fashion_creating new sustainable materials

choose a raw material. We have different choices, from polyester to algae and mycelium. Jellyfish, even jellyfish. After the choice for a raw material, you can choose for a production technique to make a fabric out of the raw material. And after that, you have to choose a kind of coloring technique. And that could be a chemical coloring, or natural coloring, for example by bacteria.

what do you want to do when you can't use your clothing anymore. recycle it, or to incinerate, or to compost for example?

for example: algae, it's easy to grow, local.

weaving or knitting? knitting is a better option because it has less waste.

natural dyeing, which is a great alternative to chemical dyeing. But non-dyeing would be best.

https://goodonyou.eco/here-are-the-six-most-sustainable-vegan-fabrics/

https://www.onegreenplanet.org/environment/what-is-the-most-animal-and-eco-friendly-material-for-clothing/

 the best way is to choose  a material, a raw material, that is fully biodegradable, for eg. mycelium or jellyfish. Then you would go for a groven,  because you can already grow it in the shape that you want. So you don't have any waste material. Then for dyeing, you would not dye it at all. So there's no water use, no chemicals whatsoever. And then your after-use option would be to compost the whole garment. So put it in the ground and there's nothing left afterwards.

  What we do is for each raw material look at what the footprint is, when you look to the use of water, energy, distribution, waste So also the impact of toxic materials for people and planet. It's a rough indication for every raw material, how sustainable it is. So what we want to show is also the experimental phase for this kind of materials. new alternatives for traditional fabrics and develop new value chains based on these biobased materials.

http://labyrinth.artez.nl

https://www.treehugger.com/revolutionary-new-eco-material-gets-kickstart-4853671

fashion_natural materials cotton

cotton is a natural material, what is the difference between organic and non organic ?they are both natural - it grows on a tree, but nowadays we also have artificial cotton or actually as we call it an artificial cellulose fibre. Cotton is cellulose. It’s just that mother nature has made it into this fluffy material that we use in a t-shirt, but we can also engineer this and we do this by taking a cellulose resource, which can be an agricultural by-product such as straw or whatever or it can even be algae or it can be trees like eucalyptus or pine and then when we extract cellulose from the material we can dissolve that cellulose and spin it into a filament which is extremely comparable to what cotton actually is.

you could have a cotton t-shirt, Without the relationship with the cotton plant? cotton is a cellulose fibre, is a cellulose filament and indeed we call this cotton, but in the future you will buy a t-shirt and it might made from something else than cotton, even though it will have the same chemical structure as cotton as so to say. what about bamboo blends? other materials?

natural fibres like bamboo, hemp, from fibres from pineapple or flax they are of course very ancient. They’ve been around for centuries. They went out of fashion a little bit, because they are quite hard to make comfortable, they’re quite rigid fibres and you have to process them quite well to turn them into a very comfortable material and of course they’re relatively expensive because of this so that’s why people usually use cotton. But especially now, with sustainability being an issue, they’re revisiting these types of materials for products like underwear, which is something you use frequently and wash often, I hope. It’s something these fibres because they’re super durable would be quite suitable for. it also depends on region aswell. for example, in Holland, that would be the hemp or the flax, but indeed in more tropical areas it might bamboo or from pineapple.

from the perspective of sustainability: what does this 100 percent silk blouse mean?the process of making silk, which is basically the filaments small caterpillars wraps around itself to become a butterfly, or a moth I should say, the caterpillar is killed. Its more about an ethics question. From a sustainability perspective it’s quite interesting, because this fibre has so many unique properties. its very light, it is extremely flexible, comfortable, it handles moisture really well, it is soft to touch and it’s a pure natural material. it’s very ancient, I call this the carbon of a thousand years ago.

imagine silk from other sources than this caterpillar; there are more animals producing protein based fibres, that this silk actually is. And is it possible to make it in a more artificial way on a sustainable manner? to imitate the process of silk-making... perhaps rayon, Quite successful, but not very sustainable.

the most used fibre is of course polyester fibre or nylon fibre or oil based materials. What could be the best alternative to have this kind of materials in an renewable way? biopolymers? finding alternatives for these materials from organic resources which we call bio based polymers. you could use corn or other agricultural waste streams, converge them into biopolymers. Typically, now, you have materials like PLA, which is made from corn, that is seen as a promising biopolymer that one day we can also perhaps use to make textile from. This is very challenging, because these materials are not fully developed yet, they don’t have the same amazing properties as some of these material you mentioned Like what kind of properties? The tensile strength, basically being UV resistant, being washable many of times,you know chemically resistant, I mean, the washing principle, I mean, you add chemicals to a textile to clean them. This of course has some effects, some of these. Does that mean that we, as a consumer, have to change our behaviour or do you say: the behaviour is there we have to put the right properties in the textile?

