of the textile sector up until now. But what is also really important to highlight is there's a huge amount of potential there.

There's a huge amount of potential available for us to take this waste that's ending directly in landfill and incineration. Capture those piles and mountains of textile waste that is ending in landfill or incineration and feed those into a new circular economy. And that's very much what's happening right now in the textile sector. 

There's a big shift away from this linear economy. And we're starting to build, I would say just in the last 18 months to two years, we're starting to build these brand new value chains for circular textiles. There's many different cross-value working chain groups being set up. For example, Accelerating Circularity who have been operating in the US and recently set up in the last year in Europe. And Textiles 2030, for example. Both of those groups … and I believe there are more across the world … both of those groups are set up to bring together everybody in this existing value chain and in this new value chain to be developed to bring them together. To figure out how we build this new value chain. 

Traditionally in the textile sector, we have collection for textiles, which typically focuses on collection for re-use. In Europe, we’re most familiar with the on-street bins for textile collection, typically run by the charity sector, where you can take back your textiles that you no longer use, and you can drop them off. Or you can take your textiles to a bring-back site, where they're collected and manually sorted for re-use. 

But one of the main things that needs to happen now is a reform in the collection system, because we're typically only collecting textiles for re-use. We're seeing a decrease in the quality of the textiles, so we're going to see a decrease in the amount of textiles that we can actually pick out and re-use. So there's increasing volumes of textiles that we could and should feed into a recycling system, and that's the circular economy and fiber-to-fiber. Textile recycling is a very new, very immature value chain … but there's a lot happening in the sector at the moment to create and build this new value chain.

Mithu: So just to recap, Louisa, just to make sure I've understood you. If there were steps that you would say that need to be taken. We need to increase the collection of the materials. Those materials should be less available for re-use. And they need to be more suitable to be fed into recycling solutions. Would that sort of sums it up?

Louisa: Yes, we need to increase the collection of textiles. If we look at Europe, just one-third of the textile waste that we produce is actually collected through designated collection points. Two-thirds of the textile waste that we produce in Europe ends directly in household municipal waste, which is destined for landfill or incineration. 

So, we absolutely need to change the way. We need to increase the amount of textiles we're collecting through, for example, separate collections. And we also need to – we need to first pick out what's reusable. We need that to always be the first step for collecting textiles is to recover what's reusable … what we can resell as a textile, to be used again. Then after that, we now need to focus on this new value chain that's evolving, where we prepare those non-reusable textiles to feed them in to a high-value recycling system. 

Mithu: You've mentioned Europe a couple of times here … the focus seems to be on Europe. But I think we all know that that we have massive textile issues in Southeast Asia. Do you see anything happening there?

Louisa: Yes, absolutely. I think we've all seen or a lot of us will have seen the pictures of piles of textile waste [Mithu: Exactly] in illegal landfills, in Chile for example. So, it's absolutely not an issue that's just contained within Europe. It's a global issue. 

Typically, we see post-consumer textile waste coming from Europe, but we also have post-industrial waste. A majority or a lot of our textiles are produced in Pakistan or Bangladesh, in Asia. So, there we also have volumes of post-industrial textile waste, which is off cuttings through the making of the textiles. We also have … or we’ve had a lot of textiles ending in Southeast Asia just due to waste exports. So, it's definitely not a problem that's just specific to Europe. 

But because it's such a new value chain that's developing for the circularity of textiles, where we have the majority of the technology, the technological advancements for automated sorting, the technology developing predominantly in Europe, Australia, or the US. We're building this new infrastructure, we can focus and almost get it right here and then we can once we've developed those new systems, we can look at what we can do with those resources that are piling up in Asia and the rest of the world as well.

Mithu: It's a matter of actually the EU, as has often been the case, being front frontrunner in the circular economy. Getting it going here so that we can accelerate as quickly as possible and then taking those solutions and transplanting them … and probably adjusting them for local situations … so that you can get it working as quickly as possible in regions such as Southeast Asia.

