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these fibers are made from old clothes it's part of a process that can turn nearly any used fabric into something brand new and fashion retailer h m bets this solution could eventually recycle some of the billions of tons of textile waste produced every year but can a fast fashion company solve the problem it helped create we went to hong kong and sweden to find out most recycled textiles are turned into mattress stuffing or insulation and the original materials are scraps from the factory floor not used clothing but this facility inside a hong kong shopping mall is the first in the world to turn used clothes into new clothes all in one place first a technician like emily shao examines the garment so today we will recycle all garments this ozone chamber sanitizes the fabric in about an hour then emily removes the buttons labels and zippers and cuts the garment so the fabric is easy to work with the shredder strips the bits of cloth down further and then i will take off the open fabrics but this part of the process does require some new materials so we will add some virgin fibers into the yarns to make it stronger another machine mixes that cotton with the recycled skirt emily then rolls the mixed fibers into clumps and feeds them into a machine that turns them into what's called a fiber web but what happens next makes the assembly line in hong kong the first of its kind the fiber web gets bundled into these snake-like slivers the slivers are then spun into ply yarn the building blocks of a new garment finally a machine knits a new sweater based on a computer design shoppers pay about sixty five dollars to recycle clothing here how do we help consumers think about their clothes differently well that's one of the reasons why we have a glass box doing research in a shopping mall the h m foundation partnered with the hong kong research institute of textiles and apparel that investment allowed the company to license and install the technology at one of their stores in stockholm where the company's headquartered h m calls it the loop here shoppers pay only 18 dollars to see the recycling process in action that's about the price of a new pair of the brand's sweatpants how it comes out and then this is the only part that has to be removed virginia the technician trims the extra yarn and the garment is ready to go it takes three days to recycle one garment that seems like a lot of time and effort to turn a sweater into a new sweater that's because a factory like this that can recycle thousands of tons of clothes a day doesn't exist yet but h m says that eventually this kind of technology could be a global solution for textile waste the holy grail is a government to government recycling and that's for me where today most our investment going to but the fashion retailer continues to grow by selling cheap clothes to more and more people how often do you go and buy you maybe one time a week how big is your wardrobe it's like maybe half of my apartment well retail kings and queens she needs a walk-in closet yes but swedes aren't the biggest contributors to textile waste the average american spends over 1800 a year on new clothes and throws away 200 t-shirts worth of textiles every year people didn't always treat clothing as disposable fast fashion really took off in the 1990s thanks to polyester the synthetic fiber made from petroleum costs half as much as cotton i think very few people realize that most of the time today they're wearing plastic by the year 2000 polyester overtook cotton as the most popular fiber in the world that's the same year h m opened its first u.s store in new york city since then global clothing production has doubled and if nothing changes it will nearly double again by 2030 all that used apparel can end up in places like accra ghana which has one of the world's largest second-hand clothing markets every week 15 million garments pass through the contamanto market and nearly half of that goes to landfill is burned or gets swept into waterways we've completely devalued what clothing is clothing is now disposable and i don't know how we come back from treating it like a plastic bag or like a plastic bottle liz ricketts has spent over a decade documenting how used clothes from wealthy countries are exported around the world the clothing that's going to landfill a lot of it is wearable and a lot of the waste comes from familiar brands it's definitely the top 10 which are what you would expect i mean it's h m and zara m s adidas nike gap it would take the loop recycling machine almost 50 000 years to deal with just one week's worth of waste from the market you can't really convince yourself that creating clothing but doing it better is somehow going to solve this issue that there's simply too much clothing still h m executives say they're serious about scaling up recycling the company has set a goal of using only recycled polyester by the end of the decade we have developed together with one congreta a machine called the green machine the h m foundation invested 12 million dollars into technologies like this machine that recycles polyester and plans to build a larger factory that can recycle over three thousand pounds of clothes per day but hk rita ceo admits that recycling has a long way to go before it can make a dent in the industry's growing waste output the commercial scale useful recycling systems have to be in the order of magnitude of at least thousands of tons a day today less than one percent of used clothing is recycled into new garments it is clear to us that we don't have a lot of time we have this danger of doing too little too late experts say that recycling can never solve the problem of textile waste brands have basically convinced citizens that we have a waste problem because we don't have recycling technology that is not that is not why we have a waste problem it's only going to be solvable if we confront growth and if companies stop over producing h m has no plans to reduce production of new clothing we are a gross company our ambition is how do we make that growth being meaningful and consumers can do their part by buying less and holding on to their current wardrobe longer we always recommend that people take a year off of buying anything new even hk rita's ceo recognizes recycling alone can't solve the problem the companies that manufacture clothes will need to change the way they do business and that is what keeps him up at night my nightmare my nightmare scenario in the industry is that we are satisfied we're happy with very modest goals but that doesn't really do anything for anybody and then we'll be accused of greenwashing and by and large it'll be true you
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