Small but mighty, trims are the MVPs of the fashion world. Buttons, zippers, fasteners, grommets, thread, tapes, bindings, beads and sequins add visual interest, lend structure or literally hold garments together. Yet they also serve as impediments to a piece of clothing’s afterlife, disrupting the sorting, deconstruction and preprocessing that needs to happen at scale to usher textile-to-textile recycling into the mainstream.
It’s not for nothing, after all, that 92 million tons of textile waste end up in the landfill or incinerator every year, said Sarah Coulter, U.S. program director at Accelerating Circularity, an “action-oriented” nonprofit that seeks to build systems to transform old textiles into new. Trims and their ilk — think labels, adhesives, interfacings and linings — she said, are among the “most common contaminants that need to be removed to enable effective textile-to-textile recycling.”
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Two years ago, Accelerating Circularity convened the circular systems for trims and ignored materials, or CSTIM, working group, rallying the likes of zipper-maker YKK, adhesive materials manufacturer Avery Dennison, collection and sorting company Tomra and AI-enabled textile identification platform Refiberd. What it found through its research and knowledge sharing was a fragmented landscape characterized by a lack of access to consistent high-volume feedstock, high labor costs for preprocessing and scant industry-wide standards for input quality or material certification.
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While an automated preprocessing system that chops up material and filters out trims can help increase throughput, improve accuracy and reduce labor costs, Coulter said, it can still lead to issues: A T-shirt with minimal trims can have a recovery rate of up to 90 percent, but a multilayer jacket with heavy embellishments would be rejected even before entering the line. (Jeans, with their heavy hardware and seams, might squeak through with a 30 to 40 percent recovery rate, which is still suboptimal.) Equally important, the dearth of standardized inputs and clear market commitments makes it difficult for sorters to justify more advanced investments in fiber detection and trim recognition.
“So the scalability of this really hinges on demand signals from brands and clear specs across the value chain,” Coulter said. “Even the economics of scale of automation don’t really make sense without those demand signals.”
Brands therefore have a “critical role” in influencing system demand and feedstock quality, the working group found. While recyclers also must clearly communicate their material specifications — such as fiber ratios, contamination thresholds and formatting needs — brands can, through design choices like standardized fiber blends and trim simplification, improve end-of-life recyclability. Even better, they can “provide stability” in the system by contracting feedstock return volumes or codeveloping closed-loop collection programs.
Recyclers that have externalized the toil of decontamination and detrimming, too, can work on developing what Coulter describes as “more harmonized, less bespoke” feedstock standards. One challenge of obtaining consistent feedstock in the appropriate format and composition is due to the fact that variation in fiber blends, dye finishes and the presence of trims leads to high rejection rates or extra filtration. Another possibility is for recyclers to borrow a page from advanced recyclers like G3rn and Fujian Cyclone Technology to internalize some preprocessing functions, which allows them to accept less-refined input and potentially lower the cost of feedstock acquisition over time.
“Each new vendor partnership with a recycler requires really bespoke negotiation and trialing, and it’s a really siloed landscape that increases operational costs and discourages investment in scalable preprocessing and limits the inner operability across the system,” Coulter said. “It creates inefficiencies for brands and collectors who want to support circularity but can’t navigate all of these multitude of technical and material demands.”
If recyclers could accept a “slightly broader” general feedstock, do the final quality assurance and preprocessing themselves at their own plants, then “we’re well on our way,” she added.
Or, alternatively, since a lot of the money has been flowing into the recycling technologies, which are starting to scale up and show promise, that money “really needs to be funneled into the garment processing and sorting area, because that’s where we need the capacity to process feedstock, so that we have the feedstock for the recyclers to use,” said Brian LaPlante, senior manager of sustainability at YKK.
Some of this funding could come from public and philanthropic capital, extended producer responsibility programs, tax credits or government procurement strategies that incorporate circular materials.
But again, a lot of it comes down to the brands, LaPlante said, adding that they “need to start designing more with an eye toward not only garment end of life but also the other higher levels of circularity — durability, repairability and emotional durability — and really think through the entire life cycle of the garments.”
YKK, he noted, has been fielding a lot of requests from customers to develop monomaterial trims that don’t have to be separated out from the rest of the garment. So far, LaPlante said, monomateriality “doesn’t work as well” for zipper and other slide-fastener-type products because they’re not as durable.
“So there’s a real challenge within that,” he said. “Are you designing a product for its end of life? Are you designing a product for the higher levels of circularity, which is longevity, durability and repairability? One of the big learnings that we came away with was how to be able to design products that would work potentially in future systems, as we improve feedstock specifications, as we improve technologies — things along those lines — but would also maintain that durability and longevity that we were looking for.”
CSTIM’s next act is to craft “specific and actionable” guidance for brands on the applicability of design for circularity principles with respect to trims and other potential contaminants. The working group also plans to develop textile-to-textile feedstock specifications that it hopes will push the industry to scale standardized, high-quality inputs for recycling streams.
“That’s really what we’re looking to in the next phase of our work: try to establish some design guidelines around that area,” LaPlante said. “And, you know, in a perfect world, recyclers would like to have garments with no trims whatsoever, but that would make it a little challenging for us to clothe ourselves, so we need to find a happy balance between the two.”