Can you imagine fibres made of old clothes? Well, there exists a process, which can turn nearly any used fabric into something new. And according to fashion retailer H&M, this one solution can help recycle billions of tons of textile waste produced every year.
Most textiles are recycled and turned into mattress stuffings or insulation. And the original materials are not used clothing, but some scraps they get from factory floors. But a facility inside a Hong Kong shopping mall is the first to claim to turn used apparel into new ones, all under one roof.
First, a technician examines the cloth, and an ozone chamber sanitises the fabric which takes about an hour. Then, they remove buttons, zippers, and labels, and the garment is cut into pieces so that it gets easy to work with. The cloth goes through a shedder which further strips them down, and opened fabrics are taken out after a good shred. However, this part of the process does require the addition of some new materials and some virgin fibers to make the yarn stronger.
Then, the material goes into another machine, which mixes the cotton and the recycled cloth. The mixed fibers are rolled into clumps and fed into a machine that turns them into what is called a fiber web.
The next step definitely makes this facility in Honk Kong one of its kind, where the fiber web gets bundled into some snake-like slivers. These slivers are then spun into ply yarn, the blocks to build a brand new garment. Finally, a new sweater is knitted by a machine, based on a computer design.
The customers here pay about $65 for recycled clothing. “How do we help consumers think about their clothes differently? Well, that’s one of the reasons why we have a glass box, doing research in a shopping mall”, says Edwin Keh, CEO of The Hong Kong Research Institute of Textiles and Apparel.
The H&M foundation has partnered with the institute, and the investment helped the company license and install the technology at one of the stores in their headquarter city Stockholm. The company calls it The Looop, where shoppers pay about $18, the price of a new pair of the brand’s sweatpants, and get to see the whole recycling process in action.
Recycling one garment takes about three days, which seems like a lot of time and effort to turn an old sweater into a new one. The reason is that a factory like this, which has the capacity of recycling thousands of tons of clothes in a single day, doesn’t exist yet. But H&M says that this kind of technology could be the solution for textile waste worldwide. “The holy grail is garment-to-garment recycling, and that’s for me where today, most our investment going to”, says Pascal Brun, head of sustainability at H&M.
Tazeen Fatma