Recycled

Recycled clothing is often bottle-to-fibre, not clothing-to-clothing. It makes for a nice green story and healthier margins, while the overall output of fossil-based fibres — and demand for petrochemicals — keeps rising. So a lot of the time it’s less about shrinking the footprint and more about making continued growth feel acceptable.

“Recycled” is rarely circular in the true sense of old clothes becoming new clothes. For instance, Stormberg (their Trolltind Recycled range and similar) say that many of their recycled items use recycled polyester — and in most cases that comes from PET bottles (washed, shredded, melted into pellets, then spun into fibre).

And it’s not just Stormberg. Textile Exchange estimates that about 98% of recycled polyester still comes from plastic bottles, not old garments.
So we end up with a “recycling narrative”, but without textile waste actually being turned back into textiles.

It’s also often more expensive — especially if you try to do genuine textile-to-textile recycling. Systemiq estimates that making recycled polyester from post-consumer textile waste in Europe (chemical recycling/depolymerisation) can cost roughly 2.6 times as much as virgin polyester made in Asia.
So no, it isn’t necessarily cheaper to make — the value is often in branding/marketing and in building new value chains.

“Bigger sustainability” can easily become another profit engine when volumes keep growing. Textile Exchange notes polyester makes up about 59% of global fibre production, and around 88% of it is fossil-based. And the IEA expects petrochemical feedstocks to be the main driver of oil-demand growth in 2026 (over 60% of the growth).
Which means a “recycled” label can give a sense of progress without necessarily cutting total fossil demand in practice.

And yes, lots of things are “recyclable” in theory, but not in reality. The OECD shows how un-circular plastics still are: in 2019 only about 9% of plastic waste was recycled; 19% was incinerated and nearly half went to landfill (with the rest dumped, burned, or leaking into the environment).
With clothing it’s even messier — blended fabrics, membranes, coatings, elastane, glues, zips and so on. “Recyclable” quickly becomes a PR word rather than a realistic end-of-life pathway.