A wonderful study on real recycling of real garments

‎Regularly, our Secretary General Lutz Walter shares his insights and knowledge through his blogposts, covering a wide range of topics related to textile sustainability and innovation. Follow his blog to gain a deeper understanding of the challenges that the textile industry is facing today.

"Recycling old discarded clothes into clean materials to make new clothes sounds like a good idea – in principle. And why not, it's done for paper, for glass bottles, for metal cans, so surely it can be done for textiles. But as they say, the proof is in the pudding. So you won’t really know until you tried.

Trying is not to take a little leftover fabric piece from the nearest home decoration store or a random t-shirt pulled from a bin and shred or dissolve it in the lab. Really trying is to consider the majority of all the real textile products that are used and discarded by real consumers in a market and to understand what it would take to turn them back into clean textile fibres for the next industrial spinning cycle at large, consistent and economically viable scale."

In his latest blog post, our Secretary General Lutz Walter highlights the study “Assessing the circularity potential of textile flows for future markets in Denmark: A study of textile anatomy” that examines what garment-to-garment recycling looks like when you analyse real clothes used by real consumers. The research reveals an overwhelming diversity of fibre blends (more than 600 in a single season) making consistent recycling extremely difficult.