Creating Sustainable Fashion From Recycled Clothing

A discolored dress. A lonely sock. Ripped and torn stockings. A tainted tops. The washed-out T-shirt. The worn-out jeans. The skirt that wasn’t your color. The ruined jacket. The old, forgotten or undesired clothes of your wardrobe. What to do with all the unwanted?

In perception of profits, the fashion industry produces ever-larger volumes of clothing at a faster pace, leading to lower quality and a huge amount of clothing waste, including unwanted factory surpluses or materials. And it’s not just clothing production; clothing consumption also produces waste.

Shoppers’ fast-fashion trend has controlled to over consumption and a throwaway mindset that increases clothing waste. According to the Environmental Audit Committee (EAC), Brits are buying and disposing clothes at a faster rate.

While intelligent recycling technologies help, collecting, sorting, and recycling clothing waste must scale up, spike demand, and improve the economic attractiveness of sustainable fashion.

Sustainable, circular initiatives in the fashion industry including H&M, Patagonia, and Zara – have already introduced take-back strategies. They expand and scale up systems for collecting and sorting unwanted clothes from households by 2025 to reproduce fibers.

H&M: Making Fashion Circular

The brand explores solutions to create a closed loop for textiles where unwanted clothes can be recycled into new ones, sets sustainability targets for a circular fashion industry within planetary boundaries using a science-based approach, and applies circular economy principles to its sustainability strategy.

Patagonia: Wanting The Unwanted

Patagonia isn’t concerned about losing profit when creating awareness on the environmental impact. With its Wear program, Patagonia takes old clothes back and gives the consumer a store credit and the clothing waste is fixed up and resold

Zara: Make Fashion Circular

Intensely devoted to environmental shield, Zara helps customers easily extend the lifespan of their clothes. They encourage consumers to bring back the unwanted by collecting clothes in its stores worldwide. Recently, owner of high street fashion chain ZARA, says its clothes will be made from 100% sustainable fabrics by 2025.

Fast fashion is out. Ecological, circular fashion is all that counts. Let’s dive deeper into why sustainability is worthy for business in Circular Economy Means Business.