Toxic Legacies / Filtering the Truth

Circularity As mentioned above, recycling can
Quality One of the first issues with this form
natural decomposition for them.” 42 life cycle assessments of clothing have major shortcoming
with reuse is one that is often the case with plastics.
PET as a material is not endlessly recyclable. In the
case of recycling rPET, toxic chemicals that are used
for the production of bottles are mixed together –
which include antimony, bleach and fire retardants
– that are not designed for prolonged exposure to
the skin. 42 Whilst there are various regulations set in
place for the chemicals used in the process of production,
certifications such as OEKO-TEX offer very
little regulations and data on the chemicals that are
present in the material itself. 43
only truly be seen as such if there is an endless cycle
of materials in which the final degradation product
must be of use for natural or industrial primary
production. 42 Currently, recycled PET is a cradle-tograve
system, in which “The link between decomposition
and primary production is broken, meaning that
nutrients that in a natural system would be “food”
for primary production instead become pollution.” 42
In this one-way street, the plastic bottles are turned
to textiles that end up in landfill or incineration as a
result of a lack of large-scale recycling technology
Material Secondly, and, to put it bluntly, rPET
for post-consumer textiles. 44 What’s more is that this
system interrupts the cycle of the PET bottle, diverting
is still a plastic. Currently – and with the highest
predicted growth rate 44 – 60% of textiles are made
from fossil fuel-based synthetic fibres, 41 releasing
an estimate of 640.000 – 1.500.000 microfibres per
wash. 42 Microplastics are not filtered at any stage of
from its own closed-loop system and deflecting
the responsibility from the waste of another (the soft
drink) industry 44 – causing the impression of solving
problem that is not their own to address: the food
industry’s neglect towards packaging.
sewage treatment and end up releasing an estimate
of 50 billion plastic bottles worth of microfibres into Regulations There is much discussion on the
the oceans yearly, 44 posing a serious threat to marine
ecosystems. Of the 8 billion metric tons of plastic
that we have produced since 1950, 42 91% have
never been recycled, and our plastic production has
been doubling every 15 years. 42 The average product
is to spend 200 years in landfill, incinerated at best.
In their paper, the Biomimicry Institute stresses that
to actually achieve a regenerative system, we need
to desperately reduce waste and a world in which
“durable” needs to coexist with “safely biodegradable”
– which as we know, is currently not the case
with plastics. They emphasise: “This means there is
no alternative to the phasing out of non-compostable
materials like polyester, and new fibres, however
“recyclable,” should not be developed if there is no
regulations of what is considered to be a sustainable
material. Arguments involve a lack of transparency
and a careful selection of facts without taking
a step back to look at the greater picture. In their
paper Ecolabelling of clothes has catastrophic consequences
for the environment, the consumption research
professor Irgun Grimstad Klepp explains how
comparisons of environmental impacts are carried
out through a life cycle assessment, LCA for short.
This assessment weighs the production stages in relation
to environmental impacts such as CO2 emissions,
water scarcity and resource depletion, and
divides them by the number of times a product is
assumed to be used. 41 Given there is little data on
this crucial division of the products life however, the
in both method and data.
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