At H&M's flagship store in Paris, it's hard to find clothes that aren't made from "recycled materials".
Last year, 79% of the polyester in the company's collections was made from recycled materials, and next year it wants everything to be recycled.
The Swedish giant in so-called fast fashion told AFP that recycled materials allow "the industry to reduce its dependence on virgin polyester produced from fossil fuels".
The problem is that "93% of all recycled textile materials today come from plastic bottles, not old clothes," said Urska Trunk of the campaign group Changing Markets. In other words, from fossil fuels.
And while a plastic bottle can be recycled five or six times, a T-shirt made from recycled polyester "can never be recycled again," Trunk stressed.
According to the nonprofit Textile Exchange, almost all recycled polyester is made from PET (polyethylene terephthalate) from plastic bottles.
In Europe, most textile waste is thrown away or incinerated. Only 22% is recycled or reused, most of it being turned into insulation, mattress filling or cleaning cloths.
"Less than one per cent of fabrics used to make clothes are recycled into new clothes," the European Commission told AFP.
Recycling textiles is "much more complex than other materials such as glass or paper", according to Lenzing, an Austrian manufacturer known for its wood fibres.
For a start, clothes made from more than two fibres are so far considered non-recyclable.
Clothes that can be recycled must be sorted by color, and then have the zippers, buttons, studs and other materials removed.
This is often expensive and labour-intensive, experts say, although pilot projects are starting to emerge in Europe, says Lisa Panhuber of Greenpeace.
Reusing cotton may seem like the obvious answer. But when cotton is recycled, its quality drops so much that it often has to be mixed with other materials, experts say.
To deal with the problem, fashion brands are using recycled plastic to incur the wrath and frustration of the food industry, which pays to collect the used bottles.
"Let's be clear: this is not circular," the drinks industry wrote in a devastating open letter to the European Parliament last year, condemning the "worrying trend" of the fashion industry making claims "about adherence to green policies related to the use of recycled materials".
Polyester recycling is another dead end, according to Laurent Veillard of the Zero Waste Europe (ZWE) network.
It is often unclean and mixed with other materials such as elastane or lycra, which "prevents any recycling", she insists.
Jean-Baptiste Sultan of the French NGO Carbone 4 also condemns polyester: "From its production to recycling, (polyester) pollutes water, air and soil."
In fact, environmental groups are demanding that the textile industry stop producing polyester altogether, even though it accounts for more than half of their production, according to Textile Exchange.
According to 2019 data from the European Environment Agency (EEA), almost half of textile waste collected in Europe ends up in African second-hand markets or, more commonly, dumped in "open dumps".
Another 41% of the bloc's textile waste goes to Asia, mostly "to specialised economic zones where it is sorted and processed".
"Used textile materials are mostly recycled into industrial rags or fill, or re-exported for recycling in other Asian countries or for reuse in Africa," the agency said.
A new EU rule adopted in November aims to ensure that exported waste is recycled and not dumped in landfills.
But the EEA acknowledged that "there is a lack of consistent data on the quantities and fate of used textiles and textile waste in Europe".
In fact, NGOs note that much of the waste clothing from Europe sent to Asia goes to 'Export Processing Zones', which, according to Paul Roland of the Clean Clothes Campaign, are 'notorious for providing 'illegal' export warehouses where even the low labour standards of Pakistan and India are not respected'.
Exporting "clothes to countries with low labour costs for sorting is also a horror from a carbon footprint perspective," said Mark Minassian of Pellenc ST, which makes optical sorting machines used in recycling.
The awful truth is that "recycling is a myth for clothes," insists Greenpeace consumer expert Panhuber.
But besides all this, "the biggest problem is the quantity of clothes produced," said Celeste Grilette of Carbone 4.
For Panhuber and Greenpeace, the solution is simple: buy fewer clothes.
"We need to reduce consumption, repair, reuse and recycle," she concluded. /BGNES
Why 'recycling' in the fashion industry is failing to save the planet
