The promise of brands: we clean the oceans of plastic waste and ghost nets, where turtles and dolphins painfully perish. The truth is that ghost nets are difficult to retrieve and clean, and the recycling process of ocean plastic has a questionable ecological balance, as Kai Nebel, Textile Sustainability Researcher at Reutlingen University explains. In addition to the high energy expenditure for cleaning and depolymerizing the raw materials, many toxic chemicals are used during the plastic recycling process. From an ecological point of view, the cost/benefit ratio is really bad. One of the most common recycled yarns is advertised as ocean plastic, but according to the manufacturer, it consists primarily of old carpeting and aquafarm nets. So what is marketed by fashion brands as Ocean Plastic in reality is industrial and post-consumer waste.
Our jacket is made of recycled PET from 20 plastic bottles. We all read or heard these slogans. In principle, collected, clean, PET bottles can be easily transformed into fibers, but first, these bottles are missing in the PET cycle and have to be newly manufactured. And secondly, there is always the need to add new materials to the process, as endless fibers, filaments, necessary for textile production cannot be produced in recycling. On top of that comes the microfiber abrasion, ie. the fact that recycling fibers dissolve faster with every wash cycle and end up in wastewater treatment plants, which are not able to filter out everything and directly go into our oceans via rivers.
There is also another, very worrying aspect of the issue of plastic waste: in underdeveloped countries, particularly in regions with poor waste management systems, there are often informal plastic waste collectors, many of whom are children, 4 million in India alone. These people collect plastic waste from streets, landfills, and in industrial ports like Manila and sell it to local junk dealers for the equivalent of 90 cents/day instead of going to school. In 2023, investigative journalists from the Süddeutsche Zeitung discovered that plastic collected by minors at garbage dumps undergoes a total of 8 stages, including sorting, cleaning, pressing, and melting. This plastic travels several times around the globe before ultimately being transformed into recycled PET yarn used by a well-known European sportswear brand.
There is no standardized definition of sustainability and the term is interpreted in many different ways by the fashion industry. Everything on websites and in ad campaigns is part of a brands' marketing strategy that doesn't necessarily reflect what companies do. In the Brundtland Report Our Common Future from 1987, which served as the basis for the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals, sustainability is defined as meeting the needs of the current generation without jeopardizing the opportunities of future generations. This means that sustainability should not only focus on the environmental dimension but also on the social component. Clear guidelines are essential for understanding sustainability. Without them, we're left unsure of what truly works. Legal and uniform standards are necessary for a comprehensive and scientifically supported approach to sustainability.
At SUNSOCIETY we use a fabric that is made of textile waste from an Italian company, dedicated to promoting social, economic and environmental balance. Through innovative procedures and technologies, it actively reduces water, energy, chemical consumption, and carbon emissions, aligning with our commitment to sustainable practices.