By Autumn Dalton
That bottle you tossed in the trash today could've been made into a t-shirt. Those yoga pants that you threw out last year could've decomposed in a landfill in a few years rather than a few decades. With the amount of textile waste piling up in landfills, there are three major ways the fashion industry is trying to tackle the waste problem: biodegradable fabrics, recycling textiles and textiles made from discarded plastic.
The fashion industry is the second most harmful industry to the environment, just behind the oil industry, according to EcoWatch. A resource-consuming industry, it takes 2,700 liters of water to produce one cotton t-shirt, which is enough water for one person to drink for 2.5 years, according to the World Resources Institute. At the forefront of overall pollution are fast fashion companies.
According to The Fashion Law, fast fashion is “the practice of rapidly translating high fashion design trends into low-priced garments and accessories by mass-market retailers at low costs.” Retailers like Zara, H&M and Forever 21 take the trends seen on the runways during fashion week and turn around and replicate them for cheap, disposable use.
It takes roughly 2-5 years for a cotton t-shirt to decompose, but a garment made from nylon (a synthetic textile made from plastic) can take 30-40 years to decompose. Nylon is often used at fast fashion retailers, as it is a cost-effective alternative to silk.
Fast fashion trends mean that manufacturers also produce a superfluous amount of clothing. In 2014, the EPA reported that approximately 16 million tons of textiles were trashed in the United States, and a total of 33 million tons of plastic were also added to the landfills.
Despite these practices, some companies are trying to counter the trend and use different methods to produce and recycle clothing.
One company, AquaVida, is making sure that clothing that hits the landfill breaks down ten times quicker than comparable fabrics.
AquaVida provides sustainably produced clothing, as well as an option to shop for clothing that they've dubbed the "Biodegradable Collection." Jana Mars, creator and founder of AquaVida, said her upbringing led her experimenting and using biodegradable fabric.
“I was born and raised in Brazil, and Brazil has always had very progressive ideas in fashion. It was through a lot of research and also a bit of serendipity that we found a fabric maker that is dedicated to forward-thinking and developing textiles with the aim to change the world. The fabric they had developed is perfect for our application,” Mars said.
AquaVida utilizes Amni Soul Eco®, a textile that decomposes ten times faster than comparable fabrics for leggings, shorts and bikini sets. Its innovative technology only starts to decay once it comes in contact with the microorganism found in landfills–it stays in tact during a sweaty workout or a round through the washing machine.
Yoga pants made from Amni Soul Eco® decompose in three years. Activewear, like yoga pants, is usually made from a synthetic blend containing a fabric like nylon.
On the other end, the water bottles you go through every week may have ended up as a jacket.
Unifi is a North Carolina-based company that produces yarn made from recycled plastics and is trying to reduce its carbon footprint in the fashion industry. The company uses everyday plastics that consumers use such as soda bottles and turns it into a t-shirt. The process is so refined that people who buy the fabric cannot distinguish it from cotton.
"Bottles are taken to a MRF [materials recycling facility] and then they're sorted. All of the trash and bottles are distributed out to their respective facilities that do all the recycling," Christine Spiegel, global marketing manager of Unifi Manufacturing, Inc., said.
Once the bottles are sorted, they're then chopped up into tiny bits, known as flake.
"We bring those bottles down to our recycling facility in Reidsville, North Carolina, where we sort, wash and chop that flake up. Once that's chopped up into flake, it's then cleaned, washed, and melted to 550 degrees to a resin, also known as chip. Once it's in chip form, chip can be sold off into other industries, not only made into fiber," she said.
After being made into chip, the chip is then extruded at 550 degrees and made into yarn, which looks a lot like fishing wire.
"As we make the fiber, we then sell it to a fabric manufacturer. That fabric is then sent to a cut and sew facility, unless they do it all, to where they cut and sew it into the actual garment you're going to buy. And then it goes to finishing where they might apply an additive, or they add buttons or zippers or whatever it may be, and then they package it, they attach hang tags, and then ship it to retail," Spiegel said.
Patagonia, a multimillion dollar outerwear company, uses Repreve, a synthetic fiber produced by Unifi. Patagonia currently uses Repreve in its fleece jackets.
Ryan Thompson, materials innovation and development manager for Patagonia, detailed the company’s commitment to sustainability, which has been utilized since its inception. In addition to using recycled fleece, the company developed a guideline called the traceable down standard, which was developed after discovering holes in the supply chain.
“It instills certain treatment for the geese and ducks from how they’re raised, how they’re fed. It absolutely bans the practice of live plucking or force feeding,” he said.
Geese and duck down is a direct byproduct of the meat industry, especially when it comes to foie gras, a luxury meal made from fattened duck or goose liver.
“We wanted to make sure that the geese whose down wind up in our jackets are absolutely not being treated in the way that animals have been in the past. We use quite a bit of recycled down that’s largely reclaimed from home goods like pillows and down comforters,” he said.
As a company developed to sustainability, Patagonia would like to see the mindset of consumers and fast fashion companies change.
“We want companies to abandon [fast fashion] and recognize that making quality product with high function is just a better business practice. We’d like to change the consumer’s buying practices and owning practices. Buy what you need but keep what you need and fix it rather than trying to go and get a new jacket if you just need to repair a seam or something,” Thompson said.
The traditional fashion model is broken up into two cycles/seasons: fall and winter.
Companies that utilize the traditional fashion model release collections twice a year.
However, the World Resources Institute reported that fast fashion goes through 50 cycles per year, which means that those companies continuously release clothing multiple times throughout the year. Fast fashion companies can have a clothing item go from the design process to your closet within a month.
The amount of cycles that fast fashion retailers go through encourages consumers to live with an "out with the old, in with the new" mentality. Fast-fashion companies are constantly releasing new products throughout the year; once these clothes are no longer trendy or begin to fall apart, they’re trashed and added to landfills. These wasteful practices however, are harmful for the environment.
This is one of the reasons why some companies in an effort to stop this waste are repurposing clothing into another textile.
Kaveri Marathe is the founder and CEO of Texiles, a D.C. based company that will pick up your unwanted clothing at your door and either donate it to a responsible company or send it off to be recycled and repurposed. Marathe has been the sole pickup person since founding her company in 2017 and is passionate about preventing more textile waste.
“The dyes that are in clothing can often, when they’re in the landfills, leach out of the clothing and end up in groundwater which can have poisonous effects both on the fish and wildlife that live off of the waterways and also on human health because we also drink that water,” she said.
Marathe initially wanted to start a sustainable clothing company, but decided against adding to the waste factor.
“We’re abusing the environmental capacity through the clothing that we’re buying because we’re not respecting the amount of impact that each individual garment has on the environment in order to be made,” she said.
Clothing can be recycled with Marathe’s company as long as it doesn’t contain mildew, hard to remove stains (oil, grease, etc.) or is wet. Many of her customers didn’t realize that clothing riddled with holes or that one unmentionable stained shirt could be recycled.
“So far, I’ve rescued probably a little over 2,000 pounds of clothing–not necessarily from the landfills, per se, but from being trashed one way or another,” she said.
Although the clothing industry has made massive changes in the past few decades, there’s always room for improvement. Biodegradable fabrics, recycling textiles, and textiles made from discarded plastic are just the very beginning of this revolution.
“I think there’s a lot of untapped potential that we’re not thinking about. There’s a lot more uses that old clothing can be converted into that we’re just not being creative enough about,” Marathe said.
