Reuse jeans to lower impact
A specialist group dedicated to textiles that the European Recycling Industries Confederation (EuRIC) set up in 2019 has published a lifecycle assessment (LCA) report. Important findings to emerge include the statement that reclaiming used garments for people to wear instead of manufacturing new ones has an environmental impact that is almost 70 times lower. The group’s president, Mariska Boer, explains all here.
Q: How helpful is a complex and detailed LCA study in driving home messages about clothing reuse to consumers?
A: There is a danger sometimes of LCA data being over-simplified. It is a scientific tool; it generates a lot of information, and perspective is always important in looking at that information. At the same time, though, we want simple, clear messages to come out of our study.
What are the key messages that have come out of it?
That there is a market for second-hand clothing and always has been. Around 70% of the global population needs second-hand clothing because they don’t have the financial means to buy new clothing. For this reason, compared to plastics or metal, textiles represent a positive waste stream, one that has value and one for which there is demand. But it has to be clothing that meets the particular needs of those people, including the materials the clothes are made from and how much they cost. Second-hand fashion has trends and seasons too.
EuRIC Textiles has said that manufacturing a new garment instead of reusing an old one has an environmental impact that is 70 times greater. Can you explain this figure?
Consultants from three agencies worked on the EuRIC Textiles LCA: Norion from Denmark, Vito from Belgium and EigenDraads from the Netherlands. They analysed 16 impact categories and used a weighting method adopted by the European Commission and software to calculate a single score for different products in ‘micropoints’ (µPt), a measurement in use in LCAs, linked to estimates for the annual environmental footprint of the average consumer in the US. In the report, a high-quality T-shirt scores 9 µPt if it is reused. If a T-shirt of the same quality is new, its score is 628.4 µPt, which is 69.8 times more. In the case of a second-grade T-shirt, the reused garment has a score of 7.9 µPt, while the new one scores 549.6 µPt, which is 69.5 times more.
What is the extent of textile waste at the moment?
Regrettably, 62% of used clothing and textiles in the European Union end up in household waste, meaning valuable textiles are likely to be incinerated or landfilled. Existing waste legislation stipulates that member states must have in place by 2025 a separate waste collection for textiles. This is good, but it means that by 2025, the quantity of textiles collected after consumers no longer want them is likely to increase. The European textile reuse and recycling industry envisages a circular textile value chain where every piece of clothing is reused in an optimal way or recycled. That hierarchy remains in place: reuse is better than recycling; recycling is better than waste.
Independent analyst Veronica Bates Kassatly asked recently if a fall in the profitability of collecting and sorting clothes when consumers have finished with them and preparing them for someone else to use is one of the reasons why “mountains of clothing” have begun to appear in the global south. What is your response to that?
Clothing consumption has more or less doubled in the last two decades and that also means people are discarding more clothing. We need a refined, meticulous sorting process. And it needs to be carried out by well trained people who understand what consumers and wholesalers need. The difficult part is that what’s in demand is not always what you can supply. If you cannot tell the difference, you end up with unsorted textile waste and this is what the photographs we have all seen of dumped and discarded piles of clothes amount to.
What would you like to see happen to change this?
One thing we would like is for the European Commission, as part of its Strategy for Sustainable and Circular Textiles, to make it mandatory for producers of new garments to use a proportion of recycled fibres that come specifically from used textiles. In this way, clothing manufacturers will become avid users of their own waste. Only 1% of the fibres going into apparel production at the moment would fulfil this criterion. That figure really needs to go up. You see claims on the label about recycled content, but if you check, it’s not usually from textiles. We haven’t really seen the industry react yet. It will probably take a mandatory system with a legal framework to make it happen. Once they face a mandate, companies will develop a business case for recycling. This will also have an impact on design. What we’ve seen in recent years is that design has been about the look and feel of a garment, not its reusability or recyclability. We can see this in the rise of mixed fibres in clothes.
Does this apply to denim too?
Twenty years ago, a pair of jeans would almost certainly have been 100% cotton. Now, almost all jeans contain elastane and elastane is a show-stopper when it comes to recycling.
Photo: EuRIC Textiles president and co-owner of Dutch collecter and sorter Boer Group, Mariska Boer.
