Back in September, the European Union (EU) finally adopted the long-awaited extended producer responsibility (EPR) regulation after years of debate, making brands and retailers responsible for the textile waste they generate. This includes post-consumer waste, which has to be collected, sorted and recycled, or otherwise reused — none of which is currently possible at scale.
Hoping to answer the looming question of how Europe can meet regulatory demand with an influx of circular infrastructure, is a new coalition of 12 textile companies, dubbed the European Circular Textile Coalition. Led by materials regeneration company Reju, the coalition includes Resortecs, Coleo, Les Tissage de Charlieu, Synergies TLC, Nouvelles Fibres Textiles, Sympany, European Spinning Group, Ariadne Innovation, Erdotex, Utexbel, and Noyfil. It’s a “coalition of the willing”, says Reju CEO Patrik Frisk, speaking to Vogue Business at this year’s Textile Exchange conference in Lisbon.
Textile Exchange’s annual Materials Market report reveals ballooning global fibre production and no end in sight for the growth of fossil fuel-based synthetics.
The coalition’s first order of business was to publish a three-point manifesto for change, which stresses the need for Europe to address the lack of circular infrastructure as a matter of urgency, or risk rendering the hard-won EPR regulation useless in the face of mounting textile waste. Europe currently generates 12.6 million tonnes of textile waste annually, it states, most of which is sent to landfill, incinerated or exported. Only 1 per cent is recycled into new garments.
To solve this, the coalition proposes combining the push for circular infrastructure with reshoring efforts, creating regional recycling hubs that minimise the need to export waste, or at least sort it better in advance, to avoid the wrong type of waste being sent to the wrong places. The emphasis is on high-quality textile-to-textile recycling, using post-consumer textile waste as the main feedstock for new textiles, especially polyester (in which Reju specialises). The coalition also wants the EU to establish mandatory recycled content thresholds for new textiles, with “ambitious but realistic” targets to be phased in gradually.
Here, Frisk explains the rationale.
Vogue: Over the past 18 months, we have seen the textile recycling sector fall to its knees. By their own admission, textile recycling associations and their members are struggling to survive, caught between the push for circularity at scale and the influx of high-volume, low-quality textile waste. Why do you think this coalition is the way forward?
I have been in this industry for 35 years. For the past 10 years, textile waste has been emerging as one of the biggest problems for fashion to tackle. The pandemic really accelerated this, but people are not doing the maths. The volume of textile waste is growing, but we are making more and more products, at lower quality, which people are throwing away even faster than before. The aggregated effect is really, really big, but because of the lower quality, it has become much harder to deal with through conventional streams like rewear or reuse.
There has been a lot of focus on textile-to-textile recycling, but it’s going nowhere on its own. There is a huge infrastructure gap that spans waste aggregation to the reintroduction of recycled materials into the supply chain, and nobody is currently filling that gap at scale. So we need to create a whole new system — a circular system — to extract the value. This could take an entire generation to get right. It’s critical that we make a start.
Vogue: What will it look like in practice?
This is a coalition of the willing. It doesn’t have a governance board or joining fees; it’s more of a support system for people that are building the new system, so we can advocate together and make sure we support the frameworks being put in place. It’s about making the new system sustainable for everyone involved, while acknowledging that this takes planning and financing.
To build a new system, everyone in the chain has to commit. No one will build a new sorting line with all the semi-automatic equipment, conveyor belts, optical reading technology and infrared scanners, unless they know they have an offtake agreement for the product they make.
Vogue: If the intention is to get every step of the value chain on board and secure both supply and demand, why are there no brands involved in the coalition?
There are no brands involved right now, but they are at the end of the chain. We already have 18 memorandums of understanding and two term sheets in place. We’ve secured our feedstock for the first two regeneration hubs we’re building. We’re fully committed.
Vogue: Sure, but brands have to commit to buying the end product to make it viable.
What are they going to buy today? There’s nothing available yet.
Vogue: It’s the chicken and the egg.
It’s always the chicken and the egg. There’s no doubt in my mind that when the product becomes available, brands will commit to it. But if you’re a brand today and you aren’t thinking about circularity, I don’t think you are really thinking through what a sustainable business model looks like for the future. What you’re dealing with is an incredibly unstable world. You’re dealing with finite materials, resilience challenges, potential procurement standards in the future — all of these things are coming. We don’t know exactly when, but they’re coming. And if you don’t have regional circular infrastructure, it’s going to be very difficult.
