recycling – Page 2 – The OM Blog by Heizer, Render, & Munson

OM in the News: The EV Battery Dilemma

Traffic backs up at the Bay Bridge. California is set to implement a plan to prohibit the sale of new gasoline-powered cars by 2035.

Recent U.S. regulations are pumping billions into battery manufacturing and incentives for EV purchases. The E.U., and several U.S. states, have passed bans on gas-powered vehicles starting in 2035. This transition will require lots and lots of batteries, reports Grand View Research (June, 2023).

When a lithium-ion battery, which consists of thousands of cells filled with cobalt, nickel and manganese, comes to the end of its life, its green benefits fade. If it ends up in a landfill, its cells can set afire or leach dangerous chemicals that can contaminate water supplies and ecosystems. The thin metal exterior of a battery will decompose within 100 years, exposing the toxic heavy metals inside, which will never decompose.

But recycling these batteries can be hazardous. If they are not opened carefully, they can explode, short-circuit, and let off toxic fumes. In the coming decades, tens of millions of EV batteries will reach their end-of-life. (Some predict there will be 150 million EVs on the road by 2030. Last year there were fewer than 12 million). Current EV batteries “are really not designed to be recycled,” says one industry expert.

The E.U. and China are setting new rules for some level of battery reuse. But it will not be easy to meet the new regulations. Most recycling processes produce heavy waste and emit greenhouse gases, and very little recycling goes on today. (Recycling rates in the E.U. and the U.S. are less than 5%). Most of the batteries that do get recycled undergo a high-temperature melting-and-extraction process. Those operations, which are carried out in large commercial facilities are energy intensive. The plants are also costly to build and operate, and require sophisticated equipment to treat harmful emissions generated by the process. And despite the high costs, these plants don’t recover all valuable battery materials.

Battery-swapping is one innovative business strategy proposed in OR/MS Today (June 20, 2023). A battery swapping infrastructure station network could provide a service for EV owners to “refuel” their vehicles. Replaced batteries would subsequently be recharged and exchanged for other arriving EVs needing a battery swap. One significant challenge impeding this concept was the need for a universal battery standard that multiple automakers could share. The battery packs needed to have identical dimensions and shapes to be compatible. Tesla tried the concept in 2013, but gave up on it a few years later.

Classroom discussion questions:

Why is battery swapping so difficult?
Why is recycling EV batteries so complex?

OM in the News: Clothes and EU Recycling Regulations

The EU imports 3/4 of its textiles. Above, garment workers cut fabric to make shirts at a textile factory in India

Clothing companies will start selling more garments made from a single material this coming decade, a major shift in response to a European Union plan to require apparel to be longer lasting and recyclable.

Clothes often contain a mix of fibers, including organics, such as cotton grown on farms, and synthetics, such as polyester refined usually from petroleum. Garments with multiple materials—such as a T-shirt made from 99% cotton and 1% spandex—are difficult to recycle because separating the fibers is tricky.

Currently, less than 1% of the world’s textile waste is recycled into new clothes, with the bulk ending up in trash heaps, writes The Wall Street Journal (Sept. 7, 2022). The EU wants to change this. But the relatively short time frame promises to challenge the big players in fast-fashion, which may have to retool their design processes and rethink their sourcing, a topic we note in Supplement 5.

The EU recently published a plan that aims to put “fast fashion out of fashion” by 2030, referring to the trend of people buying clothes and throwing them out in less than a year. Clothing should be “long-lived and recyclable, to a great extent made of recycled fibers,” the EU said. Sustainability experts say that single-fiber, or monofiber, clothes present one of the best solutions.

The plan will affect not only Europe’s homegrown brands, but also American Nike and Levi Strauss and Japan’s Uniqlo or China’s Shein. EU nations have already agreed to collect discarded textiles separately from other waste by 2025.

German sportswear maker Adidas, for example, launched a line of single-fiber clothes last year including shoes, coats, T-shirts and pants under its “Made to be Remade” label. “These products are created with just one material and once they reach the end of their useful life, they can be cleaned, shredded and recycled for use in new products,” said the firm. Swedish fashion retailer H&M is stepping up repair services and offering rental and secondhand clothing as part of its push to cut waste and its associated greenhouse-gas emissions.

