Why clothes are so hard to recycle?
Fast fashion is leading to a mountain of clothing be thrown away each year and
has a huge impact on the environment, so can we turn our unwanted garments
into something useful?
Languishing in the back of cupboards and bottom of drawers are outfits that don't
fit any more, items that have gone out of fashion, or even clothes that have never
been worn.
Globally, and estimated 92 million tonnes of textiles waste is created each year and
the equivalent to a reubbish truck full of clothes ends up on landfill sites every
second.
"The current fashion system uses high volumes of non-renewable resources,
including petroleum, extracted to produce clothes that are often used only for a
short period of time, after which the materials are largely lost to landfill or
incineration," says Chetna Prajapati, who studies ways fo making sustainable textiles
a Loughborough University in the UK.
"This system puts pressure on valuable resources such as water, pollutes the
environment and degrades ecosystems in addition to creating societal impacts on a
global scale."
Currently just 13.6% fo clothes and shoes thrown away int eh US end up being
recycled, globally just 12% of the material used for clothing ends up being recycled.
Much of the problem comes down to what our clothes are made from. The fabrics we
drape over our bodies are complex combinations of fibres, fixtures and accessories.
They are made from problematic blends of natural yarns, man-made filaments, plastics
and metals.
This makes them hard to separate so they can't be effectively recycled.
Sorting textiles into different fibres and material types by hand is labour intensive,
slow and requires a skilled workforce, and growing use of modern fabric blends in
clothing also makes it hard to do this mechanically too.