Textile Recycling Expo // Brussels

The team at SFW rarely get the chance to get to conferences or industry events as the cost to attend is always prohibitive. We just don’t have enough in the budget for tickets that cost £100s (sometimes almost up to £1000). So I jumped at the opportunity to attend the first EU Textile Recycling Expo in Brussels yesterday, as tickets were free and the Eurostar there and back was cheap enough to make it viable (barely more expensive, can I add, than the cheapest train tickets from Bristol to London).

Textile recycling is not exactly our territory, as SFW is positioned among and around the consumer and consumption itself. We don’t connect with industrial waste, and really our remit stops just short of dealing with post-consumer waste. But the latter is something so vitally connected to what we do that I wanted to get a sense of what the conference was covering and what textile recycling could look like in the near future.

With the fashion industry mired in overproduction, over extraction of virgin raw materials, over-reliance on the fantasy of infinite growth, I am always thinking about what the solutions are for how we buy and use clothing in the future. Our baseline approach at SFW would be one of radical restructuring of the industry, with a focus on localisation, degrowth and the support of workers in the system in the process. Radical reduction. No more than 5 pieces of new clothing per person per year (as per the Hot or Cool report findings a few years back).

But as we hold fast to the dramatic change this would be, we have to be realistic about the steps that will need to happen as part of this journey and how we can transition fashion from one of harm to one of planetary and human health. I think a lot about textile recycling as one tool for change. Mandating that brands include a % of textile-to-textile recycled fibres in each range is a must, an essential next step. Reducing our consumption of virgin raw materials and swapping for recycled – primarily cotton and plastic fibres – would see a reduction in fashion’s carbon emissions and environmental impact, even if slight. And with no compromise to the resultant product – it would be the same garment we know, are familiar with and ‘want’.

We continue to drown in clothing, knowing that every polyester garment that has ever existed and ended up in landfill… is still there, and will outlive every person currently alive across the globe. As we face into the reality that there is enough clothing on the planet right now to clothe the next 6 generations of people (British Fashion Council) and combine this with the awareness that over 70% of a garment’s carbon impact takes place during production and processing of the fibres/fabrics (McKinsey) – it is apparent that recycling our clothes and creating new fibres from old is key. Fashion must become circular… but there’s a lot that is missed in how we talk about circularity being the solution.  

The Textile Recycling Expo, was broadly an exercise in promoting the technical, mechanical and chemical advances that many companies are working on to sort garments, grade, split mixed fibres, manage feedstocks, and recycle dyes. With organisations from as close as Europe and as far as South Asia, it did show that there is huge momentum to create machinery, mechanisms and structures to get to grips with fibre-to-fibre recycling, and at speed too. And what was good to see was that in part this is a response to the growing pressure from EU regulations. There was talk of compliance, but also – sigh – of staying competitive in this evolving and growing market.

But what was missing?

I couldn’t put my finger on why I didn’t feel inspired. As I watched amazing demo machinery showing the sorting of garments using a combination of AI and mechanics I felt impressed but a bit anxious. And as I listened to Dye Recycle, a pioneering project from Imperial College, talking about the way they recycle synthetic dyes to create industry standard liquid dyes and pigments I just couldn’t stop the sensation that there was something that wasn’t being touched on.

Or it might have been there, I may have just missed it. But I would have had to look pretty hard.

What I was looking for was mention of microplastics, human health, and end of life for garments. The room was packed with people talking about the recycling of polyester and other plastic fibres – and I couldn’t see anything that even touched on the impact of these fibres. The only thing that caught my eye was Yarnaway, a modified polymer that seemingly looked to accelerate the biodegradation process – with complete biodegradation in 5-10 years (compare to upwards of 300 years for standard polymer fibres).

I asked a few of the companies about whether there was any comparison between virgin plastics and recycled plastics in terms of microfibre shedding and degradation, but the answer was very much that there wasn’t an answer to this. The data isn’t there as the technology and product is too new. But I think we pretty much know the answer, right? Likewise when I asked Dye Recycle about the difference between the synthetic dyes when first used vs. recycled in terms of not just their efficacy and colour, but in how they coat the fibres and how those fibres then are able to break down… the answer isn’t quite there.

Equally, what was missing was discussion of degrowth and reducing consumption. Of course, we need to increase volumes of recycled fibres, but the bigger story is how we simultaneously decrease volumes in production altogether.

Will fibre-to-fibre textile recycling become another way to prop up fashion’s status quo, with ever expanding ranges of hazardous fossil fuel fibres and synthetic dyes simply being combined with the continued (if less frequent) use of virgin raw materials?  

When I launched SFW back in 2020 I kept saying sustainability in fashion is not about ‘tweaking the product’ or fiddling with the supply chain. It’s a whole re-evaluation of how and why we buy clothing. So I feel a little on the fence about the Expo – whilst also very grateful that I was able to get it without a huge ticket fee.

So , in summary:

Textile recycling = essential.

Degrowth = essential.

It would be great to bring the two together. Recycled is better than virgin, without doubt. But even better than that would be an existing garment – with no carbon or chemical input to turn it from a garment into a garment.