Some fashion companies make sustainability claims about recycled polyester, but there is often more to be understood. However laudable a switch away from fossil-fuel derived synthetics may be, making it the gold standard of an environmental strategy barely scratches the surface of what could, and should, be done.

From its early days as ‘plastic fantastic’, the miracle material has lost much of its lustre. Campaigns the world over to ban single-use plastics and widely circulated images of beaches strewn with plastic litter have raised global awareness in just a few years. So, when a fashion brand promotes the use of polyester clothing made from recycled bottles, buyers and consumers are led to believe this is a way to reduce plastic waste, allowing them to do their part in saving the planet.

This simple solution to a more sustainable industry is not a silver bullet by a long shot. A small proportion of all PET bottles and packaging produced globally is converted into new products. In Europe, considered a top performer, only 32.5% of post-consumer plastic waste is recycled, the rest is incinerated (42.6%) and landfilled (24.9%),  as per Plastics Europe data for 2019. Brands’ use of recycled polyester (rPET) in their ranges or in a specific product is rarely indicated with precision, and the pledges some make to phase out virgin polyester remain vague at best. This lack of transparency means any claim with regards to recycled polyester rests on shaky ground.

These ‘sustainability’ goals laid down by major fashion and sports brands are admittedly better than having none, but they are nonetheless voluntary and self-declared. The Textile Exchange monitors progress made by companies adhering to its Recycled Polyester Commitment, but in the 2019 Material Change Index, the grading system was subtly shifted to take into account their “intentions and actions”.

The Textile Exchange is one of the few sources of information on rPET use in apparel. The Preferred Fiber Report of 2019 states that the rPET share of polyester staple fibre was around 29% in 2018 (down from 36% in 2017). However, it notes that as “the rPET share for polyester filament is much lower, the total rPET share of polyester fibre including staple fibre and filament is lower as well,” citing its own estimates and a 2018 presentation by IHS Markit, a market research firm. 

Lack of quality data 

On its website, Patagonia states that for the autumn 2020 season, 84% of its polyester fabrics are made with recycled polyester, with no indication of whether fabrics contain 10% or 100% rPET. As a result, the company says it has reduced its CO2e emissions by 8% compared to virgin polyester fabrics, which it says amounts to more than 5 million kilos of CO2e. The company does not specify how it arrived at these calculations but the numbers are presumably derived from one of the two commonly referenced Life Cycle Assessments (LCAs) available for recycled PET. They are the basis for sustainability database services such as those developed by Ecoinvent, Quantis or Higg.

‘Open-loop recycling: An LCA case study of PET bottle-to-fibre recycling’ by Li Shen and team, published in 2010, covers four types of recycling: mechanical, semi-mechanical, back-to-oligomer and back-to-monomer. In its conclusions, the authors state: “Recycled PET fibre offers 40% to 85% non-renewable energy savings and 25% to 75% global warming potential (GWP) savings compared to virgin PET, depending on the technology, the chosen allocation method and system boundaries.” The second report often cited is by Franklin Associates, ‘Life Cycle Impacts for Post-Consumer Recycled Resins: PET, HDPE and PP’, updated in 2018 for the US Association of Plastic Recyclers (APR). It concludes that using mechanically recycled post-consumer plastic reduces energy consumption by at least 79% and GHG emissions by at least 67%.

Using recycled PET “is an easy way for a brand to reduce its carbon footprint,” says Dr Ashley Holding, founder of Circular Materials Solutions, a consultancy, and a contributor to The Circular Laboratory. But, he says, “only the purest and cleanest still water bottles are recycled into fibres, and this represents a very slim sliver of available feedstock.”

Angela Adams, a senior sustainability consultant for Quantis, recognises the need for better data. The sustainability consulting group operates the World Apparel and Footwear Life Cycle Assessment Database (WALDB). Its mission it says is to deliver “robust data for environmental impact assessment and footprinting”. Launched in 2016, it is regularly updated as new reports are made available and new materials come to market. These are then added to the 552 existing data sets, says Ms Adams. Much of the data in the WALDB is from primary sources, but it also calls on existing literature and LCAs that are not always recent. The variety of parameters that Life Cycle Assessments take into account are rarely comparable, which begs the need to harmonise these data sets. Quantis is working with the Sustainable Apparel Coalition to standardise how the environmental footprints of products are calculated and communicated to consumers for the European Commission.