Classroom discussion questions:

Are you concerned/aware of this issue?
How does the proposed change impact the 10 operations decisions discussed in Table 1.2 of your Heizer/Render/Munson text?

OM in the News: The Problem with Solar

California has been pushing for rooftop solar power, building up the largest solar market in the U.S., reports The Los Angeles Times (July 15, 2022) More than 20 years and 1.3 million rooftops later, the bill is coming due. Since 2006, the state, focused on incentivizing people to use solar power, showering subsidies on homeowners who installed panels but had no plan to dispose of them. Now, panels purchased under those programs are nearing the end of their 25-to-30-year life cycle.

The majority of solar panels are ending up in landfills

Many are winding up in landfills, and in some cases, contaminating groundwater with toxic heavy metals. Only 1 in 10 panels are actually recycled. The challenge over how to handle truckloads of contaminated waste illustrates how cutting-edge environmental policy can create unforeseen problems. “The industry is supposed to be green,” said an industry expert. “But in reality, it’s all about the money.”

“This trash is probably going to arrive sooner than we expected and it is going to be huge,” writes Harvard Business Review. “While all the focus has been on building this renewable capacity, not much consideration has been put on the end of life of these technologies.” Disassembling panels and recovering the glass, silver and silicon is extremely difficult.

Highly specialized equipment, furnaces, and workers are needed. Panels are classified as hazardous materials, which require expensive restrictions on packaging, transport and storage. The economics of the process don’t make a compelling case for recycling. Only $2 to $4 worth of materials are recovered from each panel. It costs $20 to $30 to recycle a panel versus $1 to $2 to send it to a landfill.

The number of installed solar panels in the next decade will exceed hundreds of millions in California alone, and that recycling will become even more crucial as cheaper panels with shorter life spans become more popular.

A lack of consumer awareness about the toxicity of panels and how to dispose of them is part of the problem. “There’s an informational gap, a technological gap, and a financial gap,” say experts. The only solution seems to be extended producer responsibility, in which the cost of recycling is built into the cost of a product at its initial purchase. Business entities in the product chain — rather than the public — would become responsible for end-of-life costs, including recycling costs.

Classroom discussion questions:

Supp. 5 in your Heizer/Render/Munson text deals with this issue in detail. Which model(s) can be applied here?
What is the “systems view,” the “commons view,” and the “triple bottom line view” in this case?

OM in the News: Greening the Economy Can Be a Dirty Job

In a decarbonizing global economy, metals may be the new oil. Demand for copper, nickel, cobalt and lithium is likely to surge in the next two decades because of their importance to clean energy technologies, writes Financial Times (Oct.26, 2021)

Cobalt mining in the Democratic Republic of Congo has problems with dangerous conditions and child labor

This will have wide-reaching implications for the countries that produce them. The Democratic Republic of Congo, for example, accounts for about 70% of global cobalt output. Yet cobalt mining there has well-documented problems that raise questions about the human labor required to help turn the global economy green.

The term “green jobs” summons up images of people planting trees, insulating homes and working in spotless factories to build electric cars. The investment industry also has a tendency to conflate “good for the environment” with “good for employees” in corporate ESG ratings. But if the term “green job” means any occupation which helps to restore or preserve the environment, then it applies just as much to someone mining cobalt as to someone making wind turbine blades.

The truth is that some jobs involved in greening the economy are dirty and dangerous, and not just the ones in mines. We tend to associate the word ‘green’ with safety — but what is good for the environment is not necessarily good for the safety and health of workers who are employed in green jobs.

The recycling industry provides an example. While it is important to reduce the amount of goods going to landfill, recycling jobs can be hazardous, low paid and insecure. The rate of fatal injuries in the sector is 17 times higher than the average across all industries. In the U.S., workers in e-waste recycling centers can be overexposed to lead and cadmium. (In one case, a worker’s small children suffered lead poisoning after he inadvertently brought lead home on his clothes and in his hair).

