That shiny new top for a special night out, or fresh bright towel in the hotel room, or soft pastel no-iron sheets in the guest room, all have one thing in common – they get old, and ugly, and wear out. And existing recycling has limited options for this – despite being told to put old things in the correct recycling bin, it cannot all be recycled sustainably.
If other options have been exhausted and it cannot be reused, repaired, refurbished, remanufactured, repurposed or recycled, then basic materials should be recovered. With polyester for example, chemical recycling is an option (dependent on the mixture of fibres involved). The process is technically complex, and a lot of waste material escapes.
PET (polyethylene terephthalate, a kind of polyester, used for bottles, trays, and fabric) is more recycled than most plastics, about 50% in Europe. However, only about 17% (in 2022) of that recycled PET material becomes clean new bottles, the rest becomes plastic packaging and mixed fibre clothing (recycled PET packaging/trays and mixed fibre polyester textiles, are not themselves recycled much) or is lost during in the recycling process.
So up to 63% of PET is lost each cycle as waste, see graph above – and the 17% recycled material becoming new water bottles, is reduced in future cycles in the same way. There is still huge value in recycling all clear plastics, but the current non-circular process requires substantial virgin/new PET inputs each cycle.
Recycling of mixed fibres like poly-cottons is more difficult. Researchers experimenting with chemical processing to separate mixed fibres for reuse, are successful with small batches processing uncontaminated pre-consumer waste like offcuts from manufacturing. These complex chemical processes involve heat, rewashing, and manual sorting with high energy inputs making them technically less “sustainable” in many cases, than virgin cotton or polyester, depending on a number of factors.
Scaling the process is complicated since post-consumer textiles sourced from mixed recycling collections, may be contaminated with metallic dyes, chemical coatings like fireproofing, hidden fasteners, and unlabelled additional fibre content even with careful sorting. The risk from even minor contaminations, and heavy resource consumption, limits scaling (Marusic (2024), Gusein (2025)).
A denim factory in Bangladesh invested in mechanical reprocessing to turn pre-consumer waste, offcuts from manufacturing, into fibre ready for reweaving, close to 100% re-use. But this could not be scaled to process post-consumer waste, due to contamination.
To move towards full circularity, policy change and funding are needed. The EU proposed Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) policy requires textiles to be clearly “labelled” (even at a chemical level) so source, and content, are known, making more complex recovery, and recycling, possible. In addition, a fee collected from textile manufacturers could cover end-of-life recovery/recycling costs. Systemiq (Hermann et al 2025) calculate that Europe could be recycling ten times more polyester by 2030.
Until EPR policy enables easy consumer-level recycling of clothingwhere you just check the label to know where to recycle, innovations in testing of fibres that confirm the exact fibers used in manufacturing, enable better separation for processing, but are costly and not currently available to consumers. The lack of information about our clothing make-up means a lot of “wishcycling” happens – putting items in the wrong recycling bins.
More Information from GreenBusinessJournal
- Average life of a workwear uniform is two years.
- Currently only 1% of textiles consumed in the UK are recycled.1
- Every year, the UK produces over half a million tonnes of polyester textile waste, and households throw away 300,000 tonnes of clothing.2
- Polyethylene terephthalate (PET) or Polyester, is the most common thermoplastic polymer resin of the polyester family, used in clothing fibres, liquid and food containers, and thermoforming for manufacturing.
- A tonne of new polyester clothing creates over 20 tonnes CO2e/T.
- The UK currently has no textile polyester recycling systems. The only option is landfill or incineration.
- No worn post-consumer polyester textiles are currently recycled.
Action:
- Use less plastic, generally.
- Buy less non-recyclable materials (like mixed fibre clothing, polystyrene, and bright coloured plastic homeware) – then trying to “wishcycle” it away (thanks Sam). It never goes away, it either gets incinerated, or goes to landfill.
- Keep recycling carefully! Your clean uncontaminated recyclables in the specified containers at official collection points are very useful to organisations developing circular material use systems.
- In the UK, check for specific recycling options and locations here: https://www.recyclenow.com/recycling-locator
– In Portugal, here: https://www.ondereciclar.pt/
References
Grant, A. et al. (2022) ‘How circular is PET?’, Zero Waste Europe, 16 February. Available at: https://zerowasteeurope.eu/library/how-circular-is-pet/ (Accessed: 29 May 2025).
ANDRITZ (2025) Sustainable fashion: ANDRITZ tearing line starts up at Pacific Jeans, Bangladesh, Andritz AG Newsroom. Available at: https://www.andritz.com/newsroom-en/nonwoven-and-textile/2025-05-14-pacific-jeans-group (Accessed: 29 May 2025).
‘The climate impact of chemical recycling technologies’ (2020) Quantis, 30 November. Available at: https://quantis.com/reports/the-climate-impact-of-chemical-recycling-technologies/ (Accessed: 29 May 2025).
Strategy for textiles – European Commission (2022) Official European Commission – TCLF (Textiles, clothing, leather and footwear) industries. Available at: https://single-market-economy.ec.europa.eu/sectors/textiles-ecosystem/strategy-textiles_en (Accessed: 29 May 2025).
Plastics and the circular economy (2019) len MacArthur Foundation. Available at: https://www.ellenmacarthurfoundation.org/plastics-and-the-circular-economy-deep-dive (Accessed: 29 May 2025).
Gusein, S. (2025) Does the Circular Story Still Hold Up When You Do the Math? Shivam Gusain, Substack. Available at: https://substack.com/home/post/p-163767835 (Accessed: 29 May 2025).
Marusic, K. (2024) Q&A: Director of sustainability at Eastman Chemical Company talks chemical recycling – The Daily Climate, Daily Climate. Available at: https://www.dailyclimate.org/industrial-chemical-recycling-2667644755/particle-1 (Accessed: 29 May 2025).
Hermann, S. et al. (2025) ‘The Textile Recycling Breakthrough: Why policy must lead the scale-up of polyester recycling in Europe’, Systemiq. Available at: https://www.systemiq.earth/reports/the-textile-recycling-breakthrough/ (Accessed: 30 May 2025).