Earth Day focus: The end-of-life paradigm

The circular economy’s defining characteristic is the reprocessing of materials at the end-of-life with the purpose of keeping valuable natural resources in circulation and alleviating strain on exploited environments. The fashion industry has seen an increasing uptake in waste solutions including utilizing recycled fibers, resale and repair programs, and a surge in material innovations. While these endeavors extend the period of time garments and materials are useful, they still do not enable the perpetual cycling of healthy materials that a circular fashion system requires.

In a circular economy, at the very end-of-life, materials can either be composted back into valuable nutrients for the Earth or recycled into new raw materials of equal or greater quality. Unfortunately, these simple sounding solutions are far from the realities of the technology and infrastructure that is readily available for the fashion industry.

Composting has been a largely unexplored opportunity as synthetic materials prioritized by the industry do not biodegrade and the toxins in dyes and textile finishings make it unsafe to return natural materials to the environment.

As in many industries, recycling has been seen as the holy grail for fashion’s waste problem. While innovations in chemical recycling, which promises to return virgin quality raw materials, provides optimism for a true end-of-life solution, the historical process of mechanical recycling that is currently available to the industry at large, is not the circular solution it is made out to be.

Mechanical recycling, achieved by shredding textiles and then re-spinning them, is more a process of “downcycling” as material quality is degraded in the process. To mitigate the poor quality of the cut fibers after shredding, recycled materials are often blended with additional fibers for strength. Often, the resulting fabric is not of high enough quality or composed of the right materials to then be recycled again (and again, and again).

In this way, mechanical recycling can be seen as a limited, but useful tool to give materials a next use, but it does not reprocess materials into equal or greater quality, allowing them to be circulated perpetually, as is the defining characteristic of the circular economy.

As recycling technology develops and material innovations become more advanced, the fashion industry still faces a fundamental problem in regards to the lack of infrastructure supporting waste collection, cleaning and sorting. The quality of recyclability for textiles and garments does little good if those materials never make it back into the system anyway.

Despite the need for continued innovation for end-of-life solutions and compatible materials, transforming the fashion industry to a circular economy must begin now. Material, garment and system design must go beyond sustainability and extending use to integrate consideration for ultimate end-of-life at every stage of the fashion system.

Editor’s Note: This is the third feature in a four-part series that leads up to Earth Day and explores the circular economy and what it means for the future of sustainable fashion .

Photo Credit: Unsplash
Author: Teslin Doud