The circular economy vision that has emerged from William McDonough’s early work on Cradle To Cradle suggests that we must make less, buy less and consume less. If this is to work, the things we do buy and use need to be made from genuinely circular materials. 

Events company GreenBiz will run its Circularity conference from June 15-17. This will be third time it has run the event. Circularity 21 will be online only, as was Circularity 20, because of covid-19. The launch event, Circularity 19, took place in person in Minneapolis, billed as North America’s first major conference on this subject.

In spite of the presence and ongoing participation of figures such as William McDonough, whom some have termed the father of circular-economy thinking, sustainable fashion champion Elizabeth Cline says she was left a little underwhelmed by Circularity 19. Writing about the event later for grassroots US environmental organisation the Sierra Club, Ms Cline said she feared the message coming across was a recycled version of recycling. The author of two books about sustainability and the fashion industry, she said: “The notion that we can go on making as much as we want as long as we reuse it all is a myth that we’ll have to leave behind if we ever want to realise the dream of a circular economy.”

She quotes Professor Roland Geyer of the University of California at Santa Barbara as saying that recycling and reusing products is something we’ve tried over and over again without being able to make it work. She says that when she put this to William McDonough after Circularity 19 he agreed. He told her that there has to be more to making our economies circular than chasing higher and higher rates of recycling.

No panacea

Mr McDonough is a Virginia-based architect who, in 2002, formed an unlikely partnership with Hamburg-based chemist Michael Braungart to produce ‘Cradle To Cradle’, a book that urged us to remake the way we make things. According to Ms Cline, this is the book that introduced many, including her, to “the heady ideas of circularity” and brought those ideas out of academia and into the mainstream discourse. He has been calling for years now for action to follow the sound thinking and fine words. He was the co-founder in 2017, with the C&A Foundation (now called Laudes Foundation), of Fashion For Good, an Amsterdam-based innovation platform with the stated ambition of driving the transition to a circular apparel and textile industry. But if, in attempting to make this transition, the apparel and textile industry sees ‘reuse-recycle’ as a panacea, it could be, Mr McDonough says, “problematic”.

His view, as he explained it to Elizabeth Cline, is that recycling more used clothes to spin recycled fibres to make more clothes is all about quantity. Quality matters a great deal and manufacturers need to pay more attention to the types of material they use.

One-way ticket

The point is that, although use of recycled polyester is growing, projections suggest that consumption of virgin polyester will keep growing too. Changing Markets Foundation, a London-based consultancy, said in its February 2021 report ‘Fossil Fashion’ that synthetic fibres will grow their share of the total global fibre market from 69% now to 73% by 2030, with polyester accounting for 85% of all synthetic fibres’ share. By 2030, the report predicts, world polyester fibre production will grow from 65 million tonnes in 2020 to more than 90 million tonnes in 2030. Over that timeframe, it says recycled polyester will consistently have a share of about 8% of the total; this means that annual consumption of virgin polyester will be around 85 million tonnes in 2030. Its source for these figures is the petrochemical industry.

“Recycling will not solve fashion’s problems,” the report says. “Currently, less than 1% of clothes are recycled to make new clothes. Virtually all recycled polyester in clothing comes not from recycled garments, but from recycled plastic bottles.” It points out that, with limited options for viable fibre-to-fibre polyester recycling, at the end of its life, this already recycled polyester is likely to be sent to landfill or incineration. “Turning bottles into recycled polyester fibre, therefore, represents a one-way ticket to disposal,” it concludes.

Parallel lives

A more significant development than recycling, in the eyes of Elizabeth Cline, is that more and more brands, including apparel companies, are developing business models that revolve around extending the longevity of their products.

In some cases, Ms Cline claims, the focus for fashion brands is finding, in the second-hand market, a new avenue for growth that will not affect their main revenue streams. “Circularity is being positioned as a way to drive new growth,” she observes, “not necessarily as a way to cut down on the use of raw materials. What that means is the circular economy is not replacing the linear economy; it’s merely running parallel to it.”

Labour of love

In other cases, though, including that of high-end French footwear brand JM Weston, companies are taking pre-owned products back from customers and, if they can, expertly and lovingly reconditioning the objects. Customers who may not be able to afford the brand’s full-price products are embracing the second-hand ones enthusiastically. So much so that JM Weston recently expanded this service beyond France, taking it to Japan.

Another important French brand, Hermès, has long made its craftspeople available to carry out repairs on bags it sold years before. Its products have longevity designed into them and making them from high-quality leather lends itself to making sure they are restorable. During 2020, Hermès posted a beautiful, short film on its social media channels showing the work that its senior leather craftspeople carry out when a customer asks for a repair. An experienced member of the team, Farid Hambli, had recently travelled from France to help the brand’s team in Hong Kong offer this service there.

On a particular day, a customer got in touch to say she wanted Hermès to restore a bag she had bought for her mother seven years before. Her mother had since died and the bag clearly had immense sentimental value. When it reached Mr Hambli in the small workshop on the twenty-second floor of one of the buildings the brand occupies in Hong Kong, he paused. On touching it, he felt he recognised it. He says in the film that the leather felt familiar, that the bag spoke to him. He checked and found that it was he who had made it while working in one of the company’s factories near Lyon.

He describes encountering it again as a pleasant surprise and says that, on seeing how well preserved it was, he felt sure the bag will continue its journey through time. “Objects pass through your hands, often after they’ve had years of use,” Mr Hambli says. “The truth is that you can repair genuine luxury goods. That’s what luxury is.”

Bags and leather that talk to us may be a privilege preserved for experts such as Mr Hambli. However, any company that follows William McDonough’s advice and decides to pay more careful attention to the materials it uses ought to see that leather meets the demands of the circular economy perfectly. Rather than create waste and encourage wastefulness, it uses up waste from other industries.

This use of waste from the meat and dairy sectors should also fulfil the wishes of brands that feel the need to flag up their use of recycled content in their products. But leather does more than just recycle its raw material, it upcycles it. Leather is renewable and it allows finished product manufacturers to offer durable, repairable items that customers will keep and love for years.

Hermès leather skills on display at a fair in Asia.
Credit: NY Graphic / Shutterstock

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