A local activist group had deposited an enormous pile of clothes on the sidewalk in sight of stores such as Adidas, Zara, and the popular Dutch casual fashion chain Cotton Club. Some seven-foot-tall and 25 feet around, the garment dump drew puzzled looks from passersby, some of whom stopped to read handwritten signs poking out the top. “Every 10 minutes, we throw away this much clothing in the Netherlands,” read one.

The intent, the organizers said, wasn’t just to draw attention to clothing waste, but to urge companies to reveal how much clothing they make—a first step toward addressing what’s long been a disastrous side effect of the phenomenon known as “fast fashion.” But while a local newspaper ran an article on the protest, not much else came of it.

It was, however, emblematic of a now well-understood problem across Europe and its seemingly intractable nature. Tied to the arrival in the 1990s of fast fashion—which, for the uninitiated, is essentially the ability to churn out new clothing lines at cheap prices—the environmental destruction caused by discarded and disintegrating clothing cannot be understated. Attempts at reuse and recycling have only put a small dent in the worsening problem, hindered by a thorny set of technological obstacles to making old clothing new again.

A company claims it may have found a solution not far from the pile of discarded pants and tops that puzzled Amsterdam shoppers. It is one of a handful worldwide working to crack the code of clothing waste.

According to the European Commission, consumers in Europe discard around 5.8 million tons of textiles every year. Globally, that figure comes to 92 million tons. Clothing consumption almost doubled between 1975 and 2020, according to Textile Exchange, a nonprofit that organizes textile and apparel manufacturers and brands around sustainability. It’s projected to leap another 25% by 2030.

The genesis of—and indeed collateral damage from—fast fashion has been well documented. Global clothing chains such as Zara and H&M pioneered the trend of re-supplying stores with new, low-priced clothing every four to six weeks instead of with the seasons, enabling more consumers to follow trends without committing too much cash. In addition to rising incomes in developed nations and low wages in exporting countries, fast fashion has become a winning business model.

But those low prices and monthly trends mean the journey from fashion statement to landfill became much shorter—and that’s where the environmental disaster began. Clothing, as with anything, is the sum of its parts. Plastics, dyes and chemicals are leaking out of growing mountains of refuse all over the world, poisoning lands, rivers and oceans. Some of the microplastics inside every human being may easily have originated in a discarded pair of cargo shorts. As for those clothing items that end up in incinerators, fast fashion does its part to accelerate global warming, too.

And that’s just the endgame. The starting point of what many people wear is cotton, and growing it requires tremendous amounts of water, depleting resources in a world where fresh water and arable land are becoming more scarce. Polyester is made from fossil fuels, the burning of which is the prime culprit in climate change—a fact that also applies to the untold number of factories, planes and trucks that make up the global clothing supply chain.

Recycling and reuse sound like appealing solutions, but as Bloomberg revealed in a 2022 investigation, much of what’s collected ends up overwhelming the usually underdeveloped destinations where it’s sent for repurposing, resale or donation. Or the items are “downcycled” into things like stuffing for car seats and mattresses.

Producing new clothes from old items hasn’t been a workable solution either—at least not at scale. The processing required reduces the length and strength of fibers, making it hard to turn them into yarn that would be practical for making new clothing. According to a 2024 study in Cleaner Engineering and Technology, the biggest hurdle to recycling clothing is the quality of the end product. Just 1% of old clothes are made into new clothes.

But after a decade of attempts, a new wave of recycling tech is taking hold in Europe, with companies and entrepreneurs hoping to break through the barrier between a planet drowning in old clothes and one where everything is effectively a hand-me-down.

Andreas Bartl, a senior scientist at Technical University Vienna who studies textile recycling methods and processes, said an inflection point has been reached. “Over the last two years, technologies have evolved, and this is a big jump in quality,” he said. “The rate of about 1% will improve in the next years.”

New sustainability regulations in the Netherlands require the fashion industry to incorporate a minimum of 16.5% recycled material into their wares by 2030. Similar Europe-wide rules have been proposed as well. Key to recent improvements in the industry’s ability to comply may be two technologies being developed by companies in the US and Europe. In the latter, they include La Roche in France, Rester in Finland, Valvan in Belgium, Reju in Germany, the Swedish Waste Management Association (Sysav) and Wieland Textiles, a company just outside Amsterdam owned by Brightfiber Textiles BV.

Recyclers must separate different colors to process clothing waste without causing further environmental harm. If not, the resulting raw materials and yarns take on an unappealing gray hue—fine for mops and stuffing, but far from ideal for a sustainable clothing line.

But Brightfiber and Sysav have come up with something called an optical sorting machine. Since different colors and materials reflect light differently, the machine allows items to be differentiated simply by bouncing light off of them.