when it comes to washing textiles, we might have to change our attitude, because we will use different materials, but also it’s very difficult to change consumer behaviour, so it’s also an engineering challenge, especially to these kinds of fibres, to make them, to innovate them in such a way so that they are more suitable for this. Because they can be recycled and they are renewable, because the raw material is renewable, the corn it grows on a field, but even if you take these materials in and you can still make to put them into a techno loop if needed and use them again. it grows on the land, but is there a competition between growing for textile and growing for food, for example. the corn on that field going to be used for food or is it going to be used for textile.

new ideas from natural resources: For example pineapple leaves for making shoes.jellyfish, a shoe made of jellyfish. A lot of leather-like materials from fruit waste.

it’s mainly designers who invent these materials. And that’s because there it’s very difficult to actually develop a textile, like that’s a very complicated process, but this leather, these leathers that are developed are actually first steps into new textiles and fabrics that we’re making. We can only, we cannot make them as flexible yet, we cannot make them as thin yet, we cannot wash them at this moment, but perhaps we can use them as leather-like material and use them in shoes or in bags.

however, natural leather is very Long lasting. durable. a bidirectional material, it can flex many different ways, it ages specific way, it comes from an animal. All these properties when you look at these leather replacements they’re all sort of alternative systems to leather. But when you look at the application of these materials, their properties are, in some cases, quite similar. Not every leather product is designed for durability. Sometimes it’s just, you know, casual use of leather in a fashionable product and especially for these kind of applications all these leather alternatives are very suitable. Leather, you know, brown leather shoes, if you treat them well they will last for 10 years or more and it’s a fantastic material. But for most of these fast changing fashion outs and like bags and cheap shoes, these materials are great. 

what about opportunities of a new material like mycelium. It’s called the new plastic. used a lot in the packaging industry, or as a leather replacement. when you look at these fungal materials, fungal fabrics, whatever you can call them, made from mycelium the amazing thing is that they are relatively easily to produce. They take a little energy, they can be engineered in different ways, they’re closely related to agricultural waste streams that we have and they’re most likely quite easy to return into an organic process, so you can recycle them, compost them quite easily.

So it would be amazing if we could actually unlock this technology and that the future of this textiles is not based on cellulose or cotton, as we say, but bases on a fungus, on mycelium and the unique properties of mycelium growing, growing textile that would be, that would be a great new addition to our material library.

how do you wash it, Such a material?these things need to be innovated and they need to still fit within our newfound understanding about sustainability. We can always add a lot of stuff to make things work, to make these textiles work for us, but if they then become unsustainable or unrecyclable again then it doesn’t make much sense.

fashion _ swop shop

the first five building blocks of the Business Model Template for fashion - motive, your dream and proposition.

we've got our business model archetype and have mapped your stakeholders.The sixth building block of the BMT is deciding on a strategy to achieve your value proposition together with the stakeholders you have defined in the network analysis. In addition to these stakeholders, other contextual factors, such as geographic location, the availability of materials, resources and infrastructure can play a role in deciding which strategy works best for you.  You will have to take these into account as they might represent obstacles or provide opportunities for your project.

 Strategies that are commonly used in sustainable business are for example ‘product-as-a-service’,  life cycle extension, community building and design for recycling. [An example of product as a service is the Dutch company Bundles that enables customers to only pay for the service of using a washing machine.] This business strategy alleviates consumers of the burden of becoming an owner and dealing with all the fuss of repair, maintenance and end-of-life landfill. Instead, the company remains the owner of the product and thus also of the valuable resources that can be extracted from the machine at the end of its life cycle to be put back into the circular economy.

 For Swopshop, the strategy can focus on local community building around life cycle extension of clothes.

 Building block number seven entails that you start making your project very concrete by answering the question which core activities need to be conducted in order to achieve your value proposition. If your project deals with the circular economy, you could make use of the nine R-strategies that are commonly used to organize multiple value creation.

 Recycling, to rethink and refuse. Because when we buy less, we need to worry less about how to repair or recycle it. The ultimate aim of a circular economy is to avoid landfill, as can be seen at the bottom of this model.

