4.03 · Fashion Made from Trash

Fashion Made from Trash
Old bottles, fishing nets and even chewing gum are turning into things we wear. Is that enough?

The fashion industry has a waste problem. According to the United Nations, making a single pair of jeans takes 3,781 liters of water, from growing the cotton to delivering the jeans to the store. And when clothes become unwanted, most of them don’t get a second life. Every second, the equivalent of one garbage truck full of textiles goes to a landfill or is burned. Now a new generation of designers is asking a hopeful question: what if trash could become the raw material?

The best-known example starts with plastic bottles. First, used bottles are collected, sorted and cleaned. Then a shredder cuts them into small flakes. The flakes are melted and pushed through tiny holes to make long, thin polyester fibers, and the fibers are spun into yarn. Finally, the yarn is woven into fabric, and the fabric is sewn into jackets, sneakers and backpacks. There’s plenty of raw material: in 2023, Mexico collected 63% of its PET bottles and containers for recycling, one of the highest rates in the Americas.

But bottles aren’t the only trash that designers are rethinking. Some swimsuits and sneakers are now made from nylon that is regenerated from old fishing nets and fabric scraps. In 2018, the Amsterdam area even launched a sneaker called the Gumshoe, with soles partly made from chewing gum collected off the city’s streets. Ideas that once sounded like jokes are now products that people are proud to wear.

Still, recycled fashion won’t save the planet on its own. Turning trash into clothing takes energy, and a jacket made from bottles is still a jacket: one day, it’ll be thrown away. Almost all recycled polyester comes from bottles, not from old clothes, and less than 1% of the material in our clothes is recycled into new clothes. That’s why some critics call it downcycling: the plastic moves down from a bottle, which can be recycled into a new bottle, to a shirt that usually isn’t recycled. Polyester clothes also shed microfibers, tiny pieces of plastic that come off in the washing machine. An estimated half a million metric tons of them reach the ocean every year.

So the future of fashion will probably rest on two ideas at once: making new clothes from waste, and making every piece of clothing last longer. Jackets will be designed to be repairable, with zippers and pockets that can be replaced, and fabrics will be chosen because they can be recycled again. As a popular saying goes, the greenest garment is the one you already own. None of this is going to happen by accident. It’ll happen only if shoppers keep asking where their clothes come from, and where they’ll go next.