GoKawiilIn June, athletes from 16 countries will kick off the World Cup wearing other people’s used clothing.
Well, maybe. They’ll be sporting uniforms made from recycled fabric, potentially including a mix of scraps and old clothes. It’s the latest initiative from Nike, one of the world’s largest apparel companies, to incorporate more recycled material into the attire it makes. This time, the garment giant said it used “advanced chemical recycling” to produce its first elite performance apparel from 100 percent textile waste.
Nike executives and some media coverage have implied that the outfits represent a turning point for sustainable fashion—that “circular” clothing, capable of being recycled over and over again, could soon reach everyday consumers.
The real picture, as you might expect, is a bit more complicated.
Nike has indeed signed deals with two chemical recycling companies, but no one is saying much about their technology or how scalable it is. Despite increasing investments from fashion brands, experts said not to expect to find sales racks lined with chemically recycled clothing anytime soon.
Courtesy of Nike
“Yeah, it’s technically possible,” said Veena Singla, an environmental health researcher at UC San Francisco. “But is it going to happen in reality?” She and others who study chemical recycling don’t think so—at least not in any way consumers might expect. The day when they can buy chemically recycled clothes, wear them, then return them for another trip through the cycle isn’t nigh.
What seems more likely is the fashion industry will expand its use of this recycling technique with industrial scrap fabric—and at nothing approaching the level needed to address projected increases in textile production.
Nike is right that the fashion industry has a sustainability problem. Apparel companies produce more than 100 billion articles of clothing every year. In the process they generate up to 10 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions and an unfathomable amount of waste; the vast majority of textiles are eventually landfilled, incinerated, or sent to unofficial dump sites in poor countries. And all of this is made possible by fossil fuels, with nearly 70 percent of clothes made from oil-derived fabrics. The most common is polyester, a type of plastic also used in water bottles.
Rather than easing up on production, Nike and many of its competitors have pledged to boost the “circularity” of polyester—mostly through recycling.