Textile-to-Textile Recycling at Scale: Why Brands Must Collaborate

Textile-to-textile recycling was a hot topic at the Textiles Recycling Expo in Charlotte, N.C.​Textile-to-textile recycling was a hot topic at the Textiles Recycling Expo in Charlotte, N.C. 

Seen as something of a holy grail of circularity, textile-to-textile recycling remains a hot topic, as evidenced by multiple discussions on the subject at the recent Textiles Recycling Expo in Charlotte, N.C.

Representatives from Accelerating Circularity, Target, Unifi, Reju and Elevate Textiles gathered to discuss how different entities in the supply chain can better work together to close the loop and make fiber-to-fiber recycling a more widely available solution.

Sarah Coulter, Americas program director for Accelerating Circularity, said the key to unlocking this type of recycling at scale goes beyond the technology necessary to process textiles for reuse.

“We all know the statistic that only one percent of the 90 million tons of textiles that we generate every year is getting recycled,” she said. “But we’re also seeing a lot of advancement in the recycling technology space, so we know it’s not just a technology problem—it’s a system problem.”

Unifi—which recycles post-industrial and post-consumer fabric waste such as offcuts, seasonal items and misprints through its Repreve Takeback program—has been an early adopter of textile-to-textile recycling. But Meredith Boyd, the company’s executive vice president and chief product officer, said multiple stakeholders must be involved for this type of recycling to really take off on a larger scale.

“We already see viable solutions for textile-to-textile through offerings that we are presenting to the market, but it will take that collaboration and drive through the entire value chain,” she said. “We believe that while the products are there, it will take the pull through from the mills, from the brands, and ultimately the demand from the consumers to really start incorporating it.”

Boyd said on the post-consumer side, in particular, the supply infrastructure needs significant development, and recyclers such as Unifi will need more demand from brands that want to buy the recycled material. However, Janelle Hibbard, director of owned brand circular capabilities and systems at Target said that those recycled textiles incur a greater production cost, which often doesn’t make them financially viable for wider use.

“For us, the biggest limiter is cost,” she said. “There’s also the availability—is it available at the scale that we need? And are our mills ready to run it at the same efficiency that they run all of their other material? Once we bring costs down, then we can start to scale it.”

Jimmy Summers, chief sustainability officer and vice president of environmental, health and safety at Elevate Textiles—parent company of Burlington and other brands—agreed, saying feedstocks and costs remain a barrier. But he said he’d seen some positive progress that makes him hopeful for the future of textile-to-textile recycling.

“There are some good scales starting to happen, especially on mechanical and chemical recycling, as well as in sorting,” he said. “We’re seeing things happen much faster now, and it’s exciting.”

For textile-to-textile recycling to truly work, brands and consumers will need to shift their mindset on what that means from both a cost and a finished product perspective, according to Diane Woods, global head of business development and product at recycler Reju.

“It’s apples and oranges,” she said. “We have an existing system that makes virgin polyester or post-industrial recycling—it’s largely subsidized and built out. What we’re talking about is post-consumer waste—which is a massive problem—and actually making a fully closed-loop circular system.

“It’s taking a T-shirt at the end of its life and making it back into a T-shirt—that’s not scrap off the floor or a bottle. And so, you have to think about that differently from a price perspective. It’s not likely to ever be equal to virgin.”

Scaling post-consumer textile-to-textile recycling will require a great deal of collaboration across the supply chain, and Hibbard said that collaboration includes a level of shared risk.

“It’s several suppliers part of a supply chain coming together to agree on standards and feedstocks, but even with all those details ironed out before a pilot, there are a lot of things that can go wrong,” she said.

Hibbard said issues such as delays and product that doesn’t meet the quality standard are likely to appear during pilots with post-consumer recycled textiles. But the way collaborators work to address those challenges will be the difference between success and failure.

“We’re working with our designers, our quality assurance team to look at risks and build a model that will allow us to mitigate them in the future,” she said. “But to start, it’s a matter of us agreeing to the risks at the start and how we accommodate for those failures and continue to move forward in spite of them.”

Boyd said Unifi faced similar challenges when they first launched Repreve, their widely used material made of recycled plastic bottles. But they were able to iron out those early kinks to create a recycled product now used by Nike, The North Face, J.Crew and Levi’s, among other brands.

“There were a lot of misconceptions about recycled polyester in general,” she said. “We had to overcome those challenges to grow and recycle polyester in the way that we’ve seen for the past two decades.”

Obtaining enough useable feedstock has been another challenge, and Woods said this problem also can be solved through collaboration. She pointed to the partnerships Reju has with Waste Management and Goodwill as an example, wherein Waste Management has piloted separate textile collection that is then brought to Goodwill.

“Goodwill then takes everything that can be repaired and resold, because you always want to do that first,” Woods said. “The things that don’t have a life left in them are then fed to us. The kind of scale that partners like that can give you, building out a system of collection, sorting and pre-processing, feeds the recycling business perfectly.”

While the perfect textile-to-textile recycling solution remains just out of reach, the panelists agreed that the work being done now will lead to a future of greater circularity for post-consumer textiles.

“Textile-to-textile is right now at the cusp of an innovation moment,” Boyd said. “Look at the solutions that are available now that allow investment throughout the chain so we can all keep fueling future innovation. That means not sitting on one’s hands until the perfect holy grail moment—it means looking at those solutions that are here today, that are scalable, that are globally available and beginning that transformation to bring textile-to-textile materials into all of your products.”