The equation “more clothes, more recycling” is not realistic, because fast fashion produces at a rate too fast to enter a circular process
According to Waste Management World, limiting fast fashion is necessary to break the deadlock
At first glance, there seems to be a promising synergy between the world of fast fashion and that of the circular economy. The first makes trendy clothes accessible to a broader audience, while the circular economy aims to reduce dependence on primary raw materials through textile recycling, creating potential “green” jobs. Large clothing retailers are engaged in sustainable practices, to interwoven these two areas. However, greenwashing is behind the corner, because the big brands prefer sales to the creation of durable or repairable products. This is where the possible compatibility between fast fashion and the circular economy finds its limits. If, on the one hand, he proposes the equation “more clothes, more recycling”, the mechanism starts when you go deeper into the terms of the issue.
Textile recycling is complex, involving various strategies with different impacts. These include the production of used and cast straws for cleaning, as well as techniques that maintain the original structure of fibres. These methods recover the underlying polymer, and approaches that go up to the monomer.
An analysis by the specialist magazine Waste Management World examined the recycling of fibres in 2022 to understand more. This shows a significant recycling rate for PET fibers, mainly derived from plastic bottles. The wool is recycled chiefly but represents a minimal volume of the total. Other fibers, including cotton, show low recycling rates. Moreover, the sector is almost negligible overall, recovering a minimal part of the import to consumption. This is the great challenge of achieving a genuine circular economy. Too little is recycled – and will continue to be recycled for a long time – to keep up with the quantities the fashion industry produces annually.
The rapid growth of the textile industry is also increasingly linked to synthetic fibers, which are typical of fast fashion. Which makes it harder to recycle. To keep costs low, we focus on poor quality and continuous introduction into the clothing market with fibres of different materials and difficult to recover. The production of synthetic fibres is expected to double by 2035, making ambitious recycling targets less significant. The demand for raw materials remains so high that it undermines the effectiveness of the industry’s efforts to produce them through waste treatment.
Although recycling is valuable – Waste Management World’s in-depth study explains – its limits, including energy consumption and rates far from 100%, are obvious. The only viable solution is to limit the growth of the textile sector by pushing policymakers to implement measures that promote product durability and repairability.
