“Goodbye to the brand new, hello to the brand old! » announced Jean-Paul Gaultier during the presentation of his (very) last fashion show in January 2020, which gave pride of place to “upcycled” clothing. From there, if even Jean-Paul gets into it, I said to myself that it was time to delve a little into the subject for BonneGueule.
To start, some figures (a little depressing it must be admitted)
- The fashion industry is the 2nd most polluting in the world after the oil industry.
- It releases 1.2 billion tonnes of greenhouse gases each year. That's more than international flights and maritime traffic combined.
- The manufacture of jeans requires 11,000 liters of water, the equivalent of 285 showers, and that of a t-shirt requires 2,700 liters of water, the equivalent of 70 showers. So in the end, the jeans/t-shirt combo is equivalent to almost all your daily showers over the course of a year.
- 48 million tonnes of clothing are thrown away each year worldwide and we also buy on average 60% more clothing than 15 years ago.
- 38% of used textiles are collected in France.
Come on, one last figure, recycled textiles currently only represent around 1% of the flow of textile materials used in clothing production
Textiles incinerated in the Shaoxing Binhai industrial zone in China. © Greenpeace
After the figures, and for the more literary ones, let's start like any good essay with the definition of the subject: what is recycled clothing?
As the committed shirt brand Les Optimistes defines on its site, “ a recycled garment is a garment that has been made entirely or partially with an already existing material . This material may have simply been recovered and used as such or crushed to be transformed into fiber and then subsequently rewoven.”
Here, I have the impression that textile recycling is more complicated than it seems and that I have embarked on something that is closer to engineering school than to a tutorial. sewing her old clothes.
The figures mentioned above prove it, if people get into this, it is for a good and simple reason: for the planet, let’s see!
Because today, recycling constitutes a unique lever to achieve sustainable fashion. “The fashion industry is extremely polluting. It overproduces, wastes, destroys ecosystems, we want to show that this is not inevitable and that we can do it differently,” Florent Liénard, founder of the clothing brand Hero , launched in 2018, tells me.
A commitment to the environment shared by all players in recycled clothing, even those who make synthetics. For Romain Trebuil, founder of the sports brand CircleSportswear, several rules of the circular economy must be respected, "using recycled materials, relying on local manufacturing, developing a business model that avoids overproduction, having logistics" clean” with recycled packaging. A traditional piece of sports clothing will travel 60,000 km to be transported since it is mainly produced in Asia, with us it will travel less than 1,500 km.”
The thousand and one lives of our clothes
Cotton-polyester blends, found in nearly one in three garments, are particularly difficult to recycle — © Bicanski/Pixnio - FAL
When you put your once favorite pants in the dumpster outside your house, they can have variable fates.
It is first sorted to check whether its reuse as is is possible. This is the case for 58.6% of textiles sorted in France which are repaired if necessary then go to the second-hand store to be resold to the general public, given to people in need or sent to developing countries. This is the primary activity of Relais, a well-known French leader in the collection, sorting and recycling of textiles, household linen and shoes (TLC).
We can include upcycling in this box, which consists of recovering clothing or fabrics and reusing them without needing to transform them back into fibers. Upcycling can, for example, be carried out by recovering old rolls of fabric not used by factories or by using and customizing old clothes.
I admit, the main photos that I found on the web on upcycling concerned shirts cut up and sewn back together to become children's dresses... However, that did not prevent a good number of new eco-responsible brands ( Ornement , Polère , Entre2retros ) to be based on this reuse technique.
The rest of the clothing collected, i.e. 41%, is recycled or recovered, 22.6% transformed into textile fibers to be rewoven, 10% into rags, 8% into fuels and 0.4% disposed of.
A not-so-simple transformation process
Clothing made from recycled fabric is made from materials
A textile composed of fibers of a single material
Then, the manufacturing and embellishment choices can also make recycling more delicate, buttons, zippers and other rhinestone inlays
Third difficulty, the resulting fibers obtained, particularly in cotton, are often too short and fragile, which requires mixing them with virgin fibers to ensure their strength . 100% recycled is therefore an objective more than a reality, but R&D advances have taken place in recent years with industrial processes making it possible to integrate 70% recycled cotton, while the usual mixture is 45%. We also find synthetic materials, used to reinforce natural fibers which have been weakened by recycling, hence a composition of 50% natural (cotton, wool, linen etc.) and 50% synthetic (polyester, polyamide etc.) often displayed on the labels.
The use of mixed fibers and the lack of large-scale recycling technology means that only 1% is transformed into new clothing. We will therefore say that the room for progress is rather large...
Fight preconceived ideas
1. Recycled clothing is of poor quality.
FALSE , but you have to be careful all the same. Beyond the question of fiber processing, it is the final result that counts and the road seems long to change mentalities.
“Our first challenge is to make people understand that recycled clothing can rhyme with quality” underlines Florent Liénard, from Hero.
So no, recycled clothing, if it needs to be repeated again, is not more not that :
When Thierry discovers his gift in the film Santa Claus is trash.
