Regenerative Technology: Processing Post-Consumer Denim Waste into a High-quality Fibre Feedstock for Chemical Recycling

Less than 1% of clothing is recycled into new clothing, with 73% headed to landfill or incineration and the remainder being repurposed into lower-value applications: insulation, mattress stuffing and industrial cleaning clothes (Ellen_MacArthur_Foundation_2017).

The fashion industry needs to rapidly innovate ways to identify post-consumer waste textile materials that are not easily recycled. We simply cannot continue looking at our natural world for feedstocks; we need to view textile waste as a resource and close the loop on cotton production by recovering materials.

Anna Foster is Founder and Creative Director of E.L.V. DENIM and a renowned fashion stylist. She began styling in her early twenties, worked with an acclaimed list of photographers, models, and celebrities and is currently Fashion Director-at-Large at Australian magazine RUSSH.

E.L.V. Denim is a 100% up-cycled denim brand, with environmental sustainability & social responsibility at the heart of our company. We up-cycle old discarded denim into modern, sophisticated designs, using only 7L of water to produce vs 10,000L for a new pair (UN estimate). Launched 3-years ago, Anna Foster has built a brand that is internationally stocked, supported by the British Fashion Council and recognised as a key player in fashion's circular economy.

E.L.V. DENIM works with Blackhorse Lane Atelier, a local East London atelier with a proven social sustainability policy. All production takes place within a 5-mile radius in East London, ensuring minimal carbon footprint and supporting local communities.

We are now offering our customers the service to repair and recycle their existing E.L.V. DENIM jeans, the first step in a strategy to become fully circular, the final goal to create a new regenerative fibre out of post-consumer denim waste, closing the loop on one of the most popular items in every person's wardrobe.

Anna's vision is to fully utilise every pair of post-consumer denim we come across during sourcing and best utilise our small amount of off-cuts. We will recycle undesirable denim waste in the UK into high-quality low-impact denim fibre, replacing virgin cotton fibres in the manufacturing process of new yarns and textiles. This will add value to a currently problematic waste stream.

We will start this approach at fibre level, by chemically analysing an array of sorted denim fibre types and testing chemical processing methodologies. This will ultimately allow for a higher quality segmentation of feedstock, localising material-to-material recovery and building strong local textile and waste expertise and infrastructure in the UK.