 In the case of Swopshop a core activity is to run the store where people can swap their clothes. This includes managing the material streams coming in and going out of the store, curating the space in such a way that it attracts the right customers and marketing the business via schools and social media. In terms of R-strategies the focus is on re-use and ultimately refusal of new clothing 

https://www.theswopshop.com

FASHION: WHAT U WEAR AND WHATS IN IT - SNEAKERS

the complexity of manufacturing in the fashion industry. We all know that a lot of different materials are being used in the products we wear, the most complex of them is, perhaps the shoe

first the lace - manually added. it runs through the lip of the shoe. lace is typically a polyester type of material. to match the shoe colour it needs to be dyed. that's also quite complex system to make sure that colours match within the product. some also have meta tips, So metal is even part of this shoe. And then of course we have all sorts of stickers and labels in here.

  the shoe in different parts.

the lip, the tongue of the shoe, and the upper, which is this part of the shoe, Those two things are generally separately manufactured, and then married basically in the manufacturing process.the tongue material, a pouch, yarn and thread Usually it's a cotton-polyester blend that is used to make this product mechanically sound, a polyester tape used for decoration. or perhaps leather,  But the leather is very thinly sliced and then laminated with a piece of non-woven, and it must be polyester or some sort of other plastic-type material.

Then you have the inner part of the shoe, which also is basically a laminated product.It has a core of poly-ether. a foam material that is basically glued to an outer layer on this side and an outer layer on that side, with different functionalities. This of course is soft, it's padded, so this gives you some comfortable wear qualities.Then you have another piece of foam and that's to give it body. Because you want to have a nice firm tongue in the shoe, it looks really cool.And then we finish it of with a nice piece of again laminated leather. then its stitched all together as one component.

polyester, we have a laminated product, a little piece of laminated leather, another laminated leather, some of the polyester-cotton yarn.  Probably some nylon in there as well and a piece of tape - five, six different types of materials in there. And this is just the tongue.

the upper part of the shoe and the sole. traditionally these things would be stitched into place but it could be glued. often stitched to give it mechanical strength, but every component here is clued. the side of the shoe may have decorative elements, they need to give you some protection against wind and rain. You have some materials that allows it to basically breath. Because of course your feet are getting warm and sweaty.another leather type insert. perhaps, some sort of embossed layer. Then we of course on top of that we have a piece of leather, which is reinforced with again a piece of non-woven, it looks like some sort of polyester, perhaps even polyethylene, non-woven material. And then we have on the other side the same thing.

  the heel part. complex, because the heel of a shoe is a very mechanical demanding part. It needs to support your heel property. So there is relatively a lot of stiffness and strength in this piece. So this has another different layer built up.  perhaps a polyester cloth  And that that is coded or fused with a thick layer in some sort of flexible plastic type that is basically heat pressed into the whole system. So it becomes extremely strong. Because you can imagine your heel moves up and down here all the time. and there is always trim. Little added pieces that are part of the finish. There is also a little bit of that in the side of the shoe for giving stiffness and reinforcement - 3d , it might even be a thermoset. however thermoset plastics are impossible to recycle.They are basically not allowed anymore in many products or they try to avoid these types of materials, And yet we have these undefined materials here in many shoes. Perhaps it's a polyurethane, a material that you can of course activate so to say. There's also an inner lining. and another foamed material for dimension and comfort. not to mention stitching. all of which can be automated or manually done. 

there's also the decorative elements. the eyelets for the laces, perhaps mesh - the need for ventilation. - If it would be only polyester it would be very nice, but again a mixture then there's a lot of glue. in order to get these things manufactured, people, most likely people by hand basically stick stuff together before they throw it underneath a stitching machine to secure it.There's also still a little bit of foam, polyether again to create the soft effect of the product.

 for one trainer we have a huge amount of products: polyesters, we have the polyether, the cell rubbers, polyester linings of different types of polyester, some leather laminates, , thermoset components, sticking, foam and glue. 

 so how can it be recycled? can it be recycled?

even if you were to recycle such a product,  the complexity as you can see it's mind-blowing. And we haven't even moved towards the sole of the shoe. even if you would be able to take the shoe apart,  everything would be polluted with a resin, a glue, a binder.So you have to clean these materials.

 how is it  designed and manufactured?

