In June, players from 16 countries will open the World Cup wearing other people’s old clothes.
Well, maybe. They will wear sports uniforms made from recycled fabrics, possibly with a mix of scraps and old clothing. This is the latest move by Nike, one of the world’s largest apparel companies, to incorporate more recycled materials into its clothing. Now, the clothing giant has announced that it has produced its first elite performance apparel from 100% textile waste using “advanced chemical recycling.”
Nike executives and some media reports have hinted that the outfit is a tipping point for sustainable fashion, meaning that “circular” clothing that can be recycled over and over again could soon be available to consumers.
As you might imagine, the real situation is a little more complicated.
Nike does have contracts with two chemical recycling companies, but no one is saying much about the technology or its scalability. Despite increased investment from fashion brands, experts said they don’t expect to see sales racks stocked with chemically recycled clothing anytime soon.
“Yes, technically it’s possible,” says Veena Singla, an environmental health researcher at the University of California, San Francisco. “But will that actually happen?” She and other researchers studying chemical recycling don’t think so – at least not in the way consumers expect. It won’t be long before we can buy chemically recycled clothing, wear it, return it and repeat the cycle.
More likely, the fashion industry is increasing its use of this recycling technique with industrial scrap fabrics, but nowhere near the level needed to cope with the projected increase in textile production.
Nike is right that the fashion industry has a sustainability problem. Apparel companies produce more than 100 billion items of clothing each year. In the process, they generate up to 10 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions and untold amounts of waste. The vast majority of textile products end up in landfills, incineration, or sent to informal dumps in poor countries. And all of this is made possible by fossil fuels, with almost 70% of clothing made from petroleum-based fabrics. The most common is polyester, which is a type of plastic that is also used in water bottles.
Nike and many of its competitors have pledged to make polyester more “circular” primarily through recycling, rather than reducing production.
The push to do so by chemical means is a response to the shortcomings of other strategies they have tried. Traditional mechanical recycling through shredding or crushing destroys the fibers. The resulting fabric should be a blend of 70-80% virgin material to ensure that anything made with it does not pill or tear.
A more common strategy is to turn discarded plastic bottles into new polyester. Patagonia pioneered this approach in the early ’90s, and by the beginning of the decade, virtually all recycled polyester was sourced from old bottles. But today, companies increasingly face lawsuits and regulatory scrutiny from those who want the bottle to go back to the bottle.
Chemical recycling is considered the next best option. The term refers to the use of solvents to dissolve fibers into basic chemical units, the building blocks from which new fabrics can be spun. At first glance, this is a true “circular” solution because it doesn’t rely on bottles, and proponents say used polyester shirts and running shorts can be turned into new ones again and again without compromising the quality of the fabric.
That’s the vision currently being promoted by fast fashion brands like Gap, H&M and Levi’s, many of which have signed multi-year deals with several chemical recycling startups. Last fall, Nike agreed to source “circular” polyester from two companies: Sweden’s Saia and America’s Loop Industries.
Research backs up some of the hype. Technically, chemical recycling can produce virgin quality polyester, and at least one method called methanolysis can maintain that quality even after repeated recycling. However, there are important limitations.
Diana Ferreira, a textile researcher at the University of Minho in Portugal, said fiber-to-textile chemical recycling remains limited by the availability of the appropriate fibers to use. “If you are dealing with a waste stream that is clean, well-separated, and rich in polyester, chemical recycling could in principle produce a material with properties comparable to virgin polyester,” she said. “But the situation becomes even more complex when we are talking about post-consumer textile waste.”
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In other words, chemical recycling is most effective when using homogeneous industrial waste rather than a pile of old clothes. The latter may include mixtures of cotton, nylon, wool, spandex, and acrylic, not to mention dyes, chemical coatings, threads, labels, and zippers. All this makes chemical recycling much less viable. At least not without careful screening and repeated pretreatment to chemically remove all of these contaminants.
“If you want it to work, the clothes need to be 100 percent polyester, and you need to get rid of so many toxic chemicals,” Singla said.
Beth Jensen of the nonprofit Textile Exchange is more optimistic. He said “all solutions” were needed to reduce the fashion industry’s dependence on fossil fuels, including chemical recycling. But she agreed that companies have a long way to go to establish the infrastructure needed to accept used clothing and turn it into new clothing using techniques such as methanolysis. Moreover, it is not clear who will build it. What about companies like Nike? government? Recycler? Is some combination of those entities working together?
Even if the industry can reach its optimistic goal of chemically recycled polyester, whether from scrap or people’s old clothes, by the early 2030s, production of “circular” fabrics will likely pale in comparison to the more than 169 million tons of polyester expected to be produced annually by then. Dionysios Vlakos, a chemical engineering professor at the University of Delaware, said Sire’s goal of producing even 3 million tons by 2032 is “too strong.”
Instead, companies need to “reverse the tide of fast fashion,” said Nusa Urbančić, CEO of the nonprofit Changing Markets Foundation. This means less clothing is produced overall, whether it contains recycled or virgin materials. Last year, the increase in recycled polyester, primarily from bottles, was dwarfed by an even larger increase in the production of fossil fuel-based polyester.
Urbancic views chemical recycling as an “excuse to continue producing plastic clothing” and advocates a complete withdrawal from polyester. This material can shed microfibers and expose consumers to harmful chemicals.
Nike, Cyre and Loop Industries did not respond to interview requests or a detailed list of questions, highlighting transparency issues raised by companies Grist spoke to, including Singla and Vlakos. Industry secrecy makes it difficult to know what’s really going on at these companies and whether their promise of #TheGreatTextileShift is different from failed chemical recycling efforts in the past.
It’s worth noting that Loop Industries has never turned a profit since its founding in 2010. The company was investigated by the SEC following a 2020 report accusing it of systematically misrepresenting its technology to regulators and investors, and settled a class action lawsuit in 2022 over similar accusations. Meanwhile, Sire has not disclosed how the “mega-scale” factory it plans to build in Vietnam will be able to process consumers’ used clothing, given the country’s ban on importing second-hand clothing.
“It remains to be seen whether (Nike’s announcement) means anything,” Singla said. For the foreseeable future, chemically recycled polyester appears to be limited to niche products such as World Cup uniforms.
