Waste in fashion is on a massive scale.
It's an industry where less than 1% of recycled textiles
are converted into new wearable materials.
Even more ends up in landfills.
But very gradually, that may be changing.
I'm traveling to the Isle of Wight, off the UK's southern coast,
to find out more.
We are on our way to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation,
which is a nonprofit that focuses on the circular economy.
The foundation promotes a vision for a fashion economy
in which nothing ends up as waste.
I'm meeting Laura Belmond, a project manager.
Hi, I'm Laura.
Welcome to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation.
Every second, the equivalent of one rubbish truckload of clothing
is landfilled or incinerated globally.
In a circular economy, instead of it operating in this one-way system,
we, from the very outset,
look at creating something that designs out the waste from the beginning.
In terms of business opportunity,
there's a huge spectrum for the companies
to actually move towards a circular economy.
One company working towards a circular model is a nearby freshwater.
Welcome to the team, I'm Martin.
Madison. Nice to meet you.
Teemill is an online platform built by the clothing company Rapanui.
It allows brands to print and create their own sustainable garments.
All of its products are made from organic cotton,
and central to its business model
is combating the inefficiency built into the fashion industry.
One of the big problems with fashion, as well as the material wastage,
is actually the overproduction.
It's a stock way.
We actually make what people need when they need it,
which means making products in the seconds after they're ordered.
In 2018, Teemill shipped 1 million shirts.
The company estimates that using sustainable materials
adds about 25% of cost,
but says it offsets that by maximizing efficiencies in other places.
It costs more money.
So, what we need to do is find savings.
Teemill minimizes waste and streamlines production
using its own creative engineering.
The whole factory is powered by renewable energy.
Everything that we make is designed from the start
to come back to us when it's worn out.
So every Teemill T-shirt has this bar code on the care label,
which when you're done with your T-shirt,
you can scan it,
and it'll generate a postage label
and allows you to send the shirt back for free,
and then Teemill gives customers a discount on their next order
in order to incentivize people to recycle
instead of throw their clothes in the trash.
There are, of course, a variety of approaches
being used to move closer to a circular economy.
In Central London,
I'm meeting with Cindy Rhodes of Worn Again Technologies,
which focuses on recycling textiles at the molecular level.
We've developed a process that can take polyester and cotton,
dissolve it in a vat,
separate both the polyester and cotton.
Blended fabrics tend to be harder to recycle.
This here is a polyester pellet,
which is the building block that then gets melted down,
extruded into fiber yarn and textiles.
Then what we're able to do with the leftover cotton
is dissolve that, separate out all the dyes,
which then get separated and spun back into a fiber.
Worn Again plans to license its technology to other businesses,
crucially at an affordable price.
It was really important that the process itself is low cost,
that we're not creating a premium product
that the industry has to pay more for,
and that consumers ultimately have to pay more for it.
In nearby Islington, Jonathan Mitchell, founder of Brothers We Stand,
is tackling the challenge from a different angle.
Brothers We Stand, a commerce online retailer
where you can shop menswear that is made more sustainably,
often made from recycled materials, but crucially also made to last.
The company makes a small amount of clothing itself,
and that's all of its suppliers.
We have our six-point standard,
and every product on our site must meet that standard.
And it includes points like designed to please,
made to last,
and also stand out social and environmental impact.
Brothers We Stand says production cost using sustainable materials
around one and a half times higher for basic T-shirts,
and customers do pay a premium.
But despite that,
sales have grown by more than 50% each of the last two years,
albeit from a small base.
More people wanting to consume clothes,
and also other things more sustainably,
and I want to provide a solution to these people.
A recent study by McKinsey found that 78% of sourcing managers
said that by 2025, sustainability would be a significant factor
for consumers purchasing mass-market apparel.
It will not be quick or easy,
but as we saw in the Isle of Wight,
companies are already beginning to build circular models on a large scale.
A sign of things to come.
Subtitles by Maurício Kakuei Tanaka Review by Jenny Lam-Chowdhury