A new fabric recycling factory in Sweden is the first step for used clothes to be converted into new fabrics

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Renewcell's new textile recycling plant in the small coastal town of Sundsvall, Sweden, is so big that workers use bicycles to get from one end to the other. This factory is one of the first steps to ensure that old clothes end up being converted into new, high-quality garments made entirely of recycled fabric. It also helps manage the mountains of textile waste that accumulate around the world, and its success would help reduce the number of trees that are cut down to produce fabrics for the fashion industry. It is estimated that 200 million are slaughtered every year. There are currently five companies worldwide engaged in the commercial recycling of textile waste. Renewcell was the first to open, and is the largest of them all.


Here large bales of cotton waste are dumped onto conveyor belts, ground up and, with the help of chemicals, then broken down into a wet slurry. This paste, known as dissolved pulp, is bleached, dried and stamped into sheets of what appears to be recycled craft paper. It is then given the brand name Circulose and sent to manufacturers to be made into fabrics such as viscose.



Until now, most clothing that was marketed as made from recycled materials contained only a small percentage of recycled cotton or was made from water bottles, fishing nets and old carpets. (Technology exists to recycle polyester, but it is prohibitively expensive and rarely used).


The reality is that today, and increasingly, consumers care about what happens to their used clothes. And this is why fashion companies are looking for ways to continue growing but at the same time reduce the negative environmental impact and achieve a circular system in which clothes are reused instead of going to a landfill.


The European Union has ordered to achieve greater collection of textiles in all member states by 2025, which will significantly increase the amount of clothing waste that will need a destination. "It is exciting to see that we are reaching this stage", says Ashley Holding, sustainable textiles consultant and founder of Circuvate, commenting on the opening of the Renewcell factory.


The creation of an industry


But the circularity of fashion has not always been so complicated. Before industrialization came, many people made their own clothes from all-natural materials. According to a 2018 study by the University of Brighton, the rich reused their clothes by passing them on to servants, and then to people in rural communities, who patched them up until they were no longer usable and then traded them for harvest cloth readers In Europe, these rags were collected in warehouses and eventually turned into low-quality paper or wool to make inexpensive blankets and coats. But with industrialization in the late 19th century, things changed. “As garments lost value and women joined the industrial workforce,Secondhand: travels in the new global garage sale . There was more unused clothing, and the Salvation Army, which opened in New York in the late 1800s, began raising money for charitable projects that received, repaired, and returned clothing from household utensils "In the 1910s, the volume of clothing was so great that charities stopped mending it," says Minter.


"Today, most of our clothes end up in the trash," says Maxine Bédat, author of Unraveled: the life and death of a garment. " It's hard to get a reliable figure on how much is thrown away, but it's the majority", he explains. In Western Europe, 62% of the new clothes that come on the market each year end up in landfills or incinerators, according to a recent study by Fashion for Good. What is not thrown away is sent to organizations like Goodwill, who get rid of what can't be sold by sending those garments to for-profit sorting companies.The clothes that can be used end up in resale markets in developing countries, and the textiles that can't be made serve are turned into higher quality cloths and fibers for things like thermal insulation.


Currently very little textile waste is turned into new clothes. In Western Europe, according to Fashion for Good, only 2% of collected textiles (pure wool, pure cotton and acrylic) are recycled into new textiles, and most are used to make low-quality wool and cotton blankets. Combined with low collection rates, this means that less than 1% of clothing sold in Western Europe is recycled into new fibres.


The race to recycle textiles


Renewcell's new factory only accepts pure cotton textile waste, although many garments are made from synthetic blends. However, it is estimated that it will absorb a large amount of clothing: more than 120,000 metric tons per year. "We are creating circularity within the fashion industry", explains the executive director of Renewcell, Patrik Lundström, who acknowledges that so far "very little progress has been made" in this field.


The firm's founding researchers, Mikael Lindstrom and Gunnar Henriksson, first developed the technology to process cotton waste in 2012. The company produced enough recycled fabric for a suit in 2014 and built a demonstration plant in 2017. In addition, this attracted the interest of brands such as Stella McCartney, who funded a life cycle analysis that showed Circulose had the lowest climate impact of ten different synthetic cellulose fibers . In 2017 H&M became a minority shareholder in the company. The company went public and began trading in Sweden in 2020. H&M, Levi Strauss and the Bestseller chain have already committed to incorporating Circulose into their clothing.


In  a 2022 report , the consulting firm McKinsey estimated that it would be necessary to invest six to seven billion euros until 2030 to manage the 18% of textile waste generated in Europe. But critics point out that the most sustainable way would be to reuse, mend and recycle the fabrics to make new clothes, as people did in the 19th century.


Kathleen Rademan, director of Fashion for Good, says that while Renewcell is an important step, "it's still a drop in the middle of the ocean compared to the amount of textile raw materials that exist and the amount of materials that are produce every year."