Can clothes ever be fully recycled?
On the Swedish coast of the Baltic Sea, in the city of Sundsvall – home to the country's pulp and paper industry – a team of scientists, chemists, entrepreneurs and textile manufacturers are celebrating a milestone birthday, under a banner which features the slogan "#SolutionsAreSexy".
The Swedish pulp producer Renewcell has just opened the world's first commercial-scale, textile-to-textile chemical recycling pulp mill, after spending 10 years developing the technology.
While mechanical textiles-to-textiles recycling, which involves the manual shredding of clothes and pulling them apart into their fibres, has existed for centuries, Renewcell is the first commercial mill to use chemical recycling, allowing it to increase quality and scale production. With ambitions to recycle the equivalent of more than 1.4 billion T-shirts every year by 2030, the new plant marks the beginning of a significant shift in the fashion industry's ability to recycle used clothing at scale.
"The linear model of fashion consumption is not sustainable," says Renewcell chief executive Patrik Lundström. "We can't deplete Earth's natural resources by pumping oil to make polyester, cut down trees to make viscose or grow cotton, and then use these fibres just once in a linear value chain ending in oceans, landfills or incinerators. We need to make fashion circular." This means limiting fashion waste and pollution while also keeping garments in use and reuse for as long as possible by developing collection schemes or technologies to turn textiles into new raw materials.
Each year, more than 100 billion items of clothing are produced globally, according to some estimates, with 65% of these ending up in landfill within 12 months. Landfill sites release equal parts carbon dioxide and methane – the latter greenhouse gas being 28 times more potent than the former over a 100-year period. The fashion industry is estimated to be responsible for 8-10% of global carbon emissions, according to the UN.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230227-how-to-recycle-your-clothes
Fascinating article.
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I know that's no guarantee of what will eventually happen to them, but at least I try. I only throw out things that are either irreparably stained or literally falling apart and beyond repair.
My husband wears his work shirts until the cuffs are so frayed the interfacing is hanging out. He doesn't have to dress up for work, so he just has a few "nice shirts" for when he does want to dress up, and wears his work clothes till they're beat to shit. 
