Three numbers, because they are the reason for this post. Evrnu's first commercial fibre to fibre plant is due this year at roughly eighteen thousand tonnes a year. Infinited Fiber is building toward thirty thousand. Circulose sits at around sixty thousand. Textile to textile recycling spent a decade as a pilot line and a press release, and it is now becoming an industry with an order book.
It has not been a smooth decade. One of the best known plants in this field stopped, changed hands and restarted before most of that capacity existed on paper, and I would not build a procurement policy around any single company. But the direction is no longer in doubt, and it changes what a garment needs to have been all along.
Because these processes do not take clothes. They take feedstock, to a specification, and the specification is mostly about knowing precisely what is in the bale.
Why a school blazer is one of the hardest cases
Take a typical secondary blazer apart on a table and count the materials. A wool and polyester outer. A different polyester lining. Fusible interfacing at the front edge and collar, glued on, which is chemically a third thing. A nylon or metal zip, buttons of unspecified resin, sewing thread that is almost always polyester whatever the shell is made of, an embroidered crest in yet another thread, and quite possibly a water repellent finish nobody disclosed.
To a mechanical recycler that is contamination. To a chemical one it is a solvent problem. The garment that best survives a playground is often the one that recycles worst, and pretending there is no tension there helps nobody.
The way out is design for disassembly, and it is unglamorous work. One fibre family per garment wherever the performance allows it. Mechanical fastenings rather than glued interfacing. Sewing thread that matches the shell instead of defaulting to polyester. A crest that can be taken off without taking the front of the jacket with it. Every one of those choices is made at the drawing stage, by somebody who will never see the finished garment again, and not one of them can be retrofitted at the recycling gate.
The label is not evidence
Here is the part that surprises buyers most and surprised me least. Composition labels are frequently wrong. Not fraudulently, as a rule: a fabric is substituted mid season, a lining is swapped for availability, a finish is added at the dyehouse and never travels back up the paperwork. The label was printed against the specification, not against what actually came off the line.
A recycler cannot work from a specification. It needs what was genuinely made, per batch, to a tolerance. That is a different record entirely, and it is either kept at the time or it is gone for good.
Which makes provenance a recycling problem, not a marketing one
We record composition against the production lot rather than against the individual garment, because the lot is where the truth lives. Three hundred polos made in one run share one set of materials, one factory, one set of certificates, and every garment in that run inherits it. Ten years later, when one of those polos comes back, the question a recycler asks is answerable: what is this, exactly, and who says so. Without that record the honest answer is a guess, and a guess is refused at the gate.
I should say plainly that not everything can be recycled well, and I am suspicious of anyone who suggests otherwise. A wool blend blazer with a fused front is a hard object no matter how complete its provenance record is. But there is a wide difference between a garment that is difficult to recycle and a garment that cannot even be assessed, and most school uniform currently sits in the second category. Verified composition does not guarantee anything gets recycled. It is only the condition of being allowed to join the queue.
What to ask, if you buy uniform
Ask for composition by production run rather than by style. Ask whether sewing thread and interfacing are included in that figure, because they usually are not. Ask what the crest is embroidered with. None of these are hard questions for a supplier who keeps records, and all of them are hard for one who does not.
The capacity is arriving. Whether a particular uniform is allowed to use it was decided years earlier, by whether anybody bothered to write down what it was.