These problems could be improved by encouraging manufacturers to change the design of new products so that they can be disassembled and recycled more safely, our topic in Supplement 5 of the text. That means designing products so they can be repaired independently, providing manuals and making spare parts available. This should help reduce waste as well as provide new skilled jobs.

We are not making an argument against greening the economy. Many carbon-intensive jobs are dirty and dangerous too, and we will all suffer if we don’t tackle climate change.

Classroom discussion questions:

What does “design for disassembly” mean?
Why is cobalt mining a part of green energy/

OM in the News: Is Your Plastic Recycled?

Five decades after the future of plastics was extolled in the famous 1967 film “The Graduate,” the U.S. manufactured 36 million tons of the stuff in a single year– 17 times the amount produced when the movie was released.

But as demand for plastics has grown, so has concern over the waste, reports The Wall Street Journal (April 24-25, 2021). More than 90% of plastics generated in the U.S. each year winds up in landfills or incinerators. Only about 9% is recycled.

*Recyclables piled up in this New Jersey warehouse, but most plastics go to landfills or incinerators.*

The largest category is containers and packaging, including water bottles, milk jugs and detergent bottles. In 2018, more than 14.5 million tons was manufactured, but less than 2 million tons, or 13%, was recycled.

Plastics that have the potential to be recycled are stamped with a triangle made of three arrows enclosing a resin-identification code—a digit from 1 to 7 that indicates the type of plastic—but the presence of the emblem doesn’t guarantee the waste will be reused, even if it makes it into a recycling bin.

“People think a lot more is being recycled than is actually being recycled,” said the author of “Can I Recycle This?” “Most of it is low-value and doesn’t have a buyer.” From the curbside, it’s generally the 1s and 2s and some of the 5s. Anything else, recyclers have to pay to get rid of it.

In the past, the U.S. shipped low-value plastic waste to China, but in 2017, China said it would ban the import of most plastic waste, causing the market for those plastics to dry up.

No. 1 plastics, including water bottles and clear plastic cups, sell for 13 cents a pound. Clear (meaning undyed) No. 2 plastics, including milk jugs and shampoo and detergent bottles, fetch 60-70 cents a pound. And No. 5 plastics, including yogurt containers, prescription bottles and bottle caps, draw 30 cents a pound. So there’s a great future in plastics–as “The Graduate” tells–but only if the waste can be managed.

Classroom discussion questions:

Give some examples of how companies can be less wasteful in plastic use. (See Supp. 5–Sustainability in the Supply Chain).
How can we, as consumers, use less plastic?

OM in the News: The Fight for the Eco-Friendly Space

From recycled plastic credit cards to insect-based pet food and biodegradable shoes, sustainable and eco-friendly products have swept across consumer markets in recent years, writes Financial Times (Nov. 28, 2020). In the four years to 2019, only 16% of consumer goods products in the US were marketed for their sustainability, yet they accounted for more than half of the sector’s growth.

This proliferation of a huge range of green and eco-friendly goods has worried regulators and prompted questions about whether sustainability claims are always truthful or clear. “There is a lot of activity but some of it is very superficial and some of the product or packaging claims are actively misleading,” says a Unilever exec. The rise in sustainable goods was prompted both by consumers who want brands that have a strong purpose and by investors.

Worms are turned into a nutrition product for household pets at a facility in France as part of a growing trend for sustainable foodstuffs

At the same time, a generational shift has taken place. An NYU research study found that “the younger the household, the more likely they were to buy sustainability-marketed products.”

As sustainable products have moved into the mainstream, labels and credentials have proliferated. Canada’s Eco Label Index has counted more than 450 certification schemes. The EU said it was “concerned that this surge in demand for green products and services could incentivize some businesses to make misleading, vague or false claims.”

Some popular terms, such as “biodegradable,” lack widely accepted definitions, while others can be misleading. One example is packaging that is “recyclable” but requires specific local facilities that are not always available. A growing number of products claim to be made from recycled “ocean plastic,” even though no system exists to remove plastic waste from the sea at scale.

