You might know that fast fashion - the production of vast amounts of low-quality, incredibly inexpensive clothing that people buy, wear a few times and then discard - is negative from a number of perspectives both in its impact on the planet and poor labor practices (you simply cannot make clothing so cheaply without cutting corners). But there are people trying to create solutions to this problem and two such people are Shay Sethi and Moby Ahmed cofounders of Ambercycle.
To back up a bit, let’s talk about one of the problems with conventional recycling - to truly be useful and sustainable we need to be able to recycle materials with as little degradation as possible from its ‘virgin’ state each time the material gets recycled. This is what is called circular recycling. For some materials - like aluminum and glass - we know how to do this quite well and this is why those materials continue to be recycled and/or reused in today’s modern economy.
As you may know - if you are familiar with The Carbon Almanac - plastic is not one of these materials that can be effectively recycled - yes you can turn soda bottles into fabric or benches but you cannot produce ‘raw plastic’ that can be used to make new plastic containers or bottles from old ones. Each time you recycle plastic the resulting product is degraded and less useful. Because of this most plastic ends up in the landfill and we continue to churn out loads of new plastic for packaging and other uses.
Until now textiles fell into the same category as plastics - there was no way to go from a discarded t-shirt back to yarn which is the material from which fabrics are made. But Ambercyle aims to change that - co-founder Sethi describes the process “Old clothing gets fed in. The process takes about two hours at about the temperature it takes to cook a pizza. And the output is a chip or a resin. So when you want to make a yarn, you buy this resin, and you spin yarn from it.” So far this process only works on polyester “but the company is looking to expand it to other materials.”
Though this is far from a perfect solution it shows what can be accomplished with some dedication and curiosity.