Consumer guide

Keeping the concepts straight

Recycling, upcycling and downcycling. Post-consumer and pre-consumer waste. What on earth are we talking about? And where does actually vintage fit in?

Re-use sounds very boring. So it could easily be construed as the least sexy, but actually “green” thing to do with textiles. Handing on textiles to friends, relatives and second-hand shops helps ensure they are used for their intended lifespan or maybe even longer, and reduces the need for unnecessary new clothing manufacture. Even if clothes are no good as clothes any more they can be used as cleaning cloths which is much lower impact than buying new cleaning cloths

A totally new concept is so-called third hand

Recycling is the act of making something new out of something old – typically via a process that breaks the old thing into its constituent pieces (in textiles this generally means ripping them up to form fibres). That one could call down-cycling, since this concept involves re-cycling into products of lower value than that of the original product. For example clothes recycled in to industrial matting. Up-cycling, on the other hand, is the concept of recycling things into products of perceived equal value to the original product. This could mean handing the clothes in to a charity shop. This is typically seen as a shop that takes unwanted second hand clothes and sells them onto the public, generating money for the charity the shop represents. Much of the clothing donated goes into recycling (down-cycling) into industrial end uses or is shipped to developing countries for sale there. Another up-cycling concept is vintage, which generally means older clothing (not just last season’s waste) with a high value because it could be designer-clothing, but not necessarily. T-shirts and jeans are often called vintage if they are sold in the “right way”. A totally new concept is so-called third hand, which generally applies to second-hand clothing being resewn in to something completely new.

Post consumer waste generally applies to things that have already been owned and used. Hard core re-cyclers see this as 'proper' recycling and the use of industrial waste as cheating.

Industrial waste is waste created during the manufacturing process of a particular product. It makes sound environmental and economic sense to recycle this and make it into something useful. However it's seen as 'cheating' by some Johnny-come-lately environmentalist. However, some companies have made a sound business of just using industrial waste as their raw material for production, which is is quite ”green”.

So where does textile waste end up if it is not recycled, up-cycled or down-cycled? A land fill would be a good guess. Which is the act of throwing an assortment of waste into big holes in the ground. Very little happens in land fill so things that are 'biodegradable' don't biodegrade and things that can break down in landfill to form carcinogen x, y or z don't break up. Landfill essentially entombs things. One solution is to burn the organic waste in land fills, for energy.

Closed loop recycling is the concept of using 100% of a product at the end of its life as raw material for manufacture of other products, which is the basis for Cradle to Cradle thinking. This could be done via for example composting. Which is the process of breaking down finished products by the action of enzymes, microbes, worms etc to create usable compost for use in agriculture etc. If one wishes to do this with textiles (which could be possible), one has to ensure that the textiles that are actually compostable are kept separate from those that are not.

(Source: Phil Patterson)