Recycling clothing the chemical way

In recent decades, the number of clothes purchased globally has skyrocketed. Like fast food, however, fast fashion has some serious drawbacks. Many of these clothes, for example, travel nearly as quickly through our wardrobes and into the bin. Today, plastic recycling is very much in vogue, partly thanks to widely publicised problems with plastic pollution. Awareness of the need to apply the same logic to our clothing, however, remains firmly out of the spotlight.

Action is needed to better capture the value of the resources in clothing that has genuinely reached the end of its life – and this is where chemistry has a role to play.