Sustainable Innovation: Reducing Fashion’s Carbon Footprint

Jan Bom – P+ People, Planet, Profit the NetherlandsThe prototype of the textile sorter, in a warehouse north of Amsterdam.

The colorful world of fashion has its dark sides, not least of which is its potential impact on the environment.

First, there are the negative effects cause in the making, dying and distributing of most clothes, coverings and other fabrics. Then, there is what happens to all these textiles after consumers are done with them.

Cheap clothing has become a disposable product in our society and most people in Europe recycle or donate less than half the clothing they discard — and they discard a lot — with the rest going into landfills.

And despite the global economic downturn, more clothes, home furnishings and other textiles are being bought than ever. Great Britain alone has seen a 60-percent increase in textile purchases over the last decade. Experts estimate that British consumers throw out more than a million tonnes (1.1 million U.S. tons) of textiles in the form of clothes and other products every year. A European Union environmental report calls fabric Britain’s “fastest growing waste stream.”

Meanwhile, the Bureau of International Recycling, an industry advocacy group, claims that a single kilogram of collected used clothing can help reduce up to 3.6 kilograms, or almost 8 pounds, of CO₂ emissions. Recycling textiles — rather than producing new ones from raw materials — can also eliminate the use of 6000 liters of water (1600 gallons), 300 grams of fertilizer (10 1/2 ounces) and 200 grams, or 7 ounces, of pesticide.

A consortium in Northern Europe is working toward getting better value out of discarded clothes, and, in the process, resizing fashion’s carbon footprint.

Key to its plan is building a machine that can automatically, quickly and very accurately sort clothes into specific fabrics to be recycled.

With a grant from the EU sustainability initiative, Eco-Innovation, eight consortium partners launched the textile4textile project in 2009. The venture, which includes machine builders, commercial sorters and charities, is adapting and testing the automatic fabric-sorting machine.

Although the sorter is in its early days, it could make it common place for people to recycle their clothes knowing that the fabric shows up — shredded and rewoven — in next year’s fashions.

Given the cost of having materials sorted by hand, this widespread shift toward fabric recycling is unlikely to happen without machines.

The machine, described in a promotional video below, was assembled in a warehouse north of Amsterdam in the spring and will be officially inaugurated in November.

It uses near infrared light to detect specific fabric types and to sort heaps of old clothes into six separate bins, one each for pure wool, cotton, polyester, acrylic and several bins for specific but common cotton mixtures.

“The trick is to develop better techniques to get quality fiber, but the beginning of that good quality is sorting,” said Sander Jongerius, the project manager at KICI, the Dutch charity helping to develop the sorting machine.

Once fabrics are separated into like tissue, they are much more valuable, especially natural fibers like wool and cotton. Recycled fabric can be spun from the shreds of the used clothing.

The charity KICI collects used garments in about 1100 bins throughout the Netherlands, where 30 percent of the 240,000 tonnes of discarded clothes end up. Most of the other discards end up in landfills.

Initially contractors sort the clothes by hand according to whether they can still be worn. The 45 percent of the bins’ contents that can no longer be worn is currently recycled into low-grade stuffing or moldable plastic-like material.

“If it is not pure, it is very difficult to become a high-value recyclable,” said Ellen van den Adel, whose company Work on Progress is part of the consortium.

With the help of the sorter, however, the recycled fabric will be pure enough to be shredded and woven into real, wearable fabric. This recycling will cut down on the production cost of fabrics and take some pressure off landfills. In an example KICI likes to use, your favorite worn-out t-shirt can become next year’s most fashionable pair of jeans.

In an article Ms. van den Adel wrote about textile recycling last month:

For the production of a pair of jeans for example in which 50% recycled fibres are used, 25% less energy is required in the production process. Almost 50% less water is used, because there is no need to grow virgin cotton. Moreover around 40% fewer chemicals are needed, predominantly pesticides that are used in growing cotton.

“We do this as business, but also from a sustainable point of view, we see a lot of material is wasted in Holland,” said Mr. Jongerius.

The sorting machine, which, once in production, will cost between €200,000 and 500,000 will pay for itself quickly, said Ms. van den Adel.

Would you be more likely to dump your unwanted garments in a used-clothes bin if you knew that they were being remade into next year’s fashion?