From trash to treasure: Europe's journey to 'infinitely' recyclable textiles

It seems we just can’t resist buying new clothes. But what happens to the millions of tonnes of textiles we throw away every year in Europe? A lot of it goes to developing countries, such as Ghana. 

"Simply there, there are 15 million pieces of clothing that arrive every single week in the city of Accra," Matteo Ward tells Business Planet. He is the CEO and Co-founder of WRÅD, a sustainable design studio in Milan. "There was a new generation of kids... they have never seen the soil underneath all of this textile waste, imagine they were playing on grounds that were built of our textile waste.”

But there are alternatives to the massive dumping abroad of unwanted waste; primarily reuse and recycling. To find out more Business Planet went to a recycling plant in Slovenia where old fishing nets and carpets are transformed into a nylon yarn called ECONYL, which can be recycled - infinitely.

These materials are all made from nylon 6, a common type of nylon, which can be turned into ECONYL. Aquafil is an Italy-based company using this technology: 

“Aquafil is producing nylon but instead of using oil we are starting from waste," explains Giulio Bonazzi, the firm's chairman and CEO. "Some of them are particularly ugly like fishing nets, carpets and other plastic waste that the industry couldn’t recycle before. So for us it’s a kind of journey from trash to treasure." 

A chemical recycling process turns the nylon waste back into raw caprolactam - a substance that is normally made from crude oil. It is squeezed into long spaghetti-like strings and then cut into tiny chips, before it is spun into fine strands of yarn.

It has many potential uses, as Tina Mavrič, PR and marketing officer for Aquafil Slovenia told Business Planet: “Some of