Louisa: Yes, absolutely. We also see one of the biggest drivers to this new circular economy is legislation. And so far, Europe has been the frontrunner in the legislative push towards sustainable and circular textiles. In March this year, the EU set out the strategy for sustainable textiles, which set out the pathway for us to achieve a more circular textile. 

Within that there were a lot of different measures that were included things such as harmonized extended producer responsibility for textiles across the EU and banning the destruction of unsold goods, including textiles. And restricting exports of textile waste – so all of these measures are real drivers to making textiles circular, and I think the legislation will be a really key driver of which countries will excel in making textiles circular. 

We also have other drivers towards circular textiles such as sustainability. We've seen that in the last five plus years with plastic where we've become a lot more eco-aware of our plastic use. And I believe that that's also happening with textiles where now consumers are now beginning to think consciously about what textiles they’re buying. Are they sustainable? Do they come from sustainable sources? So, there's the sustainability aspect and the consumer sustainability awareness driving it. 

There's the legislation, and I believe one of the biggest drivers as well towards this new circular economy for textiles are brands. We're now seeing many of the different brands making commitments to a certain percentage of recycled content going into their garments in the future. This is really interesting because at the moment we really have very little, very small volumes of recycled fibers or recycled materials available. So, brands will be a really big driving force behind ensuring that this new circular economy, this new value chain is built. And that new value chain means that we need to collect the textile waste, we need to optimize the sorting of it so we can produce or provide pure, consistent feedstocks to these new recyclers that are developing processes. 

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Mithu: So, it sounds like there's a lot to be done. Maybe you can kind of walk us through … what are we talking about when we talk about textile recycling? Do you do you actually make it into a new piece of textile or a new piece of clothing? Or what happens there?

Louisa: When we talk about textile recycling, we can look at it very broadly as two overarching recycling methods. That would either be mechanical cycling or chemical recycling. If we look at mechanical recycling first, that involves breaking down the clothing into its individual fibers so that those fibers can be re-spun and to make a new yarn of recycled fiber. So that would be a new yarn that can then be re-spun into a new garment. So, it's most applicable for cotton. 

If you think of your cotton t-shirt or your cotton shirt. Once you are finished with that, it's got a rip in it, or it can't be used again as a textile garment, you can feed that into a mechanical recycling solution where they will shred the cotton t-shirt and release the individual fibers. Once you have those individual cotton fibers, you can then re-spin those individual cotton fibers into a new cotton yarn. So that could go into making a new cotton t-shirt, for example. 

When you mechanically recycle or through that shredding process of the cotton, the cotton fibers typically shrink, which leads to a decrease in quality of those fibers. So, it typically requires the addition of virgin cotton fibers to go back into that. There's a lot of work going on to look at how to mechanically recycle, for example, those cotton fibers, but to retain or to increase the size of those fibers. So that's just one example of a mechanical cotton recycling process.

Mithu: Okay, and chemical? 

Louisa: Yes, so then we have the chemical recycling. And chemical recycling is a very broad term. Included within that is thermomechanical, thermochemical, and chemical recycling. And within those three broad chemical recycling processes, they use a combination of heat, pressure, chemicals, or a gasification process to break down the fibers or to break down the material. They typically focus on synthetic or polyester materials. They break the polyester down into its polymers or its individual monomer state, which can then you can recover the polyester. And in some processes, for example, producing PET pellets … similar to virgin quality … that could then be re-spun into polyester fibers replacing those virgin polyester fibers. 

Mechanical recycling is a lot better established … it's happened for many more years. Whereas chemical recycling and everything that's included within that broad overarching phrase of chemical recycling is reasonably new. It's interesting because at the moment the most advanced, developed, and readily available textile fiber-to-fiber recycling processes are available for cotton. Predominantly to take a feedstock of cotton. 

