Why clothes are so hard to recycle

Why clothes are so hard to recycle Press Association The rise of fast fashion is largely behind the growing amounts of clothing we buy and throw away each year Fast fashion is leading to a mountain of clothing being thrown away each year and has a huge impact on the environment, so can we turn our unwanted garments into something useful? Alamy Millions of tonnes of clothing, shoes and other textiles end up in landfill every year because very little is sent for recycling “The current fashion system uses high volumes of non-renewable resources, including petroleum, extracted to produce clothes that are often used only for a short period of time, after which the materials are largely lost to landfill or incineration,” says Chetna Prajapati, who studies ways of making sustainable textiles at Loughborough University in the UK. “Similarly, a typical pair of jeans are made from cotton yarn which is generally blended with elastane, and other components such as zips and buttons and polyester sewing thread and dyed using a range of dyes.” Getty Images Sorting clothing by hand is a time consuming task made more complicated by the many blends of man-made and natural fibres used in modern garments This makes them hard to separate so they can be effectively recycled. Some are even looking at turning other types of waste – such as off milk – into clothing “Recycling needs to be incorporated into the current system to make it more circular,” says Prajapati. Alamy The shredding process used by mechanical recycling methods leads to shorter, weaker fibres that cannot be resued to make clothes “Using recycled, rather than virgin, materials offers an opportunity to drastically reduce non-renewable resource inputs and the negative impacts of the industry, like CO2 emissions, water and chemical use,” says Prajapati.