Classroom discussion questions:

What OM functions are involved in meeting sustainability goals?
What does the term “corporate social responsibility” mean in relation to this article? (Hint: see p. 194 in your Heizer/Render/Munson text)

OM in the News: The Secret to Affordable Electric Cars?

Melting down batteries for recycling is difficult and sometimes hazardous work.

The cost of batteries has long been the biggest obstacle to making electric cars affordable for the masses, reports The Wall Street Journal (Aug. 29-30, 2020). As a result, electric vehicles still carry a hefty $12,000 average price premium compared with gas engine cars.

Since 50% to 75% of the cost of a battery for the industry now lies with its raw material, Redwood Materials, in Carson City, Nevada, sees potential for recycling to lower costs. Almost every day old iPhones and other used personal electronics arrive by the truckload at Redwood, where workers crack them open, pull out their batteries and strip them for raw materials. The firm believes refuse holds the key to driving the electric car revolution forward—and making the vehicles affordable enough for everyone to own one. (Another source is the supply of used EV batteries, which is exploding. Half-a-million EVs are expected to be scrapped in 2025).

For most battery manufacturers, where to find all the nickel, cobalt and lithium needed to make the batteries that power Tesla’s cars and their growing list of rivals is the number one problem. Extracting those materials from nature, through mining and other processes, is costly and difficult, and production is lagging far behind expected demand.

Redwood Materials’ tack is to quietly build the biggest car battery-recycling operation in the U.S., betting that it can perfect a fast and efficient way of collecting and repurposing those materials to disrupt the centuries-old mining industry. “Forever, the entire market has been dictated by the commodity price of these metals,” said Redwood’s CEO. “It is work that is essential if the industry is going to continue to increase production of electric cars at the pace companies are planning.”

Classroom discussion questions:

When federal subsidies end, will demand for EVs remain high?
What are the advantages and disadvantages of recycling vs. mining for raw materials?

OM in the News: Sustainability Goes Mainstream

Expired yogurt. Cardboard cartons. Pallets and plastic jugs. Wilted lettuce. Steel drums. Is it ecologically sound policy to send multiple trucks to transport waste products for separate recycling and diversion, when one dump truck could haul it all away? This is just one question companies face when trying to improve sustainability and in some cases reach carbon neutrality, the topic of Supplement 5.

Companies are increasingly cognizant that consumers and investors are watching their actions to reduce emissions– and realize their pledges have other positive impacts, including financial ones. Instead of sending tons of material to landfill, companies are identifying their waste streams with economic value and sending those materials to recycling facilities, writes Supply Chain Dive (July 21, 2020). Firms can calculate the carbon footprint involved with waste and landfill and see if diversion would yield additional savings.

Consumer sentiment now makes waste reduction a priority. “It’s becoming more prevalent; 30-40 years ago, nobody cared,” said one industry exec. (We recommend showing our video case study: “Green Manufacturing and Sustainability at Frito-Lay” to make this point).

In the U.S., over 30 million tons of food goes to the landfill– about 75% of total food waste, comprising 22% of municipal solid waste (MSW) landfill. Almost 7.5 million tons of food waste is converted to energy through combustion of MSW, and 2.57 million tons is composted. Materials like cardboard and plastics have resale value, and businesses are relatively disciplined about recycling these, due to the economic incentives and sustainability goals. Metal has the highest impact in recycling, given its value. It takes 75% less energy to make a steel product with recycled steel versus with virgin steel, and 95% less energy to make aluminum cans with recycled aluminum.

Companies can calculate emissions using the EPA’s Wa ste Reduction Model, a reporting tool for baseline and ongoing greenhouse gas emissions.

Classroom discussion questions:

What does the Triple Bottom Line mean?
What forces during the pandemic are working against increased sustainability efforts?

OM in the News: Strained Supply Chains and Circularity

In a fast-moving, understaffed crisis, medical facilities produce lots of items that may not be easily recyclable. Remanufacturing and circular economy experts are anticipating an increased need for recycling, writes Supply Chain Dive (June 10, 2020). Some are targeting the healthcare sector specifically while others think the coronavirus crisis highlights how essential recycling and reuse can be for other industries struggling to cope with ruined supply chains. All this upheaval could reveal how circularity may serve everyone better than pre-pandemic protocol did.

