The way Scott Hamlin sees it, the fashion industry boils down to two things: oil and water.
“It’s oil to make polyester and water to grow cotton or any other natural fiber,” said Scott Hamlin, founder and CEO of Looptworks, an Oregon textile recycling firm, at a recent webinar. “If you look at those two things, both of them have issues from a scarcity standpoint and cost standpoint, right? And it really is a viable thing to say we need to add textile-to-textile recycled materials into our supply chain to help back up some of the feedstock that we’ll need in the future.”
Hamlin was speaking at the invitation of Accelerating Circularity, a nonprofit working to ramp up textile-to-textile recycling systems, to discuss the results of a series of life cycle assessments comparing yarns and chips made from post-consumer textiles.
The “action-oriented” organization has moved from running systems trials across Europe and the United States to building the operational networks needed to make circularity economically viable at scale. As part of that effort, it commissioned Netherlands-based Green Story to analyze the environmental impacts of mechanically recycled cotton yarn, thermomechanically recycled polyester yarn and chemically recycled polyester chips.
The study’s main takeaway was that while recycled inputs generally performed better than their virgin counterparts, even on a baseline level, the results varied by pathway and depended on key assumptions such as waste sorting quality, reject disposal routes and energy sources.
Mechanically recycled yarn made from a blend of 20 percent post-industrial cotton textile waste, 20 percent post-consumer cotton textile waste and 60 percent conventional cotton, for instance, showed clear environmental benefits over virgin materials, with water use dropping by roughly two-thirds when conventional cotton was swapped for a rain-fed organic version.
Thermomechanically recycled polyester yarn derived from 50 percent post-consumer polyester textile waste and 50 percent post-consumer PET bottle waste similarly outperformed virgin polyester across carbon emissions, resource use, water use, freshwater eutrophication and human toxicity—with especially large gains from avoiding virgin material production. Another plus? Replacing 50 percent of grid electricity with solar slashed the carbon footprint in the final production stage.
Chemically recycled polyester chips made from 100 percent post-consumer polyester textile waste also beat virgin polyester chips—even after accounting for transatlantic shipping from collection in North Carolina to final processing in Spain. While sorting rejects—making 78 percent of input, most of which was incinerated—drove much of the footprint, along with transport, avoiding virgin production and landfill emissions still presented overall wins, including toxicity credits from diverting waste to refuse-derived fuel.
For Akhil Sivanandan, the results weren’t that surprising, even in a cradle-to-gate scenario as is typical with most LCAs. Recycled materials, he said, displace the need for virgin production—and all the embedded costs it brings—while swerving landfill impacts. It’s also why upping the recycled content in the finished product delivered even more benefits, he said.
“Just increasing the mix, even a little bit, seems to have outsized impacts; so going from 40 percent to 50 percent has a huge impact overall on the environmental footprint of the yarn itself,” he said. “Another low-hanging fruit could be just improving the process efficiency of recycling operations, especially reducing the percentage of rejects, which could significantly reduce environmental impacts as well.”
All of this made sense to Hamlin. Though Looptworks tries to minimize the often carbon-heavy transportation of materials, he’s found that the overall reduction in emissions and water use is still an improvement over creating new materials and then “moving those new materials through the same process.”
Hamlin said that having definitive LCAs in place allows industry insiders like him to avoid any unintended consequences of recycling. At the same time, it’s also about sourcing surety: “How do I really back up my supply chain so that I know that I’ve got additional materials that aren’t virgin, so that I can count on those in the future,” he said.
Even so, challenges remain before textile-to-textile recycling becomes more widespread, whether mechanical or chemical, or a mix of both, said Maurizio Crippa, founder and CEO of Swiss and Italian PET recycler GR3N.
Mechanical recycling is still highly sensitive to contaminants with different melting points, meaning that a single cotton thread in a polyester batch could “caramelize” in an extruder and ruin the entire lot. Post-consumer garments—many of them “legacy textiles”—contain complex fiber blends, dyes, finishes and hardware that must be stripped out. Sorting is also often not done at the scale or precision needed for high-quality recycling, meaning the process sometimes has to be done twice.
Most of all, Crippa said, without strong, consistent demand from brands, the industry lacks the “reason to do it” at a scale that would push prices down. In other words, while recycling old textiles into new ones is environmentally superior, how “green” it ultimately is ultimately hinges on how the industry tackles the supply chain’s messy middle.
“For me, it’s clear: we recycle or we burn it,” he said. “But the fact is that the capacity in Europe was lost because there was material coming from outside of Europe at a really super-cheap price. So we have to think about the whole problem and not just pick up certain aspects like a silver bullet that solves everything. It doesn’t work.”