EVA expanded rubber material. is an amazing product, a synthetic polymer that basically allows this shoe to be soft and flexible and easy to walk on. with an air pocket here which is also to support you know the bounce in your step. But EVA is the material that does that over the long period of time, most likely injection-moulded or heat-moulded with these inserts - perhaps a bio-polymer And then together they push in this white, white-ish material.We have a very durable rubber, which is a synthetic rubber. Not a natural rubber. We have an expanded product with air, little air bubbles inside the rubber to give it that memory, the bounce. some sort of PVC, some sort of transparent polyvinyl chloride material

  the comfort sole, which again is a different type of cell rubber,  Lined with a polyester material, below that we have another material with a lot of little holes in it - to increase ventilation within the shoe so you don't sweat too much. It's all bonded, then stitched, laminated. six different types of plastics in one small area!  Polyester, nylons, EVA's, PVC's, other types of rubbers.

  "how do you simplify such a product?"

 a huge problem is the need for performance and durability, and therefore its inability to recycle usually. you can only incinerate this product and retrieve some energy. Or you can landfill it and then basically time takes care,with all bad consequences. a lot of these materials degrade slowly and leave  chemicals compounds in our soil material.

 We can say that almost every component has glue on it.So it's contaminated in any way. Many parts are coloured. So they are difficult to recycle because colour is something that needs to be pure and shiny. And when you start mixing things colours become reduced.We have most likely even a few thermoset materials in here. But we also have a little bit of leather. We have foams. We have a lot of polyester products in various different variations. We have laminated product, a lot of laminated product - often aligned with a rubberized cell,  a poly ether type of material, a composed laminated material etc. we have the stitching, the many layers of material and that is bonded into the lower part, the sole of the foot bed.So extremely complicated but often cheap. We have manual labour, we have automated labour, systems combined.we also have different sizes.There's about 7, 8, 9 different sizes for the same shoe. Different moulds, different cutting patterns, so difference lasts, so that's also extremely complicated.

 "is this the way we should be doing things?"

 We're trying to close the loop of fashion, we try to make products more circular. Should this not be banned? Should we not put regulation in on this? Can we do that? How does that measure to price?

fashion: textile sorting

https://www.circle-economy.com/programmes/textiles/fibersort 

FibreSort is an automated sorting technology that's able to recognize the composition and color of textiles. This technology has been developed and the development started 10 years ago, by Wilan Textiles, a sorter that realized that it has quite a big share of non-rewearable textiles. These are used textiles that do not have a value on the second-hand market. This can be because they are broken, they are not clean or they're very much out of fashion. So they are not necessarily technically broken textiles. So these non wearable textiles up to then and also currently, you would send them for, let's call it down-cycling, somewhere else abroad or in the worst case they are incinerated. At the moment that textiles are no longer re-wearable, it doesn't really matter whether they are trousers or a t-shirt.

put the cottons with the cottons, the wool with the wool, the cotton polyester blends with the cotton polyester blends, etc. So you can sell off these fractions to recyclers to process them. 

https://www.nweurope.eu/projects/project-search/bringing-the-fibersort-technology-to-the-market/

In 2016, a collaboration between six different partners started in the context of an interactive project. So that's an European funded project. And the aim of this project is to commercialize the FibreSort technology. there are two big components here so on the one hand, the partners decided to work together to improve the technical performance of the technology. you need to include the whole chain, or at least the chain, let's say the functions around the FibreSort to make sure that it's commercially viable. And also to make sure that the technology does what it should be doing. It's very important to have automated sorting technologies. Because the alternative would be manual sorting. 

there are different disadvantages to manual sorting.

 One, it takes lots of time. two you would basically base it on labels.So on composition claims on labels.labels they can be cut out, so then for those garments you can not actually sort them.

for specific material types there are reasons to doubt the accuracy of these composition claims. So to sort manually, to do that at skill and to really increase the business case for sorters and collectors and use textiles, it doesn't really make sense. you will not be able to sort them accurately, because of the labels. also it's not financially viable to check all these different labels. So that's why you really need automated sorting, otherwise it will never be a solution that cannot really operate at scale.

a very important limitation is that it only sorts mono materials. these are garments that consist of one material type.

there are different kinds of fabric on one product, you're not able to process those. So all those more complicated materials, products, they cannot be used as an input for the FibreSort. And that's a very important limitation because it means that the FibreSort is a beautiful technology and very promising to close the textile loop. we do have a rest problem in a sense that not every material is a mono material.