Stunted (or overwhelmed) supply chains partially explain why “reuse” has become integral to coping with this pandemic. “Anytime there’s a resource-constrained situation, it’s important to extend the lifespan of products,” says the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, an organization that works with businesses to help them pursue circular economy practices. For example, mask shortages prompted interest in sanitizing N95 masks with vaporized hydrogen peroxide.

There will be plenty of remanufacturing needs once the pandemic is over. Many ventilators made for desperate hospitals will get put in storage, for example, and someone will have to figure out how to keep them in good condition in case the machines need to get rolled out again.

Pressure comes as recycling access in the U.S. has deteriorated in certain ways, and the balance between reuse and disposal could shift in a post-pandemic world. Single-use items, like the stretchy plastic gloves that gum up recycling facilities, could boom when people are hyper-concerned about sanitation.

Reuse might be a future need in some industries — but others have to adopt its companion, recycling, even more quickly. Paper mills that produce packaging for General Mills, Pillsbury and other food suppliers still need raw materials to meet customer demand and higher grocery store sales. Residents are also moving forward with at-home construction projects, and regional suppliers of plastic or wood-composite lumber still need those supplies. Recycling fills those supply chain needs, and importantly, keeps paper mills and other manufacturing facilities open.

Classroom discussion questions:

What is the “circular economy”? (Hint: See Supp. 5 of your Heizer/Render/Munson OM text)
Why has recycling “deteriorated in certain ways”?

OM in the News: The Plastic Bag Controversy

The NY ban on plastic bags has forced customers to use bags of paper, cotton, or more durable plastics.

Reusable shopping bags are “petri dishes for bacteria and carriers of harmful pathogens,” read one warning from a plastics industry group. They are “virus-laden.” The group’s target? Countless Americans increasingly using natural fiber bags instead of disposable plastic bags.

The plastic bag industry, battered by a wave of bans nationwide, is using the coronavirus crisis to try to block laws prohibiting single-use plastic, reports The New York Times (March 26, 2020). “We simply don’t want millions of Americans bringing germ-filled reusable bags into retail establishments putting the public and workers at risk,” said an industry campaign ad. The Plastics Industry Association went so far as to request the US government to declare that banning single-use plastics during a pandemic is a health threat.

The science around reusable bags and their potential to spread disease is contentious. One study found that reusable plastic bags can contain bacteria, and that users don’t wash reusable bags very often. A government study found that coronavirus can remain on plastics for up to 3 days.

What is clear, however, is that single-use plastic bans have become a growing threat for the plastics industry. Packaging makes up 1/3 of end-use demand for plastic resins as a whole. Before the coronavirus outbreak, the nationwide move to ban plastic bags had reached California, Hawaii, New York, as well as cities like Boston, Boulder, Chicago, and Seattle. But now disposability, once a dirty word, has become a selling point as hygiene takes priority over sustainability. Because plastic is made from fossil fuels, plastic prices track oil prices — which have slumped. That has made recycling plastic less economical.

Ironically, the bag ban in California in 2016, which led to elimination of 40 million pounds of single-use plastic bags, led to a 12 million pound increase in larger trash-bag purchases.

Classroom discussion questions:

Make the case in support of single-use plastic bags.
Make the case against them.

OM in the News: The Fraught Future of Recycling

The American recycling industry is in crisis — and cities are on the front lines.

The economics undergirding the U.S. recycling system have fallen apart, writes Energy and the Environment (Feb. 15, 2020). Unable to absorb the extra cost, some cities are opting to kill recycling programs altogether — just as public concerns about climate change are ratcheting up. Why? (1) China, the biggest buyer of U.S. recycled materials, has closed its doors. Before the ban, the U.S. was exporting around 70% of its waste to China. (2) Changing consumer behaviors have made the trash-sorting process more complex and expensive.

A major Maryland recycling center area used to turn a healthy profit from processing recycled materials from a 50-mile radius. Now it’s having to pay vendors to truck material away. The Prince William County facility operates up to 22 hours a day to process about 550 tons of thrown out paper, plastic, aluminum and glass delivered there daily.

