Where do all the old clothes I throw in the recycling bin end up?

If you have an old piece of clothing that you no longer want, what do you do with it?

Put it in the old clothing recycling bin? What if it's worn out and can't be donated?

Some old clothes recycling bins will have a processing flow like the one below. However, can all these old clothes really be processed back into textile raw materials? What is the recycling rate?

Old clothes recycling bin | Tuchong Creative

The situation may be much worse than we imagined.

Stuff it into the donation box,

Can clothes be recycled?

At first glance, it seems that we already have a lot of ways to recycle clothes. People can sell old clothes to second-hand stores, donate them to poor households, turn them into pillowcases, cushions, and even cut them up and make rags...

These practices of making full use of materials are all good, but the problem is that they are just reuse , and they do not recycle the materials - in other words, they cannot be called "true recycling" .

Turning old shirts into pillows may be cute, but it’s not really recycling | craftylumberjacks

Even if they are fully used, the fabrics that make up clothes will eventually break down and become waste. To properly dispose of this waste, the fibers should be recovered and made into new products again , so that the cycle can be truly completed.

However, it is quite difficult to recycle old fabrics, and the recycling rate is still very low around the world. According to the "China Renewable Resources Recycling Industry Development Report", the current recycling rate of waste clothing in China is about 15% .

Not only that, a large part of the already small amount of material recycling is " downcycling " - it can only make low-value products such as insulation materials and filling materials. In the end, less than 1% of waste clothing materials can be made into new clothes .

Most of the "recycled clothing" on the market is made from recycled beverage bottles, and very few old clothes can be recycled into new clothes | buffalojackson

What happens if you don’t recycle?

In China alone, more than 20 million tons of textile waste is generated each year. The waste fabrics that are not recycled end up in landfills or are incinerated. However, burning them may pollute the air, and landfills occupy land and the waste may not degrade for a long time.

A massive clothing dump in Chile | AFP

For example, polyester , which is widely used in clothing fabrics, has the same chemical composition as plastic beverage bottles, so it is difficult to degrade like the latter and brings environmental problems such as microplastics . Even for natural fibers that are more easily degradable, landfills may not provide conditions conducive to their degradation.

On the other hand, discarding these materials without recycling is also a waste of resources . The production of chemical fibers uses precious petroleum resources, and the production of cotton also uses a lot of water. If the materials can be recycled, the consumption of these resources can be reduced, and the carbon emissions of producing new products can also be reduced.

Why is it so difficult to recycle clothes?

You can make new paper by shredding waste paper, but you can't directly weave new fabrics or make new clothes by shredding old clothes . This is because the fibers of waste fabrics have been worn out and their quality has dropped significantly, making it difficult to meet the requirements of textile production.

In order to turn used clothing into high-quality new fibers, more advanced methods are needed. For example, cotton fibers can be dissolved with special solvents and then made into regenerated fibers such as rayon. Chemical fiber materials can also be dissolved or broken down into small molecules and then repolymerized.

Scarf made from recycled fibres, a pilot product in a study on textile recycling | Simone Haslinger et al.

At present, there are many such "high-quality recycling" technologies, but they are still not popular enough. The biggest difficulty hindering their promotion is that the chemical composition of clothes is complex and it is difficult to separate different components .

Fabric recycling technology is designed based on the chemical properties of fibers, and each treatment method can usually only deal with one component. In theory, used clothes should be sorted first, separated into different materials, and then processed. However, there is currently no mature system that can efficiently complete this sorting work.

The sorting of used clothes is currently very inefficient and even relies on manual label checking | TuChong Creative

What's more, the complexity of clothing ingredients is not only reflected between clothes, but also inside a piece of clothing. In order to improve the performance of fabrics, many clothes are blended with fibers of different ingredients , and it is difficult to separate and recycle these ingredients.

Currently, scientists are actively working to solve these problems. For example, some researchers are trying to use infrared sensors to distinguish different fabrics, and some are developing chemical methods to treat blended fabrics. But it will take a long time to really change the status quo.

What can we do now?

Clothing material recycling is indeed a very complex issue, and it is difficult for ordinary consumers to help. However, while waiting for recycling technology to be improved, we can still do a good job of "reducing" and "reusing" to reduce the amount of fabric waste.

In addition to donating old clothes and selling second-hand, we can also change our clothing purchasing strategy. It is best to buy less but better clothes, only buy the amount you need, and choose high-quality and durable products so that they can be worn for as long as possible. In addition, we can also try to reduce the purchase of "fast fashion" clothing, which are cheap and easily damaged. Often, these clothes become garbage faster than other clothes.

Buying less but better clothes is better for the environment and can save you money | Pexels/pixabay

Hopefully, as technology advances in the future, we’ll eventually be able to give all those old clothes a new lease of life.

References

[1]https://www.chemistryworld.com/features/recycling-clothing-the-chemical-way/4010988.article

[2]https://www.snexplores.org/article/recycling-old-clothes-recycled-fabric-cotton-polyester

[3]https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2019/gc/c9gc02776a

[4]https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0956053X19305100

[5]http://ltfzs.mofcom.gov.cn/article/ztzzn/202106/20210603171351.shtml

Author: Window Knocking Rain

Editor: Mai Mai

This article comes from the Species Calendar, welcome to forward

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