 Another big challenge still ahead is at the moment that you have sorted these textiles, and you want to sell it to a mechanical recycler for instance, because those are the mature technologies currently out there, There are still zippers, buttons and labels in those garments, the need for hardware removal - possible by hand, but the financial viability is tough.

the challenge of this project is very much related not necessarily on the technology,  but rather on the market development

the business model for collecters and sorters needs to change, in order for collectors and sorters to still be around in a few years from now. So this transition towards circularity for them is crucial to ensure that they are still able to collect and sort used textiles.And it's also very much why for instance I believe in the FibreSort technology and the need for similar technologies to arise. Because if we don't do anything in the current setting, so with these mountains of used textiles just growing, and meanwhile the demand for these textiles struggling let's say,  If we don't do anything, then actually in a few years from now, there will be no financial incentive for collectors to collect textiles anymore. 

According to Hilde van Duijn, textiles should be recycled in multiple rounds, versus using recycled content for yarn/textiles, without further recycling possibilities. An automated sorting system is needed according to Hilde, so that textile waste can be collected and sorted in a viable future business model, versus hand sorting as we know it today. In order to be able to correctly reuse or recycle the large volumes of textile waste, a market demand for recycled materials is needed. These will establish a closed loop textiles system. She does not specifically talk about consumer awareness

The PET fibres come from bottles, which is a source of PET that can be recycled either into new bottles or into garments. However, Hilde van Duijn states that once PET fibres are used for garments, it is impossible to then recycle that garment into a new textile again. The garment has lost its value as a textile and can only be recycled in other capacities. She perceives this as value loss and therefore, downcycling.

fashion: material waste

Natural resources used for extraction, farming, harvest, processing, manufacturing and shipping phases of the value chain, play an important role in the fashion industry. In the current linear fashion industry, these non-renewable materials are extracted, used and ultimately discarded as textile waste. This textile waste mountain can be divided in pre-consumer waste (also called industrial waste) or post-consumer textile waste. These textiles are often incinerated, landfilled or in exceptional cases, recycled. 

Understanding what happens with textile waste is important in transitioning towards a circular economy. Often governmental bodies develop a strategy for waste management, for example in the Waste Framework Directive. In this directive, the European Parliament demands waste management legislation and policy to act according to the waste hierarchy. The waste hierarchy aims to retain the value of resources for as long as possible. The hierarchy is as follows: 

(a) prevention; 

(b) preparing for reuse; 

(c) recycling; 

(d) other recovery, e.g. energy recovery; 

(e) disposal. Unfortunately, around 10–20% of all textile products are currently wasted, which results in large resource losses when not considered either for reuse or recycling, as textile waste is currently incinerated or disposed of, which are the last steps of the waste hierarchy. Whereas increasing the collection of used clothing for reuse and recycling in the EU leads to a reached reduction of among others, 8% climate change, 8% fossil depletion and 7% urban land occupation on overall environmental performance. 

So, improving the environmental impact of textiles thus requires an increase in reuse and recycling of textile waste. But, what exactly happens to our collected textile waste? Sanne de Lorme, communications Sympany shows the daily practice of a Dutch sorting company dealing with mainly post-consumer textiles and gives insight into the possibilities and limitations of the current recycling system.

Sympany is a textile collector.they collect the discarded textiles in the Netherlands. then sort it and sell it for either re-use or recycing, collecting around 24-25 million kg of textle every year. So in the Netherlands, around 80 million kg of textile is being collected.And Sympany collect around 24 to 25 million kg every year.In total though about 145 still ends up in the household waste. And unfortunately this gets burned.

Sympany's vision is to collect as many discarded textiles as possible. And give all of those items a sustainable new destination. We buy and buy more and more textiles every year. the average of new-bought items in a year is now 46 a person. And we throw away around 40 each year as well. People start to buy more but also they throw away more of the clothes. We see really differences in the quality. So, before there were a lot of like re-used, re-wearable items. And this is getting less and the quality is declining. So this is something we see throughout the years. Because of the fast fashion, because of like the quality of the clothes that people buy and also throw away. There is a lot of household waste in the textile. So even the good textile is getting infected by that. People throw away their food leftovers, stuff from the garden, everything that you can imagine, they throw away in the textile container.

Some of the municipalities in The Netherlands still think they can earn with the collection of textile. So they have to be paid to get the textile from them. yet, The overall prices on the sales are dropping. So there is a lot of textile that's on the market and the overall prices are decreasing, So the whole business model with the costs of sorting, transport and then the high costs that we have to pay to municipalities is under pressure. for the recycling, there aren't that big solutions yet So there're problems with upscaling recycling possibilities, but also the revenue models for recycling possibilities aren't there yet. And our percentages of recycling quality are growing. we need to find a solution for that, that it also has a revenue model.