Despite the heavy machinery and increased automation involved, the process is still extremely dependent on humans.
On each shift, 28 “sorters” sift through the material as it rolls down a series of fast-moving conveyer belts. The workers spot and pull out non-recyclable trash from the stream so fast that they look like card dealers in a game of blackjack.
Contamination is a huge problem. People throw surprising things — Christmas trees, old carpet, shoes, diapers and even cinder blocks — into their recycling bins.

About 60 other cities are struggling to make recycling work or have cancelled their programs. Others have stopped accepting glass, paper or plastics. (Baltimore County just admitted that it hasn’t recycled the glass its collected for the past 7 years). Some have seen massive increases in their costs. Omaha, Nebraska, received a single bid for recycling services for $4 million, twice the city’s budget. Milton, Massachusetts, experienced a 36% increase in recycling costs.

Classroom discussion questions:

How is this a Triple Bottom Line issue? (See Supp. 5 of your Heizer/Render/Munson OM text).
What can companies, government, and society do?

OM in the News: Your Foam Coffee Cup Is Fighting for Its Life

The Dart Container Corporation, which makes foam products, is a manufacturing behemoth and produced a fortune for the family behind it. Dart makes, by the millions, white foam cups, clamshells, coffee cup lids, and disposable forks and knives — the single-use containers that enable Americans to eat and drink on the go. It employs 15,000 people across 14 states. But now many of its products are being labeled as environmental blights contributing to the world’s plastic pollution problem, writes The New York Times (Feb. 11, 2020).

Cities and states are increasingly banning one of Dart’s signature products, foam food and beverage containers, which can harm fish and other marine life. Maine and Maryland banned polystyrene foam containers last year, and nearly 60 nations have enacted or are in the process of passing similar prohibitions. Environmental groups say polystyrene containers are difficult to recycle in any meaningful way. They believe the harm that plastic pollution can inflict on marine life is immediate. “There is overwhelming evidence that this material is seriously damaging the earth,” said a Maryland lawmaker.

But Dart is not backing down. After Maryland voted to ban foam, Dart shut down its warehouses in the state, displacing 90 workers and sending a signal to other locales. San Diego recently decided to suspend enforcement of its polystyrene ban in the face of a lawsuit by Dart. Even as the market for polystyrene shrinks, many environmental groups want to abolish foam entirely because if it ends up as litter, it can break down easily into small pieces, harming fish and animals that ingest it. For humans, plastic fibers have been found in everything from drinking water to table salt.

The same properties that can make foam an environmental problem also make it profitable to manufacture. The costs are low because foam is 95% air and can be made using relatively little raw plastic.

Classroom discussion questions:

Relate this issue to the Triple Bottom Line, as discussed in Supplement 5 in your Heizer/Render/Munson text.
What is Dart’s position in terms of sustainability?

OM in the News: Nestlé Tries to Tackle Big Food’s Plastic Problem

Nestle just pledged to cut its use of plastic made from fossil fuels by 1/3 in 5 years and said it would invest $2 billion to find more recycled material, a particularly big challenge for the food industry. Sellers of everything from soap to soft drinks are under pressure from consumers and regulators to use less fossil-fuel-based plastic, as well as prevent plastic trash ending up in the ocean. In response, some big consumer-goods firms, like P&G and Unilever, have rushed to promise reductions in plastic, saying they will switch to recycled material, use refillable containers or scrap packaging entirely.

But changing to recycled plastic is especially challenging for companies that need high-quality material that is safe for direct contact with food, writes The Wall Street Journal (Jan. 16, 2020). Recycling the packaging typically used for coffee, instant noodles or candy bars is difficult and expensive because it is often made from multiple types of material, like plastic melded with aluminum or paper. Sellers of fresh food also rely on plastic film—used to wrap cucumber and broccoli—and thin plastic bags for loose items, that often can’t be recycled.

Even when plastic is technically recyclable, it often isn’t collected and recycled. That is partly because, until recently, there has been little demand for recycled plastic, so even highly recyclable plastic—like drinks bottles—leak into the environment. Nestlé’s target of reducing the 1.67 million tons of plastic it uses is a challenge. Just 2% of its plastic packaging is currently made from recycled material.