Awareness is growing, says Ms Adams, as brands realise the resources they rely on are not as solid as they could be. Conducting LCAs on the main materials, at the very least, used in apparel and footwear, requires funding and access to detailed information throughout a supply chain. As brands and sustainability consortiums would like to use the database, Quantis is considering making it more widely available and is investigating the business model that could make this feasible. Currently, access to WALDB data is restricted to the database’s founding members for three years.

Jason Kibbey, CEO of Higg Co, acknowledges that the industry is currently “awash with vague product claims”. He stressed the need for better data in his contribution to the 2020 online Copenhagen Fashion Summit. The recently updated Higg Index, itself awash with criticism, draws on what he says is the best available data from public and private sources.

Textiles versus packaging

For sustainability experts, bottle-to-fibre recycling is not a closed- but an open-loop exercise and, thus, a form of downcycling. They contend that PET plastics should be recycled into PET plastics and polyester fibres into polyester fibres. But neither the infrastructure (collecting, sorting) nor the technologies to recycle textiles into textiles exist at scale. The mechanical recycling of used clothing generates low-quality fibres and, however promising, none of the various depolymerising or chemical recycling techniques in development has made it past pilot scale. It is anyone’s guess at this point how much energy, water and chemicals are needed to convert PET back into its original components.

At a broader level, “bottle manufacturers have a bigger incentive to recycle,” says Dr Holding. Competition from the packaging industry could impact the availability of rPET for apparel end-uses. Pressure is mounting on plastics manufacturers to increase the proportion of recycled content in their products. The European Union is pressing the sector to include 25% recycled content in plastic drinks bottles by 2025 and to incorporate 30% recycled content in all plastic bottles by 2030. In 2014, bottle-to-bottle use took the lead as the main end market for recycled PET in the EU ahead of bottle-to-fibre applications. A report by the European PET Bottle Platform notes that average recycled content in PET bottles in Europe was 11.7% in 2017.

These constraints are pushing major users of plastics to fund research into PET recycling. L’Oréal and Michelin have invested in French biotech company Carbios, a developer of an enzymatic depolymerisation process for PET. They provided €10.5 million of the €14.5 million the start-up raised in 2019. A new fundraising campaign this July brought their combined controlling share of the company to 10.6% (6.05% for L’Oréal and 4.55% for Michelin Ventures). Also in July, Coca-Cola European Partners (CCEP), an independent bottler of Coca-Cola products, invested in Dutch start-up CuRe to accelerate the development of its partial depolymerisation technology. Once it is market-ready, CCEP will receive the majority of the output from a new plant licensed to use the technology, says a CuRe company statement. To be fair, big names in fast fashion also support research into textile-to-textile recycling. In 2019, Inditex contributed $4 million to fund MIT research. H&M provided an estimated €6 million to HKRITA, a Hong Kong-based textile innovation centre, for a four-year research programme to develop at least one commercially viable recycling method for blended textiles.

Growing demand for rPET

Producers of polyester are investing in recycling facilities to address increased demand from the apparel, bottling and packaging industries. US-based Unifi launched its Repreve brand of recycled polyester yarns in 2007 and has since opened a recycling centre in 2011 and a bottle processing centre in 2016, both in North Carolina. In 2020, it claims to have transformed its 20 billionth plastic bottle into yarn and aims to recycle 30 billion bottles by 2030. The company has calculated that recycling 20 billion bottles improves air quality by eliminating CO2 emissions from the use of more than a million barrels of oil, provides more than 2 million people with drinking water for one year and generates enough energy to power nearly 200,000 homes for one year. 