We see quite a big gap in the sector at the moment for recycling technologies available to take polyester feedstocks. So, there's a gap there of development. But there are, I would say just in the last 18 months to two years, a huge number of new fiber-to-fiber recycling technologies that are developing. They're starting to build pilot plants. They're starting to take feedstocks of polyester and some blends of materials to start scaling up these textile recycling facilities. 

Mithu: Okay. If I understand you, we need both mechanical and chemical recycling, correct?

Louisa: Yes, absolutely. It's not going to be an either or. I don't believe it will be an either chemical or mechanical. We will need a combination of both technologies in the future. And that's down to the number of different fibers and materials that we use to produce clothes these days. 

As I mentioned, mechanical recycling is maybe more suitable for our cotton materials. Whereas a chemical recycling process may be more suitable for our synthetic polyester fibers. Due to the amount of different fibers that we use on the market, it will definitely be a combination in the future. 

I can imagine that cotton feedstock will be sent to a cotton recycler or a cellulose recycler, whereas synthetics and blends of materials will be sent to some different textile recycling. So, in the future we'll need an ecosystem of many different types of recycling technologies available to take the many different types of materials that we're producing.

Mithu: You've talked about chemical and mechanical, and you've talked about collections. In my head, I would like to picture how this process works. So, let's say we've collected the material. What happens after that?

Louisa: Yes, today as the infrastructure stands, we collect the material. It arrives or it will be sent to a manual sorting facility where we can manually sort out and grade those textiles for re-use. So that's a very important part of the value chain. And it's very different to the value chains that we typically see where we're collecting paper or we're collecting plastics. Those can be fed directly into an automated sorting facility. Whereas with textiles, we first need to ensure that whatever textile we've collected, it needs to be manually sorted to pick out the reusables. And that's a very human process of is it fashionable?

Mithu: And you don't see that changing, correct?

Louisa: No, I don't see that changing in the near future. It's a very manual process, being able to identify, being able to touch and feel the material. Then from what we've collected, manually sorted, and picked out the reusable textile, we have a fraction of textiles that can't be reused. 

This is the fraction that we're now focusing on feeding into these high-value recycling processes. But before that happens, we need to automate the sorting of that. Typically, with post-consumer collection of textiles, that will include any number of different types of materials. So, it will include some polyester, it will include cotton, it will include blends of materials, it will have poly-cotton tops, and many different types of materials within that collection. To be able to feed the materials into a high-value recycling system, first we need to separate out all of the individual garments into their product type. 

That would mean automating the sorting to say, here is your polyester feedstock, here is your cotton feedstock, here is your poly-cotton feedstock, for example, and here is your wool. Once we have them separated, there's then a preprocessing step that would need to take place. So, you would have recovered your polyester garments and before they can be fed into one of the polyester recycling technologies, you need to, for example, remove the buttons and zippers, metal, hard parts, and any other material or contamination that might be harmful to that recycling process. 

Many of the different recycling processes have different feedstock specification requirements, so some might be able to take a lower threshold. So, they could take pure polyester, but then also some blends of polyester with 10 to 20% of other fibers mixed in. Other recycling technologies might have quite a strict specification requirement, so they could only take very pure polyester, for example. There will be different processes to separate out different specifications and different feedstocks to go to different recyclers. They would be preprocessed and then connected to the higher value recycling process.

Mithu: And just to take a step back, you've mentioned the word several times … and I'm not accustomed to hearing it in the in the sense of textiles. When you talk about textile feedstock, what are you talking about?

Louisa: Textile feedstock can be two things. The feedstock could be the textiles that we are feeding into an automated sorting facility. So, after it's been collected, manually sorted, that material that is left over and it can't be reused, that is a feedstock that we can provide to automated sorting. 

And then we also have a feedstock after the automated sorting. So, once we have these polyester and this cotton that can go to recycling, that's then a feedstock. It's a material that we can provide to the recyclers for them to put into their recycling process.

Mithu: So, we have sort of a front-end feedstock and a back-end feedstock, if you will, I guess.

Louisa: Yes, yeah.

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