Vogue: Why do you think a regional approach is best?
The waste is here, and it needs to be dealt with here. Also, if you try to create value with that waste in the region, it creates an opportunity in terms of innovation and jobs. We have enough yarn-making, weaving and fabric-making capacity in Europe to begin that journey. The volumes will be small to start with, but there is also the potential to use the circular infrastructure to sustain the industry that is still here.
Vogue: There are different schools of thought about how exactly EPR schemes should roll out. You obviously favour the regional approach, where each region has its own infrastructure to deal with its own waste. But there are many circular ecosystems already existing — such as Kantamanto Market in Ghana — where the Global South is dealing with Europe’s textile waste and not getting financial support for doing so. And they would say that EPR needs to be globally accountable. How do you marry those two realities?
It’s a fair question, but the biggest issue we have is waste aggregation at home. A lot of the clothes that end up in the Global South have already been collected, and to some degree that waste is already being served. We’re talking about opening up the stuff that is not yet being collected or segregated — unleashing a whole volume stream that is absolutely ginormous.
I’m not saying we should deprive markets that are already in play today, but we should make sure they get stuff that they can actually use and sell. The quality of clothing is degrading so fast, which means it’s not always possible to reuse or upcycle. So the rings around cities in Ghana where waste is disposed of are getting bigger and bigger. If we’re going to send anything there, we need to send the right stuff.
Vogue: Do you think recycling technology is ready to deal with the scale of waste you’re talking about?
Not today. We’re about a generation away, and that’s the problem. Even if everyone built what they said they would on time and in full, we would only be able to chemically recycle between five and six million tonnes of polyester per year by 2035. But polyester is 59 per cent of all global fibre production, and by that time we’ll be making around 110 million tonnes of virgin polyester per year.
The problem is twofold. If we don’t tackle polyester waste specifically, we are putting a finite resource in the ground or burning it, which is not a smart idea — we could use it in other stuff. At the same time, the waste problem is only getting bigger. The industry owes it to itself to deal with this before it becomes necessary to regulate the hell out of it.
Without technology, you cannot transform all of this waste. But technology by itself will do nothing. You need a systemic approach and collective action to create the right infrastructure around technology.
Vogue: Is there actually enough money on the table to make this a reality?
It’s a huge problem, absolutely. But this is infrastructure and there are funds for that. No investor will build anything unless there is potential for them to make money from it. So if we want to solve the waste problem being created by the fashion industry at an alarming rate, we have to make sure that everyone in the supply chain can invest in this and make money from it.
Vogue: Can you help to contextualise just how big the infrastructure gap is right now?
I already have a facility in Frankfurt and I’m currently building a facility in the Netherlands. The one we’re building now will be able to process 61 kilotonnes of post-consumer waste. To be able to sort that, you need 200 kilotonnes. That’s a lot of waste, and that’s only for one unit. In Europe, every year, there is around 12 million tonnes of textile waste, and that figure is growing. So there needs to be a real sense of urgency, to build as many facilities as possible.
Out of that 61 kilotonnes of waste, I’ll be able to make 38 kilotonnes of recycled polyester. The big fast fashion brands use close to 300 or 350 kilotonnes each. So I’m barely at 10 per cent, and I don’t want it all to go to one brand, I want to spread it between maybe 15 brands. So we need to scale as fast as we can.
Vogue: Even if you could reach that scale, how will you get brands on board when the cost of recycled polyester is so much higher than virgin polyester?
I won’t let brands use cost as a reason not to do this, because it doesn’t fly. Let’s say it costs a brand three or four times as much upfront to buy recycled polyester, the material is only a few percentage points of the total garment cost. So will it really have enough of an impact on your margins that you won’t buy it? Not for the next decade at least.
There are also lots of ways you can offset that cost, from distribution to shipping. Most brands are overproducing by around 40 per cent. What does that do to their margins? Why don’t you manufacture more in Europe to create a faster business model? Why don’t you make better stuff, which you can actually make more money on?
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