Is Circular Fashion Coming?
Last year Renewcell, an important start up and industry solution, failed. Now it's back, but is fashion ready for it?
It’s sometimes easy to forget that we have all the solutions we need to get us out of the fix we’re in. That’s one of the reasons why I started this Substack, and the basis of the book I wrote, What to Wear and Why. There is a climate positive future!
The problem is not all these solutions have the support to find success. One of the most crushing disappointments of last year was the failure of Renewcell, a circular solution for textile waste. Researching the book, I spoke to Nicole Rycroft, Executive Director of Canopy Planet, who back then was very excited about the possibilities presented by Renewcell. Canopy is a Not For Profit that protects forests from fashion: “Every year, over 3.4 billion trees are logged to make paper packaging and viscose fabrics. These trees are often from Ancient and Endangered Forests—landscapes that are critical for stabilizing our climate and preserving natures,” she says.
Whereas synthetic materials like polyester are plastics derived from oil and should be avoided at all costs, there is another group of materials, semi synthetics, that are sourced from wood pulp: these are the likes of Viscose, Rayon, Tencel and Lyocell. Canopy now has over half of the world’s viscose producers signed up to source pulp from sustainable forestry, but Rycroft knows the future has to shift from virgin materials to recycled. “We’re drowning in discarded textiles; less than 1% of clothes are recycled into new clothing and 85% of the 100 billion items of apparel produced each year end up in landfills.”
Back in 2022, Nicole was excited about two innovations that addressed this: Nanolose, which uses agricultural food waste to make viscose pulp, and Renewcell, a factory which made a pulp, Circulose, from discarded textiles. Not only was Circulose a fully circular solution, but the process required 70% less energy, 90% less water, plus greener and less chemicals. A solution for all those overflowing landfills, and one that shifted us away from ‘take, make, waste’ production by transforming discarded clothing back into high-quality, low-carbon textiles “with 5x less impact on biodiversity, and 4 tonnes less carbon per tonne of product.”
Only, it all went wrong.