Nike has announced plans to incorporate more recycled material into its clothing, but experts say the technology is not yet scalable and may not reach everyday consumers anytime soon.
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 “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. 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.
“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.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.
The push to do so through chemical means is a response to the shortcomings of other strategies they’ve tried. Traditional mechanical recycling through shredding and grinding causes fibers toChemical recycling is supposed to be the next best thing. The term refers to using solvents to dissolve fibers into their base chemical units—building blocks that can be spun into new fabrics.
On its face, this is a truly “circular” solution, because it doesn’t depend on bottles, and proponents say it can turn your used polyester shirts or running shorts into new ones over and over again, with no loss in fabric quality. , many of which have signed multiyear agreements with a handful of chemical recycling startups. Last fall, Nike agreed to source “circular” polyester from two of them: the Swedish firm Research does bear out some of the hype.
Technically, chemical recycling can produce virgin-quality polyester, and at least one method, called methanolysis, is capable of preserving that quality through repeated rounds of recycling. But there are Diana Ferreira, a textile researcher at the University of Minho in Portugal, said textile-to-textile chemical recycling remains limited by the availability of suitable fabric to work with.
“If we are dealing with clean, well-sorted, polyester-rich waste streams, chemical recycling can, in principle, produce material with properties comparable to virgin polyester,” she said. “However, if we are talking about postconsumer textile waste, the situation is much more complex. ” In other words, chemical recycling works best with industrial scraps, which are more uniform than piles of used clothes.
The latter may include blends of cotton, nylon, wool, spandex, and acrylics, not to mention dyes, chemical coatings, thread, labels, and zippers. All of this stuff makes chemical recycling much less feasible—at least, not without“If we wanted it to work, we would have to have our clothes … be 100 percent polyester, and we’d need to get rid of so many toxic chemicals,” Singla said. Beth Jensen, of the nonprofit Textile Exchange, is more sanguine.
She said “all solutions,” including chemical recycling, are needed to reduce the fashion industry’s dependence on fossil fuels. But she agreed that establishing the infrastructure required for companies to accept used clothing and use technologies like methanolysis to make it into new apparel remains a ways away. Plus, it’s not clear who will build it. Companies like Nike?
Governments? Recyclers? Some combination of those entities working collaboratively? Even if the industry can hit its optimistic targets for chemically recycled polyester by the early 2030s—whether from scrap or from people’s old clothes—production of “circular” fabric would likely pale in comparison to the more thanof polyester projected to be manufactured annually by then.
Dionisios Vlachos, a professor of chemical engineering at the University of Delaware, said Syre’s goal to produce even Instead, companies need to “reverse the trend of fast fashion,” said Nusa Urbancic, CEO of the nonprofit Changing Markets Foundation. That means making less clothing overall, whether it contains recycled or virgin materials. Last year, growth in recycled polyester—mostly from bottles—was dwarfed by an even larger increase in the production of fossil-fuel-based polyester.
Urbancic sees chemical recycling as “an excuse to keep producing plastic clothes” and advocates for a shift away from polyester altogether; the material Nike, Syre, and Loop Industries did not respond to interview requests or a detailed list of questions, highlighting a transparency problem flagged by Singla, Vlachos, and others Grist spoke with. Industry confidentiality makes it difficult to know what’s actually going on in these firms—and whether ““It remains to be seen whether amounts to anything,” Singla said.
For the foreseeable future, it seems chemically recycled polyester will be limited to niche products like World Cup uniforms. Head to the Beach in the Best Sustainable Wetsuits, Surfboards, and Sunblock This SummerIt Sure Seems Like These Instagram Ads Want You to Do Cocaine From designer straws to magnet-sealed leather pouches, the platform is awash in products seemingly built for coke—despite Meta’s policies on drug paraphernalia.
The move could save the oil company hundreds of millions, even as Texas lawmakers start looking at reining in incentives for data centers. With the launch of the first 16 satellites, Russia begins construction of a network for satellite internet that aims to cover the entire country by 2030. But getting there won’t be easy. After Struggling With EVs, US Automakers Pivot to Energy Ford and GM are backing away from electric vehicles and moving into the battery storage business.
And it all comes back to AI. Venom and Hot Peppers Offer a Key to Killing Resistant BacteriaSave on iRobot products, including robot vacuums and mops designed to handle pet hair, daily messes, and hands-free cleaning with smart home integration.
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