But a covert sustainability barrier has morphed from a decade of (somewhat misguided) sustainable fashion initiatives that warrants examination. The barrier grew, I contend, from a collective focus on the wrong levers for mitigating climate change. Before addressing that though, how much greenhouse gas does fashion emit?
Fashion contributes approximately 8% to global emissions, but as population and consumption grow, this figure is expected to increase by 45% come 2030. Simultaneously, an industry-wide science-based approach would require an 80% emissions cut by 2050 to remain below 2 degrees Celsius warming. Compounding fashion’s continual rise in emissions is ecological damage, biodiversity loss and wastewater pollution from textile production processes. These interrelated global impacts are not clearly quantified. […]
Is the ‘solution’ the problem?
I have seen what I believe to be an under-scrutinised monolith in sustainable fashion’s way: circular economy (and within it, recycling) which is believed to be the key to sustainable fashion.
To elaborate, recycling and circularity are arguably the most potent and publicly successful environmental initiatives in the sustainability toolkit, but they offer far less environmental benefit than we think. This has created an illusion that the industry is becoming more sustainable, when the opposite is true.
Despite powerful consumer sway (and the personal satisfaction it gives us when we partake), recycling limps in at number 42 on a list of 82 possible actions to mitigate climate change, according to Project Drawdown. Additionally, the above-referenced Quantis research concludes that implementation of circular (recycled) fibers would “achieve an approximate 10% industry-wide emission reduction within the broader apparel value chain” and a circular economy target alone would “simply not achieve the industry-wide emission target”.
Fiber recycling’s potential is limited by many factors, including fragmented infrastructure, downgrading of recycled materials, rapid growth of fashion consumption, and the vested interest of petrochemical giants (amongst others) in maintaining the status quo on virgin fiber production. But does that mean recycling should be ignored in favour of adding our decarbonisation bellows to that of the scientific community? Definitely not (although bellow too).
The key here is to openly and honestly admit the capacity recycling has to mitigate climate change, and how this potential changes when its limitations are addressed—including those stated in the previous paragraph. Fashion’s overselling of recycling and circularity masks the vast work still to be done on recycling innovation and scaling. But there is good news. This article was inspired by significant expansion in textile recycling infrastructure and improvement in recycled material quality that could see an improvement in its impact mitigation ranking. And as I learned in the following interview with Renewcell, it is a mistake to view recycling benefits in emission terms only—independent of ecology and resource extraction.
Renewcell is a fiber-to-fiber recycling company with a difference. Founded in Sweden in 2017, they join Spinnova and Infinited Fiber Company (IFC) in a surge towards rapid expansion of ‘chemical’ recycling of textile and garment waste. Renewcell differs in that their only waste-input is textiles, while Spinnova and IFC also process wood and agro-waste. Renewcell turns cotton and viscose textiles into recycled pulp, which they supply to textile mills in place of wood pulp from the forestry industry. This pulp is then used to make new cotton-like material. Like the fiber-to-fiber recyclers mentioned above, Renewcell’s idea is to extract maximum (and ongoing) value from cellulose-rich waste, without reducing the fiber quality, so that it can alleviate dependency on virgin sources.
Recycled versus virgin fiber impact
The global cotton industry produces 25 million tonnes per year, at vast land, chemical and water cost. Renewcell believes they can meet some of this demand. Their biggest supplier is Bank & Vogue, who own and operate the vintage fashion retail chain Beyond Retro. During an interview with Renewcell’s Chief Growth officer, Harald Cavalli-Björkman, he revealed they recently secured 30,000 tonnes of cotton-rich garment waste from Bank & Vogue’s sorting facility in India. Additionally, they obtain pre-consumer textile offcuts from mills in Turkey, India and Bangladesh. Following their IPO last year (which raised $60M from investors including Capital Group and H&M) they are transforming a disused wood pulp factory in Sweden into a production facility with 60,000 tonnes annual capacity. 50,000 tonnes is already accounted for, says Cavalli-Björkman: 40,000 tonnes will go to one of the world’s largest mills—Tangshan Sanyou in China, and 10,000 will go to H&M.
Read the full article on Forbes