The ability to separate fibers is also improving, thanks to chemical processes now deployed by Frankfurt-based Reju, a company started in 2023 by Patrik Frisk, a former chief executive of Under Armour and president of Timberland. The company has found a way to separate cotton and wool from polyester or elastane—the material that gives yoga pants, underwear waistbands and skinny jeans their stretch.

La Roche, Rester and Valvan, meanwhile, have developed machines that tear clothing items into small pieces, cleaning them of buttons, zippers and labels. Taken together, these new technologies may enable recycling at a volume never before possible.

But the open question is: Will it be enough for clothing companies to sacrifice the easier, more destructive path to fast fashion?

With its factory just a few miles northwest of Kalverstraat, shoehorned into a logistics center near Amsterdam’s western port, Brightfiber said it’s the first European company to successfully bring together optical sorting, cutting-cleaning and raw material production to make high-quality substitutes for virgin cotton, wool or blends of organic and sustainable fibers and synthetics like polyester. The company said it began with €5 million ($5.7 million) invested, including a €1 million grant from a Dutch government sustainability initiative.

The first thing you see when entering Brightfiber’s building is a small showroom of sweaters, shirts and pants—made from recycled clothes, of course. Rather than being obviously repurposed or rough to the touch, they appear and feel similar to the lightweight retail sweater worn by a reporter during a recent visit. Producing such soft, fine yarn is a recent advance from the more primitive cable knits of earlier designs, said Ellen Mensink, Brightfiber’s founder and CEO.

To be clear, no one has figured out how to make usable materials that are entirely recycled old clothing. Brightfiber, like its rivals in the growing space, makes material from a combination of recycled fibers, new material and waste pieces. (Waste cloth comes from the factory floor—as much as 40% of material fed into clothing production lines ends up discarded.) The company said that the mixture is necessary to deliver the longer fibers needed for quality yarns.

Mensink said Brightfiber’s production is derived from between 40% and 70% post-consumer textiles. Also added are organic and sustainable fibers like lyocell and alpaca—or polyester from recycled bottles. As for color separation, when seen up close, it’s clear that a green Brightfiber sweater is not uniform in color but composed of yarn of many similar shades of green.

While making clothing often begins in a cotton field, recycling begins in a donation bin. Brightfiber buys old clothes by the pound from both charities and companies that gather discarded items from collection points across the Netherlands. Currently, around half of textile waste in the country comes from drop-off bins. In Germany, the rate is even higher, at 70%, according to Bartl. However, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency, worldwide efforts to recycle textile waste sit at only 15%.

When old clothes arrive at Brightfiber, its optical sorting machine uses near-infrared light to detect a garment’s material and color and then separates the stream into 90 different combinations. There are ten colors and nine material combinations, including cotton-polyester, polyester-elastane and cotton-polyester-elastane. A second machine developed by Valvan chops these into pieces the size of an adult’s palm, cleaning them of buttons, zippers and labels.

The resulting swatches are then transformed into a fluff similar in look to virgin cotton, thanks to a third machine developed by Brightfiber and Turkey-based Balkan Textile Machinery Ltd. That fluff is, in turn, spun into yarn for fabrics and end products that Brightfiber sells to other brands, including the Dutch chain King Louie.

The entire line has a capacity of 5.5 million pounds per year, according to Mensink, who believes that operating two lines would enable the company to process all of metropolitan Amsterdam’s textile waste.

Even with these advances, chemical separation will likely remain central to repurposing the vast majority of textiles that aren’t made of 100% natural fibers. The ubiquity of polyester in modern clothing makes it inescapable to separate it from other materials.

“It’s extracting the polyester and then depolymerizing it—breaking it down back into its monomer, and then polymerizing it again to make it back into polyester,” explains Reju’s Frisk, who said his company has optimized this process. Reju’s method adds a catalyst to one of three existing chemical recycling methods. “This makes it faster and more efficient,” Frisk said.

Reju’s end product becomes feedstock for its owner, France-based Technip Energies NV. The company said its technology is used in about 1,000 polyester factories around the world, representing a third of all polyester manufacturing.

Brightfiber and Reju hope to benefit from European Union regulation. So-called Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) mechanisms are already in place in several countries, and they are aimed at forcing textile producers to internalize the cost of waste. In February, the EU Council Presidency and Parliament representatives reached a provisional agreement to harmonize frameworks already existing in France, the Netherlands and elsewhere, with the goal of establishing an EPR scheme across all 27 member states.

The rules would require manufacturers to pay into a fund that will be used to develop recycling infrastructure, with the fees “eco-modulated” so that more sustainable products cost producers less. Bartl expressed concern, though, saying whatever policy comes out of Brussels shouldn’t impede existing efforts in Austria, Germany, Finland and the Netherlands. The EU should not “destroy a system that is quite efficient in sorting textiles,” he said.

Frisk and Bartl agreed that requiring minimum repurposed content for garments might be the best way to jumpstart clothing recycling. “Let’s just put it at 5%—whatever, just so the industry knows that this is coming,” Frisk said.