Textile Recycling is now!
A new factory operated by Renewcell, a textile recycling company in Sweden, is the first step in turning old clothes into new, high-quality fashion.
by Alden Wicker
30 November 2022
New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/30/style/clothing-recycling.html
About a half-dozen start-ups around the world are focused on commercial textile recycling. Felix Odell for The New York Times
This article is part of a series examining Responsible Fashion, and innovative efforts to address issues facing the fashion industry.
A new textile recycling plant opened by the company Renewcell in the small coastal city of Sundsvall, Sweden, is so big that employees use bikes to get from one end of the production line to the other.
Large bales of cotton waste are dumped on conveyor belts, shredded, and then broken down into a wet slurry, with the help of chemicals. That slurry, known as dissolving pulp, is then bleached, dried, stamped into sheets of what looks like recycled craft paper, given the brand name Circulose, and shipped off to manufacturers to be made into textiles like viscose for clothes.
Up until now, most clothes marketed as made from recycled materials only contained a small percentage of recycled cotton or were made from water bottles, fishing nets and old carpets. (Technology exists to recycle polyester into polyester but is prohibitively expensive and rarely used.)
Renewcell’s factory is one of the first steps toward a system that turns old clothes into new high-quality clothes made entirely with recycled fabric. It also helps to address the mountains of textile waste accumulating worldwide and may help reduce the number of trees that are harvested from ecologically sensitive forests to produce fabrics for fashion. (More than 200 million trees are cut down every year to produce dissolving pulp for man-made cellulosic fabrics, including rayon, viscose, modal, and lyocell, according to Canopy, a Canadian nonprofit that works with the paper and fashion industries to reduce deforestation.)