To date, there is almost no market for the hard-to-recycle material often used in food packaging. Recycling efforts are being further challenged by China’s ban on scrap imports. For decades, the country took many of the world’s recyclables and turned them into new products. Its absence from the market has hit demand and raised costs for municipalities, propelling some to scrap their recycling programs entirely. This important topic is discussed in detail in Supp. 5 in your text, Sustainability in the Supply Chain.

Classroom discussion questions:

Why has China reversed its position vis a vis importing plastics?
What suggestions do students have for dealing with this serious issue?

OM in the News: Why Used Clothes Head for the Dump and Not the Recycling Center

Shoppers are buying more clothes and discarding them faster than ever, sending an increasing amount of textiles to the dump and propelling the fashion industry to search for new technology to recycle used garments, reports The Wall Street Journal (Oct. 4, 2019). The growth of fast-fashion retailers like H&M, Zara, and Gap–each vying to deliver quicker and cheaper style–has flooded the world with affordable clothing that is worn just a few times.

The number of garments purchased annually by the average consumer jumped 60% from 2000 to 2014, while the number of times an item is worn before it is discarded dropped 36%. Despite the buildup of used clothes, the technology to recycle old textiles into fiber to make new ones has remained embryonic, meaning clothes eventually end up in the dump or incinerator. Textiles in American landfills jumped 68% from 2000 to 2015.

So far, companies have focused on improving collection of used clothes. H&M and Zara have in-store bins to collect garments which are then sold as secondhand clothing, largely to emerging markets. But there has been little regulatory pressure on clothing makers to take responsibility for the waste generated by their products, unlike the crackdown seen in other areas, such as single-use plastics. Garments that are recycled are mostly turned into lower-value products like wiping cloths and insulation, which ultimately hit the landfill. Less than 1% of the fiber used to produce clothes is recycled into new garments.

The growing popularity of synthetic clothing like fleece jackets and gym leggings is also releasing more tiny plastic particles into the ocean when the garments are washed. The good news is that Americans are increasingly shopping for secondhand clothing, driven by desire to save money, help the environment and avoid appearing in the same clothes twice on social media platforms.

Classroom discussion questions:

How can clothing manufacturers design and produce for sustainability? (See p.197-202 for ideas).
How many students in your class are buying used clothing, and why?

OM in the News: The Fashion Industry Goes Green

In a factory the size of an airport terminal, laser cutters zip across long sheets of cotton, slicing out sleeves for Zara jackets. Until last year, the scraps that spill out into wire baskets were repurposed into stuffing for furniture or hauled off to a landfill near the plant in northern Spain. Now they’re chemically reduced to cellulose, which is mixed with wood fibers and spun into a textile called Refibra that’s used in more than a dozen items such as T-shirts, trousers, and tops.

The initiative by Inditex, the company that owns Zara and 7 other brands, highlights a shift in an industry known for churning out super cheap stuff that fills closets for just a few months before being tossed into the used-clothing bin. Gap promises that by 2021 it will take cotton only from organic farms or other producers it deems sustainable. “One of the biggest challenges is how to continue to provide fashion for a growing population while improving the impact on the environment,” says H&M’s CEO.

The $3 trillion fashion industry consumes vast amounts of cotton, water, and power to make 100 billion accessories and garments annually—3/5 of which are thrown away within a year, writes Businessweek (May 7, 2018). And less than 1% of that is recycled into new clothes. “The equivalent of a dump truck filled with textiles gets landfilled or incinerated every single second,” says one researcher. To tap into this trend, H&M is seeking to make all its products from recycled and sustainable materials by 2030, up from 35% today.

Inditex last winter started disassembling old clothing to spin into yarns for fashions it markets as “garments with a past.” “We’re trying to find a more sustainable version of all materials,” says an Index exec. Today’s recycled jeans, he says, are typically only about 15% repurposed cotton, because the fiber “gets worn down and we have to mix with new.”

Classroom discussion questions:

Why does this industry consume so many resources?
What are the driving forces for change?