Fashion set to turn a load of rubbish into material worth

We pay a fortune for clothes, but we’re quick to bin them, and that’s an environmental disaster.

Second hand clothes at Waterlooplein market in Amsterdam, Netherlands.

What value do we put on clothes?

Not so much the price we pay for them when we first succumb to their charms and head to the checkout, but in the longer term?

By our current standing, not much.

The statistics around fashion waste are both alarming and increasingly being circulated to make us rethink our actions.

According to the National Waste Report 2020, Australians throw 780,000 tonnes a year of textiles waste – of which a large part is clothing – into landfill. Globally, it’s estimated to be around 92 billion tonnes, according to a 2017 Global Fashion Agenda report.

In November last year the federal government awarded a $1m grant to the Australian Fashion Council to devise a strategy to tackle the issue of clothing waste specifically via the National Clothing Product Stewardship Scheme.

The planning of the scheme is under way, with a consortium of industry leaders involved across all facets of the fashion industry, from cotton growers to designers, academics to retailers, the charity sector to recycling companies, with the view to creating a “shovel-ready” plan by next March that will reveal a road map to 2030 for clothing circularity, in line with the National Waste Policy Action Plan targets.

“Because of the various stakeholders – there are so many stakeholders involved – getting consensus on what is the best way forward and getting buy-in from everyone is going to be really difficult,” AFC chief executive Leila Naja Hibri told The Weekend Australian following the first consortium forum earlier this month.

“That said, we’re starting the journey in a very collaborative manner.”

But that question of value will have to be central in the move towards a circular economy.

“How do we find value for things that are inherently low in value?” asks Alice Payne, associate professor in fashion at Queensland University of Technology, and a member of the consortium.

“And low value because of a whole range of socio-economic factors. We’re talking about a systemic transformation that has to happen to transform that value from lower to higher. That’s the crux of it. How do we incentivise items to be in use longer, incentivise new business models that enable that and all the different pathways that can be used at end of life?”

That end-of-life journey for garments will be critical in the scheme. Once we have decided to part with a piece of clothing, if it’s not given to a friend or sold, there are really only two options, according to Omer Soker, chief executive of Charitable Recycling Australia, another consortium member.

“One – you donate it to the charitable system, and there’s a commercial system that sits alongside that,” he tells The Weekend Australian. “Or it goes to landfill. That’s it. That’s where we are.”

There is a lot of value in goods donated to charity, both in Australia and abroad.

Within the charitable market, there are various value-adds for item we no longer want: its worth to somebody who can’t afford a new piece of clothing; what it generates in revenue to the economy; the income generation for those onselling second-hand clothing, especially in developing countries, where dealers buy our donations in bulk.

According to the Charitable Recycling 2021 Impact Report, donations to charity keep 100,000 tonnes of clothing waste out of landfill, raise $527m in revenue for the Australian economy, employ over 5000 people and work with over 33,000 volunteers. All of that is worth more than just throwing your T-shirt in the bin.

“In places like Kenya, there are about 2 million people involved in the reuse clothing trade, so second-hand clothing exports is poverty reduction. And a lot of (the sellers) are women, so it’s gender equality. There are a lot of benefits there.”

There are also some issues here, in terms of poor-quality clothing ending up in another country’s landfill.

Hibri believes that better sorting in Australia can go some way to alleviating this.

“How do we sort here really well so that we are reusing, recycling and upcycling well and repairing? And what is OK to send overseas and what’s not OK to send?” she asks.

This will also make up part of the stewardship scheme.

But for those items not suitable to sell on, or even repair, how do we recapture – or add – value? Recycling will play a larger part in this.

Queensland-based Blocktexx, part of the industry reference group for the Product Stewardship Scheme, is one of a number of companies creating solutions at this level, and has created world-first technology in the chemical separation of polyester-cotton blended fabrics.

Blocktexx co-founder Adrian Jones says there needs to be education for both the industry and consumers about “how to drive value rather than destroy value”.

It aims to quite literally monetise textile waste. Following 4½ years of research and development, its first facility is currently being built, and set to open by May. The aim is to be able to process 10,000 tonnes of textile waste in the first year, with “ambition to get to 100,000 tonnes in three years”.

Once processed, the textiles are separated into polyester pellets, and cellulosic powder, which have applications in a range of industries, from injection moulding for the polyester, to soil regeneration for the cellulose.

For Jones, and the first Blocktexx commercial partners, which include uniform suppliers and hotel chains, there is both an economic and environmental value to recycling.

“We charge a gate fee on the way in, predicated on the landfill levy and the transport costs to landfill,” Jones says. “For the same price that you can put your textiles in landfill you can have a demonstrable environmental outcome because we built our business on a blockchain so it’s publicly verifiable.”

He also points out there is a solid business foundation to the resulting materials produced, which yield “very strong gross margins – it’s a cash-generative business”.

The price for recycled polyester chips, for example, is currently higher than that of virgin polyester due to the lack of supply.

As the stewardship scheme works with its consortium members to come up with industry solutions to fashion’s overwhelming waste issues, Payne’s words will continue to resonate: “Value is at the heart of this. We need to recalibrate the way that value works in fashion and textiles.”