Want not, waste not In the UK, almost three-quarters of discarded clothing ends up in landfill or being burned, with less than 1 per cent being recycled into other garments. In part, that’s because recycling clothes isn’t easy. “There is a lack of thought at the design stage, which makes it challenging for recycling to be viable,” says Richard Thompson at the University of Plymouth, UK. Buttons, toggles and other parts have to be removed, but the materials themselves are also tricky to break down and reuse. That could soon change. A Japanese company called Teijin has developed a way to chemically decompose polyester so it can be used again as a raw material, while a European Union-funded project called Trash-2-Cash is investigating how new, high-quality fibres can be created from unwanted clothing. And in 2017, Herbert Sixta from Aalto University in Finland and his colleagues found an ionic liquid that could be applied to polyester-cotton blends to separate the two types of fibres. Without any further processing, the cotton could then be used to make new clothing.

Want not, waste not

In the UK, almost three-quarters of discarded clothing ends up in landfill or being burned, with less than 1 per cent being recycled into other garments. In part, that’s because recycling clothes isn’t easy. “There is a lack of thought at the design stage, which makes it challenging for recycling to be viable,” says Richard Thompson at the University of Plymouth, UK. Buttons, toggles and other parts have to be removed, but the materials themselves are also tricky to break down and reuse.

That could soon change. A Japanese company called Teijin has developed a way to chemically decompose polyester so it can be used again as a raw material, while a European Union-funded project called Trash-2-Cash is investigating how new, high-quality fibres can be created from unwanted clothing. And in 2017, Herbert Sixta from Aalto University in Finland and his colleagues found an ionic liquid that could be applied to polyester-cotton blends to separate the two types of fibres. Without any further processing, the cotton could then be used to make new clothing.