For Violaine Lablancherie, the co-creator of the recycled material sweater brand Au Juste, the question of the quality of the garment remains central: “In terms of use and customer opinions, we are receiving very good news, it is not moving not, does not lint or very little, does not scratch, easy to maintain. We have a low rate of returns of our products. However, these are materials which present quite strong technical constraints: we cannot expect the same thing from a recycled material as from a natural or new material. For example, it is complicated to obtain something really fine and regular. Some colors react differently to recycling stages.”
2. My clothes are easily recycled to make new clothes.
FALSE , only a very small portion of clothing is recycled into threads that can be used to make new clothing and complex techniques must be used to produce these threads. If we take the example of jeans, industrial processes must be used to automatically remove the elastane they contain, remove seams, eliminate surfaces with hard points (rivets, closures, etc.) in order to preserve only potentially recyclable material surfaces.
This requires straightening (cutting) techniques and then defibration and fraying to extract cotton fibers. These processes tend to break fibers and generate significant amounts of production waste . The challenge is therefore to obtain sufficiently long fibers, without too much material loss, to be able to produce recycled cotton yarn.
3. Recycling protects the environment.
TRUE , but the diversity of methods of transformation into textile fibers, with or without the addition of synthetic materials or virgin fibers, requires nuance in the analysis of the environmental impact of recycling. Not everything is rosy. Synthetic materials make it possible to solidify clothing and increase their durability, but their environmental impact is, for example, far from neutral.
Furthermore, sending collected clothing to developing countries also has its perverse effects since, in a certain way, it allows developed countries to get rid of the question of the end of life of clothing. Ghana thus receives tons and tons of used jeans.
For a little thrill, I came across a crazy site which deals with this subject and takes as its title the belief that these millions of jeans arriving on the Accra markets belonged to white people who are now dead.
A dark side of recycling that is tempered, however, by the words of Violaine Lablancherie: “our recycled materials use little energy: a sweater from Le Juste is up to 98% less impactful than a sweater made in a conventional way.
Some of our recycled materials are made by recycling plastic bottles, others from end-of-life clothing. We don't use any dyes or chemicals for our colors and our recycling process requires much less water than normal production.”
When will there be large-scale recycling?
The key today surely lies in optical sorting and textile material recognition technologies . In order to separate textile materials, it is necessary to have a material recognition system that is reliable, fast, non-destructive for the textile, and economical.
Exclusively manual sorting of materials
I don't know about you, but when I hear about spectroscopy, I imagine that.
Focus on spectroscopy
A spectrometer
But, like any recent application, there are still challenges:
- Pure materials and blends : there are thousands of different blends in marketed textiles. Systems that aim to sort only pure materials should not identify a mixture as one of the dominant materials in the mixture.
- Materials in low proportion : the fact that a material is present in a very small proportion (a few percent) in a mixture makes its identification more complex. This case is very common with elastane in textiles (jeans in particular). Some systems seem capable of distinguishing a pure material from a material containing a small quantity of elastane (above 3-5%). However, this may not be possible in some cases. For example, if the elastane thread is covered with cotton thread.
- Related materials : some materials are very close chemically. A classic example is cotton and viscose, both cellulose-based.
- “Double-layer” clothing : spectroscopy only analyzes the surface of the material. Parts with a non-homogeneous 3D structure therefore risk being incorrectly identified.
- Dark colors : in terms of colors, certain dark pigments (e.g. carbon black) can hinder or make it impossible to detect the material by absorbing all the waves.
- Various treatments : certain treatments that textile materials may have undergone during their manufacturing (e.g.: coating, waterproofing) can potentially have an impact on their identification.
The sorting of textile materials is still at the development stage today since it is not yet carried out operationally on a large scale in Europe. However, we have observed significant progress over the past two years and a desire by certain operators to engage in investments, particularly in the field of artificial intelligence.
The ban, from 2022 in France, on destroying stocks of unsold clothing will push for the development of second-hand and recycling and perhaps large investments to achieve better recycling solutions on a large scale. .
They must be donated, reused, reused or recycled to give them a new life, otherwise the State will hit the wallet. This may push some people to move.
Furthermore, more and more recycled clothing is also appearing on the textile market thanks to brands specializing in the production of recycled clothing or already established brands trying to renew themselves. H&M, Uniqlo (yes you read that correctly) and Cyrillus have, among others, implemented assertive strategies (notably discount vouchers) to revalue their clothing.
And make no mistake, pushing for second-hand clothing on your own is not contradictory to increasing sales. WornWear made necessary repairs free of charge for customers who returned them to the store and saw its sales increase by 30% the following year. So why deprive yourself ?
Covid-19: have confinement and textile recycling gone well together?
The textile recycling industry has been deeply disrupted by the closure of borders. The cause: the saturation of collection and sorting centers for lack of an outlet which led to the interruption of collections during the summer of 2020. Inventory management was a thorny issue, which at the same time made it possible to put at the heart of the discussions is the issue of the revaluation of clothing.
Furthermore, supplies of recycled fabrics processed in other countries were strongly affected but “paradoxically, demand increased and order books were well filled ” during confinement, says Florent Liénard of Hero .
For Au Juste , it was more complicated: “one of our resellers closed its doors, taking with it a physical presence. However, we sold our entire collection quickly (customers turning to e-commerce ). Our physics highlights were cancelled, which for us each time represented a strong commercial moment as well as privileged exchanges with our customers and important publicity.”
