To receive the Vogue Business newsletter, sign up here.
When a favourite swimsuit no longer fits, options are limited: selling it on a resale site is perceived as unhygienic, but throwing it in the trash feels wasteful. A fibre-to-fibre (F2F) recycling programme launched this month by American fashion retailer J Crew provides a better option.
J Crew is partnering with recycling tech and reverse logistics platform SuperCircle to offer a swimwear takeback programme named Second-Life Swim. Launched on 22 February, the programme encourages customers to return swimwear from any brand to J Crew (in-store or online) and collect a $5 credit, valid through August 2024, towards the purchase of a new J Crew swimwear piece (the credits can be stacked up to $20 and applied to any full-price swimsuit).
Through the partnership, 40 per cent of J Crew’s current assortment can be textile-to-textile recycled, including its poly swimsuits and all 100 per cent nylon and Econyl swimwear. No garments go to landfill or to secondhand markets in the Global South; the garments rated not fit for F2F recycling are being fed through SuperCircle’s open-loop recycling feeds for other product lines such as compression or insulation, extending the life for two years or more.
The journey to make fibres more sustainable
“[We] want to keep items in use for as long as possible before recycling, but we see this as a key part of our evolving circularity strategy,” says Lisa Greenwald, chief merchandising officer at J Crew, which has been working towards a goal to source 100 per cent of the key fibres in its materials “more sustainably” by 2025. “[We] started this journey thinking recycling swim was not an option, but after a long search, we found the right partner with SuperCircle.”
It’s a small change but potentially significant. “Not everything can be fibre-to-fibre recycled, but these incremental changes are what enable J Crew as well as the retail industry to find a wider scale solution,” says Greenwald. “This space is continually evolving.”
Swimwear typically ends up in landfill where it can take decades, hundreds or even a thousand years to break down, polluting the environment with chemicals from the dyes used in the processing and microplastics from the synthetic materials. Swimwear is a particularly challenging category for proponents of circularity because most consumers are not willing to buy or sell secondhand swimwear (for hygiene reasons) — and the synthetic fibres from which most swimwear is made are difficult to recycle.
When synthetic materials are recycled, they’re usually downcycled to create products such as insulation or carpet underlay. When you see a swimsuit that’s recycled on the market, it’s usually made from discarded water bottles or fishing nets — not from other swimsuits.
J Crew’s adoption of fibre-to-fibre recycling is a big step for the industry. According to McKinsey, once the necessary technologies are fully mature, up to 70 per cent of textile waste could be recycled fibre-to-fibre — compared with just 1 per cent of textile waste recycled fibre-to-fibre in 2022.
“The end goal of circularity is to drive fibre recapture that can be used in new garments. Fibre-to-fibre recycling makes that a reality today,” says SuperCircle CEO and co-founder Chloe Songer. “It’s important to drive the industry towards the reuse of fibre within the garment supply chain, as well as keeping everything out of landfill and participating in a truly circular fashion system. The textile recycling value chain could create new, valuable raw materials that enable more apparel production, with less impact and waste.”
Among the barriers to F2F recycling are poor fibre identification systems for mixed fibre garments and the level of processing required to make a garment viable for F2F recycling. The process also requires large volumes of garments. SuperCircle’s technology leverages a number of systems, such as digital tags and NIR, to sort through garments, adding materials and product data to each garment collected. Its backend streamlines the delabelling, trimming and shredding processes to turn each garment into viable feedstock. By aggregating fibre feedstocks across brands, SuperCircle is able to build up the necessary large volumes.
Recycling materials can only go so far, though. Recycled poly and nylon still shed microplastics when washed — implying a wider need to reduce the use of synthetic materials across the industry. However, the reduction in virgin material use and longer lifecycle of the fibre within the supply chain does make F2F recycling a significant option.
Over time, SuperCircle aims to work with J. Crew’s design team to make more of its swimwear line fit for fibre-to-fibre recycling. “Textile recycling (mechanical and chemical) are advancing technologies rapidly,” says Songer. “The more reliable feedstock there is for pilots, testing, and proving the viability of recycling options, the more successfully these technologies will scale and have impact.”
Comments, questions or feedback? Email us at feedback@voguebusiness.com.
More from this author:
As it turns 40, is London Fashion Week growing up?
London’s comeback brand: Why Marques Almeida returned to LFW
