From cast-off clothes to fishing nets Europeans produce a staggering 12.6 million tonnes of textile waste per year. Most is burned, dumped in landfills or exported. But fibre-to-fibre recycling is another option that a new European Commission scheme will push companies to take.
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00:00 It seems we just can`t resist buying new clothes. But what happens to the millions of tons of
00:07 textiles we throw away every year in Europe?
00:11 Ghana and Accra, simply there, 15 million pieces of clothes every single week arrive
00:18 in the city. There was a new generation of kids. They have never seen the soil underneath
00:24 all of this textile waste. Imagine, they were playing on grounds that was built of our textile
00:29 waste.
00:30 Hello and welcome to "Business Planet." I`m at a recycling plant in Slovenia, where old
00:37 fishing nets and carpets are transformed into a special nylon yarn called Econil, which
00:43 can be recycled infinitely. Let`s find out how.
00:47 This is where the Econil journey begins, in a warehouse near Ljubljana, where the waste
00:53 arrives, old fishing nets, fabric scraps and thousands of tons of old nylon carpets. These
01:00 materials are all made from nylon six, a common type of nylon, which can be turned into Econil.
01:06 I caught up with the developer of Econil in Italy.
01:12 Aquafil is producing nylon. But instead of using oil, we are starting from waste. Some
01:19 of them are particularly ugly, like fishing nets, carpets and other plastic waste that
01:24 the industry couldn`t recycle before. So, it`s a kind of journey from trash to treasure.
01:31 A chemical recycling process turns the nylon waste back into raw caprolactam, a substance
01:38 that`s normally made from crude oil. It`s squeezed into long spaghetti-like strings
01:43 and then cut into tiny chips before it`s spun into fine strands of yarn.
01:49 So, this is Econil yarn after the chemical recycling.
01:55 And what is this going to be used for eventually?
01:58 Some of the Econil yarns are used for carpets, but these ones we see here are used to make
02:05 clothes, for example, sportswear, swimwear, underwear, anoraks, backpacks.
02:13 And it`s how those items are designed in the first place that makes all the difference
02:19 to how they can be recycled.
02:21 You can imagine a jacket. A jacket is having different layers of fabric, the sewing thread,
02:28 the labels, the zippers, metal components, many different types of fiber, sometimes intimately
02:36 blended together. That`s the difficulty of arriving to fiber to fiber recycling. The
02:42 product is simply not made for being recycled at the end.
02:48 In Europe, textile waste is a staggering 12.6 million tons a year. Most is either burned
02:54 or goes to landfill, some is exported.
02:58 The European Commission plans to introduce an extended producer responsibility scheme.
03:03 This makes the producer, the brand, pay for the entire life cycle of their products, including
03:08 the disposal.
03:10 The more polluting an item, the more they pay. The money will go towards recycling facilities
03:16 and research into circularity.
03:20 I went to Milan to meet Matteo Ward, who runs a sustainable design studio. He`s high hopes
03:26 of the extended producer responsibility scheme.
03:32 This is a fundamental change, you know, because we`ll put incentives in the brands and hopefully
03:36 creating products that are less to last - designed to last longer, that are more durable, that
03:41 are eventually recyclable, that can be regenerated, which is something that brands don`t do right
03:45 now, because they have zero incentives in doing that.
03:48 Matteo is a poacher turned gamekeeper. He used to work for a mainstream U.S. brand,
03:54 but became disillusioned with fast fashion after a textile factory collapsed in Bangladesh
03:58 in 2013, killing more than 1,000 people.
04:03 That was the moment - you know, when you look at yourself in the mirror and you`re like,
04:07 man, what am I doing? And like, I did not want to be a complicit in the murder of thousands
04:14 of people worldwide through my job. Never. But in reality, I was, because I never, ever
04:22 questioned whether the jeans and the T-shirts and the hoodies that we were selling were
04:26 coming from factories like that one.
04:29 Brad works with schools to highlight the social and ecological problems of fast fashion and
04:34 consults with brands like Candiani Denim, an Italian company that makes biodegradable
04:39 denim.
04:42 Recycling technology and sustainable fabrics will have a part to play in the future of
04:46 fashion. But we, consumers, need to change our habits if we want to reduce the impact
04:51 our clothes have on our world. See you next time on Business Planet.
04:58 (bell dings)