Recycling

Recover, a leading manufacturer of low-impact, high-quality recycled cotton fibre and cotton fibre blends, will be setting up Bangladesh's largest recycling plant in association with BEXIMCO.

The ITMF award that the Green Machine received in September is only the latest feather in its decorated cap. Developed by the Hong Kong Research Institute of Textiles and Apparel (HKRITA), the Green Machine has been making waves since its launch in 2016. Katherine Chan, Director (Business Development) at HKRITA, talks about the challenges that had to be encountered, and the excitement that the Green Machine has generated.

Worn Again Technologies, an innovator in chemical recycling, has secured yet another round of £27.6 million funding, the start-up’s most successful tranche since its founding, dedicated to a largescale demo plant that will leverage ground-breaking polymer processing technologies to upcycle 1,000 tonnes of textiles per year.

In a bid to promote innovation in textile recycling and use research findings to address practical issues, the Singapore-based Nanyang Technological University (NTU) has set up a collaborative textile research centre.

A new consortium is rallying 17 public and private European organizations to establish a circular economy. The project wants to enable the annual recycling of more than 2 million tonnes of PET fibres by 2030.

There’s plenty of evidence that reducing the consumption of clothing by wearing items longer and buying second-hand is preferable to purchasing recycled fibre clothes. But even second-hand fashion isn’t without problems when you consider the scale and pace of clothing production today. Again, most clothing is simply not designed to be recycled. Even when it is, the fashion industry lacks the kind of infrastructure needed to really embrace a circular economy model.

Two activist groups have released a new report 'The Real Truth About the US Plastics Recycling Rate', which documented a recycling rate of just 5-6% for post-consumer plastic waste in the US for 2021. The groups also revealed that while plastics recycling is on the decline, the per capita generation of plastic waste has increased by 263% since 1980.

Doing away with secondhand garments is easier said than done because people do need access to affordable clothing. Founder of Nairobi-headquartered Africa Collect Textiles (ACT), Elmar Stroomer, believes it is time to add a waste tax on imported items and the funds should be invested in high-end collection and recycling infrastructure.

Nairobi-headquartered Africa Collect Textiles (ACT) is run by ordinary people with extraordinary ideas on how to divert textiles from landfills. No one believed recycling clothes would work in a country where a sizeable proportion of people wears secondhand clothes from abroad. Founder Elmar Stroomer tells us why and how it does.