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Making something new out of something old, but on a large scale. That's one of the fashion industry's solutions to reducing textile waste to drive down the sector's impact on the planet. While upcycling is still a relatively niche practice, some in the industry are now investing in in-house recycling programs to reintroduce scrap fabric or off-cuts into the production chain.
Making something new out of something old, but on a large scale. That's one of the fashion industry's solutions to reducing textile waste to drive down the sector's impact on the planet. While upcycling is still a relatively niche practice, some in the industry are now investing in in-house recycling programs to reintroduce scrap fabric or off-cuts into the production chain.
Still relatively unheard of before the pandemic, the process of upcycling has become one of the strategies used by the world's biggest fashion brands to avoid wasting scrap fabric, or even unsold items, that were previously lying dormant in factories or being thrown in the trash. From food packaging and automotive industry waste to home textiles or even old jeans and socks, there are countless initiatives aimed at repurposing waste to keep it out of landfills, where it is usually buried or burned.
But despite a growth in interest, this practice has not yet become widespread, pushing the fashion industry to find new solutions for reducing waste. This could be achieved through recycling programs designed to reintroduce off-cuts and scrap from the production process into the production chain in order to make new clothing. This concept is being used by the Danish brand Ganni, which announced the implementation of an internal program that should now allow it to recycle some of its fabric scraps to give life to new creations.
12 tonnes of off-cuts per year
Based on the observation that conventional production methods currently generate 20% of off-cut waste, the Danish brand has estimated its annual production of cotton scraps in the manufacture of its T-shirts at 12 tonnes. As a starting point, before extending this program to cover more fabrics, these 12 tonnes of cotton scraps will be transformed into new clothes. The brand says that it took almost a year to develop a recycled yarn that meets the brand's quality standards, composed of 50% recycled cotton scraps, and 50% GOTS (Global Organic Textile Standard) certified cotton. This yarn will then be used to produce... new T-shirts.
"Fashion supply chains are immensely complex and opaque, so things like waste streams are often ignored. We need to analyze and understand our production processes in more detail in order to allow for small but majorly important improvements like this to happen. For us, this is a great case study that can be rolled out with more suppliers over time," explains the Danish brand's founder, Nicolaj Reffstrup.
After Copenhagen Fashion Week recently established a highly strict set of specifications in a bid to make it the most sustainable fashion week, many Danish brands are stepping up their efforts to reduce their impact on the planet. This innovative program should prevent these 12 tonnes of annual waste from being thrown away, or at best transformed into insulation, while allowing the brand to reduce its use of new raw materials. A serious solution to the fashion industry's waste problem.
In 2020, in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, it was the Swedish giant H&M that stood out with its first in-store recycling system, set up in Stockholm. Called Looop, the program offers customers the opportunity to bring in old clothes and recycle them into brand-new creations. Whether they are aimed at the consumer, or implemented internally, these initiatives show that recycling must be envisaged as a serious pathway to reducing fashion's impact on the planet.
