The Biggest Barrier to Textile Recycling? Disassembly

Before any clothing can be recycled, it must be taken apart. This process, known as disassembly, is quickly becoming a major sticking point in the race to scale textile-to-textile recycling.

“You cannot make a [recycled] yarn if there’s a button or a zipper in it,” says Ellen Mensink, founder and CEO of Amsterdam-based circular textile producer Brightfiber.

Now, more than ever, it’s something fashion and recyclers need to figure out. Regulation is coming, via extended producer responsibility (EPR) mandates, as eco-design rules, the availability of materials to recycle, and non-destructive disassembly become ever-pressing matters for compliance.

“In the next couple of years, it’s going to be crucial for designers to have [disassembly] tools in the toolbox to make better products,” says Kristoffer Stokes, co-founder and CEO of D-Glue. D-Glue is a patented technology incubated by Boston-based plastics and textile consultancy Geisys Ventures, which can be added to existing adhesives to make them debondable under heat.

Most clothing is designed without any consideration for how it might be disassembled at the end of its life; designers and product developers instead focused on style, fit, functionality, or durability. Elements such as tapes applied to make seams waterproof, rivets to reinforce pockets, or embroidery applied for decoration all make disassembly considerably harder. As a result, each company processing recycled clothing has to design its own approach, meaning fashion is far from a clear path to circularity.

Same problem, different method

The struggle to scale disassembly is characterized by the ways individual recyclers and producers increase processing capacity to answer growing demand.

Luxury fabric producer Manteco is located in Prato, a region of Italy known for textile recycling. Locally, the worker who sorts clothes by color, quality, and composition is known as a cenciaiolo and regarded as a highly skilled artisan, able to tell the difference between a woolen and a worsted yarn just by look and feel. Manteco regularly shares footage of its cenciaioli sitting among piles of textiles, cutting up garments, and tossing sections into color-coded baskets. In 2023, over 1.3 million kilograms of textiles were processed in this manner, according to the company’s most recent sustainability report.

Giuseppe Picerno, head of innovation and sustainability, believes that eventually automatic sourcing will be possible with AI training, but for now, the technology is simply not robust enough to ensure only high-quality inputs make it through to the recycling stage. “Technology is not sufficient to ensure good quality, and the quality of the input material is one of the pillars of our success. We need highly experienced operators,” Picerno says.