The company also recycles polyester fabric through a textile takeback programme set up with various brands including The North Face. The most recent addition to the programme is US-based eco-activewear brand Girlfriend Collective. In 2019, it launched Repreve Our Ocean, polyester made from what is called ocean-bound plastic. “Unifi collects post-consumer plastic bottles within 50 kilometres of coastlines in countries and regions that lack formal waste or recycling systems. Because 80% of ocean plastic comes from land-based sources, and 75% of that is uncollected waste, our approach prevents plastic waste from ever entering the ocean,” the company says, referencing the ‘The New Plastics Economy’ 2016 report funded by the World Economic Forum and Ellen MacArthur Foundation. 

Indorama Ventures, another major producer of polyester, entered the recycling business in 2011 when it acquired Wellman’s facility in Ireland and has since invested $1.5 billion to expand its recycling capacity for post-consumer PET bottles. It acquired Green Fiber International, a recycling company based in California that produces rPET flakes in 2019 and entered into an agreement to acquire IMP Polowat, a PET recycler in Poland in 2020. These are part of its stated goal to scale up its recycling capacity to 750,000 tonnes by 2025.

Designing for recycling

Many denim brands, and mills, similarly put forward recycled polyester from post-consumer PET bottles content as a move towards more sustainable jeans. A few mills, including Candiani and Orta, have said they will be phasing out synthetics in general and specifically polyester. Candiani says it is phasing out all synthetics to use only plant-based fibres (such as its patented natural rubber-based stretch fibre), and Orta says it will phase out polyester in its next collections.

Thomas Huriez, founder of French denim brand 1083, makes an interesting point on the subject of recycled polyester: “Recycled polyester,” he says, “is not an innovative product, it’s been around for years. What is innovative is to design jeans in a recycled polyester fabric that can actually be recycled, and which contains only recycled polyester.” This is what the brand has done with its Infini range: it is a monomaterial design made in 100% recycled polyester including tags, buttons, sewing thread, etc. The yarn is spun in Seaqual recycled polyester (the company collects ocean waste to make its recycled fibres). The jeans are sold with a €20 deposit fee, to encourage consumers to send it back to the company when they no longer want to wear it. The range was launched in the summer of 2019. 

The Ellen MacArthur Jeans Redesign Guidelines takes a more stringent approach and recommends that to ensure recyclability, jeans “include a minimum of 98% cellulose-based fibres by weight in the total textile composition”. Non cellulose-based materials refers to all plastic-based fibres, for example elastane, nylon and polyester. The report specifically excludes recycled plastic-based fibres from PET bottles or other industries. H&M’s new denim range is made using these guidelines.

Patagonia, which has been using recycled polyester since 1993, says it is keeping a close watch on the evolution of chemical recycling technologies that might allow it to use recycled garments. But this, it says, is a long-term prospect. Tin Shed Ventures, the brand’s investment arm, supports a number of companies specialising in textile innovation, but does not list any working specifically on recycling. The company website makes no mention of Eco Circle, a textile-to-textile recycling process for polyester developed by Teijin in 2002, that it helped launch. 

This closed-loop recycled polyester is used by Swedish outdoor brand Houdini, the first European brand to become an Eco Circle partner in 2006. At the time, recalls company CEO Eva Karlsson, “we expected this process to be available in Europe at some point, so as to avoid sending used clothing all the way back to Japan”. No such project came to be and, worse, oil prices have been going down, she notes.

Picture Organic Clothing, an eco-minded brand based in France, encountered a similar situation when it created its first all-polyester, monomaterial jacket in 2013. “It was designed to be recycled, but we soon realised that the technologies to do so did not exist,” says the brand’s sustainability manager, Florian Palluel. He would like to set up a consortium of textile and apparel companies to encourage Carbios to focus on textiles as well as plastics. He is also keeping an eye on a projected PET and used-clothing polyester recycling facility that Japanese company Jeplan says will be in operation in France by 2022.

“The current situation is akin to greenwashing. It is better than landfilling and using new fibres made from crude oil, but it is far from enough,” says Ms Karlsson. The situation calls for a broad infrastructure for collecting used clothing and extracting new raw materials from them, along with the necessary funding to achieve these. In time, buyers and consumers will come to realise the difference between intention and action in brands’ pledges. They will justifiably consider PET recycled from packaging as falling short of their expectations and just another instance of greenwashing.

Photo credit: Nick Fewings on Unsplash

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