Is polyester a friend or foe in the fashion industry’s quest for circularity? The answer might lie somewhere in between.
That’s according to sustainability experts at the Sourcing at Magic trade show in Las Vegas, who acknowledged that while polymer-based fibers have been fingered for their many adverse environmental impacts, their continued presence in collections is likely a given for the foreseeable future.
The ways that brands choose to employ polyester—and their thoughtfulness surrounding circular advancement in the recycled fiber space—may hold the key to rendering it a “frenemy” to the environment rather than an all-out adversary, however.
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Grace Wu, founder of Canada-based luxury outerwear label Loop Division, provided context for the continued dominance of polyester and polymer-based materials in certain categories. The brand’s DNA is rooted in its functionality, propelled by high-tech materials with the capacity to withstand the elements, she explained.
The cold-weather label, which makes parkas, ski jackets and shells, uses synthetic polyester down and relies on textile processes like lamination, bonding and coating which enables it to create durable, waterproof, windproof and moisture-wicking performance garments for activities like skiing and mountaineering. Such qualities can’t be replicated using natural fabrics like cotton or man-made cellulosics, she believes.
But the brand is dedicated to sourcing non-virgin inputs, Wu said. Loop Division purchases mostly recycled polyester made from plastic bottles, which come at a higher price point than conventional polyester fiber. It also uses recycled nylon, which demonstrates high stretch and tensile strength, for many of its products, and is experimenting with dope-dyeing methods, wherein color is injected into the material in its liquid form, to enhance colorfastness and eliminate the need for water-based dyeing processes.
Camille Tagle, co-founder and creative director of New York and Philadelphia-based textile recycling body FabScrap, said much of the 7,000-pound load of apparel waste that comes into its warehouses each week is made up of polyester or poly-blends.
A former designer, Tagle said that the use cases for the material are vast, hence its dominance across categories in the apparel sector. “As a designer, I dabbled in a lot of different markets… from contemporary [to] mass market,” she said. From that “unique experience,” she learned that choices surrounding material selection often come down to their application and, of course, to the bottom line.
Now, as the leader of a group that focuses on sorting usable deadstock for use by designers and brands, as well as downcycling unusable materials for use in industrial applications like insulation, Tagle said she’s overwhelmed by the sheer volume of polyester that comes to FabScrap as waste. “When you see these things come in huge tsunami waves… the amount that we receive, how varied it is and how little consistency there is, is why we downcycle most of the things that can’t be reused,” she explained.
Sortation remains the textile recycling sector’s biggest hurdle. FabScrap, and other recycling bodies like it, see “so many different blends… even one brand will have an unlimited variety of compositions and mixtures of fibers,” she said. Over the past eight years, the firm has diverted nearly 2 million pounds of fabric from landfills, she said, illustrating the massive scale of sorting infrastructure needed to make sure those fabrics find a new home.
There have been developments in sortation technologies, like scanners that identify the fiber content of a garment, but those efforts haven’t yet scaled to a commercial level. Blended textiles are now salvageable via novel chemical or hydrothermal recycling processes, but those solutions, too, require funding and the buy-in of brands to grow. Until the infrastructure for textile recycling is scalable and widely applicable, prices on recycled materials will remain higher than conventional inputs.
The price differential is not prohibitive and shouldn’t be a deterrent from using, and driving up demand for, recycled polyester, Tagle said. “We put something out there without thinking about the consequences, and now it will exist well beyond our lifetime and future generations’ lifetimes–it’s literally it’s not going anywhere,” she said of the ubiquitous material. “Obviously, it will take quite a long time for our industry to really make a significant dramatic switch” to non-virgin versions of polyester, but with all the advancement in the space, that substitution is an exercise in doing the “bare minimum” to drive circularity, she believes.