the circular chain of textile. Without people collecting it, sorting it and giving it a new destination, there is no circular model possible. specific customers, all have a specific demand. if we don't sort what they want, we will loose the customers. And nobody will end up buying products. We also have our specific buyers that buy not only our shop quality, but also all the other qualities. it's a question of like the amount that they buy. So you can also have like complaints about the qualities, recycling qualities are growing The quality of the textile is decreasing So we need to come up with solutions for recycling categories.But we cannot do this alone. We need to do this with stakeholders in like the textile industry to come up with these solutions. And we need to collaborate where possible. we need a really good regulation from the government on this. So that not only the possibilities are there to recycle but also the demand for the recycled products or the yarns or whatever is there.

the first thing that is needed is that we start to buy less. If we buy less and better quality then we throw away better quality, that can be re-used. Either re-used or recycled. Because we are all like one actor and only if we collaborate we can find the recycling solutions for it.

textile blends

 When you look at the labels in your garments, you will see that the current textiles are composed of a variety of materials.

nowadays current textiles are composed of many different types of fibres, why does this makes post-consumer textile recycling very challenging.

 If you were to burn a piece of textile, you would see large differences, based on the fibre composition. hundred percent cotton. It burns readily without melting, like burning paper, a material also consisting of cellulose. There is no distinct smell, and the residue is a small amount of light grey ash 

a piece of hundred percent polyester however, burns slowly and melts, and it smells like burning plastic. The residue consists of black, hard matter

a blend of thirty percent acryl, forty percent of polyester and thirty percent of wool burning. when burnt The burning is very intense and smells very bad. We have no explanation, based on the fibre composition, why this burns so readily. Most of the textiles nowadays are composed of many different types of fibres. As you can understand, this also means that processing of these post-consumer textiles through recycling can be very challenging. So why do we use textile blends at all?

 To understand why we use textile blends, we first need to know a little bit about the properties of each fibre. Tenacity says something about the strength of the fibre. Elongation is the ability of a fibre to recover its original length when stretched and released. And moisture regain is the ability of a dry fibre to absorb moisture under humid conditions.

cotton is a strong fibre and becomes even stronger in a wet state. It is comfortable to wear due to high moisture regain. Viscose is not so strong but also very comfortable due to high moisture regain. Polyester is a strong fibre, but is not so comfortable as it does not absorb moisture. Elastane is a very stretchy fibre providing a lot of comfort.

therefore its easy to understand why a single-component textile such as 100% polyester or 100% cotton, often does not fulfil the requirements of today’s fashion. Fibre blending, by combining two or more fibres to a new yarn, can combine the best qualities of each fibre. Selection of fibres for blending is often based on achieving several objectives. One is to improve functionality of the fabric. A well-known example is the presence of a few percent of elastane in jeans to improve wear comfort. Another example is a blend of polyester and cotton, to combine strength and comfort. But also to reduce the price as polyester fibres are cheaper than cotton fibres. A third reason can be ease of processing, as synthetic fibres can be produced in a wide range of fibre lengths compared to the relatively short length of natural fibres, making spinning easier.

a well-known combination is a 50/50 blend of cotton and polyester, but other fibre combinations are also used. Elastane is not only added to cotton in jeans, but also to polyester, polyamide, wool or other fibre combinations to create clothing that stretches with your body. In the end, you get complex textiles, often based on 2 or 3 fibres, but also combinations of 4 or 5 fibres are not unusual  However, for sustainability and end-of-life options blending might not be such a good idea. There are good recycling options for 100% polyester and 100% cotton fabrics. Chemical recycling of polyester leads to virgin quality and cotton can be processed to regenerated cellulose fibres like viscose or lyocell. But what happens when fibre blends are used instead of only cotton or polyester? And when in each garment a few percent elastane is present? Then the current recycling technologies do not fit anymore as each textile fibre has its own optimal recycling process and elastane amongst others acts as a contaminant.In this case, recycling becomes technically complicated, energy-consuming and expensive and will most likely not become a profitable business.To change this, we need to start at the beginning of the value chain,with design for circularity as the focus area.Recycling options for monomaterials, like 100% cotton, are much more promising than recycling of multimaterials like textile blends.We can also work on alternatives to elastane made from fully recyclable biobased polyesters. Another option is improving the strength of regenerated cellulosic fibres. In that case, blending will not be requird anymore.Textile recycling of post-consumer goods is still in its infancy,and we should learn from mature recycling industries, like paper and glass.

 In particular, we should also follow developments of plastic recycling closely, as it has large similarities with the current textiles for fashion in terms of material use and complexity.If we do this,we will stand a much better chance of making fashion truly sustainable.