H&M calls it the Green Machine: a piece of technology it says is the first to separate and recycle polyester and cotton-blended clothing at scale. Later this month, Monki, the Gen Z targeting womenswear brand owned by H&M, will drop the first commercial products made using its recycled fibres.
The collection — a £40 hooded sweatshirt and matching £40 sweatpants — is recyclable through the same system, an option the brand is facilitating by eschewing metal grommets, plastic drawstring tips and other components that would complicate the largely manual end-of-life stripping and sorting process. Because of the limited quantities of reclaimed polyester available, the product run is small by necessity: Monki made only 120 pieces of each design in the collection, which it mixed with organic cotton to generate a soft jersey feel.
It’s a modest achievement, but one that may represent a turning point for an industry that struggles with waste and relies heavily on virgin polyester, which made up 52 per cent of global fibre production in 2019, according to a 2020 market report by Textile Exchange. While affordable fashion’s biggest purveyors, like H&M, Zara and Uniqlo, have promoted take-back programmes, true circularity remains an elusive goal. The Ellen MacArthur Foundation estimates that less than 1 per cent of materials used to produce garments is recycled into new ones. Poly-cotton blends have proven especially tricky, since the fibres, once twisted together, are nearly impossible to tease apart. Several startups have tackled the problem, which has become something of a holy grail of textile recycling, to varying degrees of success. The Green Machine, if effective, could make garment-to-garment recycling a broader reality.
“I think this is the first technology we’ve seen that has actually produced something from poly-cotton separation,” says Ashley J. Holding, a circularity consultant and former innovation manager at Fashion for Good. “Obviously, it’s a big step forward.”
The Green Machine is the culmination of a €5.8 million, four-year collaboration that began in 2016 between the H&M Foundation, H&M Group’s philanthropic arm and the Hong Kong Research Institute of Textiles and Apparel (HKRITA).
The process starts by feeding poly-cotton fabrics into the system, which uses heat, water and less than 5 per cent of a “biodegradable green chemical” that a spokeswoman says is citric acid. Once separated, the polyester is extracted for spinning into yarns. The processed cotton takes the form of cellulose powder, which can be applied to functional products or regenerated fibres. There are some kinks to work out, but from start to finish, the Green Machine is closed loop, meaning the “water, heat and the chemistry are recycled, so there is no discharge”, says Erik Bang, innovation lead at H&M Foundation.
H&M's Green Machine turns poly-cotton fabrics into a cellulose powder and regenerated polyester yarns.
© H&M Foundation
Equally important, the reclaimed polyester is economically viable, something that will be crucial to the adoption of the technology, which Bang says H&M Foundation will license for free to other companies to use and build upon. “I think the main reason why you haven’t seen more progress on polyester recycling is because virgin is so cheap [and] it’s really, really hard to come up with a competitive alternative,” he says.
Monki, which targets a younger customer, has pushed for sustainable innovation within the H&M Group. “We have, in the past two years, mobilised ourselves to try and build a sustainability strategy that really turns the table upside down in our organisation,” says Monki head of sustainability Jenny Fagerlin, who has overseen the company’s forays into upcycled denim and recycled swimwear. Monki has a fraction of H&M’s reach, with 124 stores in 19 markets compared with H&M’s 4,455 stores in 74 markets.
The Green Machine is by no means a silver bullet. Since it’s indistinguishable from its virgin counterpart, the reclaimed polyester is just as likely to shed synthetic microfibres in the wash and contribute to marine plastic pollution, Bang admits. In its present iteration, the system cannot recover non-polyester or non-cotton fibres from more complex blends, such as those containing acrylic and elastane, rejecting them as waste. Critically, without widespread industry collaboration, the technology will encounter the same hurdles — a lack of infrastructure, financial investments, customer participation or legislation — that trip up meaningful and systemic change.
A grey tracksuit set, part of Monki’s first collection using the Green Machine system.
© Monki
And for all its efforts, H&M Group, which also has partnerships with recycling firms Infinited Fiber Company, Renewcell and Worn Again Technologies, continues to be dogged by accusations that it’s focusing on solutions that incentivise disposal rather than simply producing fewer and better-quality clothes that stay in circulation for longer. Bang says that slowing down consumption to ease up pressure on the planet’s resources is “a conversation we need to have”, but notes that the global population is climbing at the same time.
“Whether it becomes a game changer for the industry — or not — will depend on the roadmap and the feasibility to scale it up,” says Natalia Papu Carrone, Circle Textiles research analyst at Circle Economy. “We’ve experienced firsthand the challenges that textile collectors and sorters have today to find end markets for blended textiles, as well as the barriers ahead to scaling poly-cotton blend recycling, even when these textiles can be accurately and efficiently sorted through automated technologies.”
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