USA Team Will Wear All Recycled Cotton Polo Shirts During Olympic Walk In

USA Team Will Wear All Recycled Cotton Polo Shirts During Olympic Walk In

Why Ralph Lauren is going all-in on recycled cotton

Ralph Lauren uses cotton in 80% of its clothing. The company is now working to make sure it’s recycled cotton.

BY ELIZABETH SEGRAN

As Team USA walks at the opening and closing ceremonies, they’ll be wearing Polo shirts made by Ralph Lauren, the team’s official outfitter.

The Polos look identical to the shirts the brand has become known for over the years, but they’re actually a radical departure for the company. In the past, the brand has manufactured them from virgin cotton; its new garments are made these entirely from recycled cotton, a feat that took years of research and the latest in chemical engineering technology.

In recent years, several companies have been pioneering fabric-to-fabric recycling. Many different approaches now exist, but the big question is whether the fashion industry can adopt these technologies at scale. Ralph Lauren wants to use these Olympic Polos to signal that it is ready to invest in recycled cotton, so that other players in the industry—from mills to factories to other brands—feel confident that they too can shift towards recycled materials.

“The eyes of the world will be on us at the Olympics,” says Katie Ioanilli, Ralph Lauren’s chief global impact and communications officer. “We’re very strategically using this opportunity to shine a light on this recycled cotton, because we need the rest of the industry to support it so it can be a viable option in the future.”

WELDED FIBERS

Cotton is one of the most widely used fibers in the fashion industry. At Ralph Lauren, for instance, it makes up 80% of all fabrics. But producing cotton exacts a high cost on the planet. It’s a crop that requires a lot of water and chemicals to ward off pests. Traditional farming degrades the soil and excavates carbon from the ground, releasing it into the atmosphere, contributing to global warming.

A much better solution is recycling existing cotton fabric from clothes that consumers have used and no longer need. Cotton recycling technology has existed for decades. Companies have been able to take existing cotton fabric, mechanically shred it into tiny bits, then spin the fibers back into new yarns.

The problem, however, is that this lowers the cotton’s quality. High quality cotton is made up of long fibers, because it doesn’t pill or break down easily. Historically, however, this mechanically recycled cotton has had very short fibers. The final product was not good enough to be used in clothing, so it would be used in insulation or rags.

A tech startup called Natural Fiber Welding (NFW) has found a solution to this problem. It was founded by Luke Haverhals, a chemical engineer, who found a way to “weld” these short fibers together, turning them into longer fibers. This allows them to be used in the fashion supply chain. And importantly, this welding process doesn’t require complex technology or a new factory. It can take place in existing mills and factories that already have a stock of mechanically recycled cotton.

“This is crucial to ensuring this technology can scale,” says Haverhals. “If you need to build a new factory to create this yarn, it adds another obstacle. The best way to make sure the technology takes off is to make sure it can plug into the existing system.”

Ralph Lauren has partnered with NFW for six years. It’s one of the startup’s investors, and it has also used the recycled material, called Clarus, in other collections. But as NFW’s operations grow, Ralph Lauren is able to start incorporating more of the recycled cotton fiber into new collections.

The company doesn’t have a fixed plan for how much Clarus it will use in garments going forward, but Ioanilli says it is working to use as much as possible as quickly as possible. The hitch is that using recycled cotton takes planning. Ralph Lauren has a large, complex supply chain of factories all around the world that make its clothing. In this case, the factory in Guatemala where the Polos were manufactured did not already have NFW technology. Ralph Lauren had to ship recycled cotton fabric from NFW’s factory in Illinois, which the Guatemalan factory used to make the final Polos.

MOVING THE NEEDLE

Right now, brands like Ralph Lauren need to do these kind of supply chain gymnastics in order to use sustainable materials. That’s because fabric-to-fabric recycling is still in its infancy. Jason Berns, Ralph Lauren’s head of product and manufacturing innovation, says that it will take time and coordination for technologies like NFW to become widespread, and available at more factories.

“The fashion industry is a complex eco-system that has been in place for more than a hundred years,” says Berns, referring to the fabric mills, factories, logistics partners, brands, and more that make up the supply chain. “To change the system, we need many players to work together to move things forward.”

Earlier this year, Renewcell, a major fabric-to-fabric recycler in Sweden, declared bankruptcy. Renewcell built a factory and was ready to start scaling, but it didn’t get enough orders from brands and factories for it to be a viable business. Last month, the Swedish investment bank Altor acquired Renewcell’s assets, so there is still a possibility that it may be able to operate in the future. But Renewcell’s story shows how vulnerable new recycling technologies can be, without industry support.

Renewcell’s bankruptcy was a blow to many sustainable fashion advocates. But Berns is still optimistic about fashion’s future. He compares the current moment to the first dot com boom in the 1990s. “We’re exploring a lot of new technologies and business models right now,” he says. “Some of these will become the dominant players in tomorrow’s fashion industry, but we don’t yet know which ones will survive yet.”

The most important thing, he argues, is for brands to show their support for all of the new sustainable approaches that are now emerging. For instance Ralph Lauren is investing in the U.S. Regenerative Cotton Fund, and it is also using recycled polyester when possible. But it also means investing in new fabric-to-fabric recycling companies like NFW. “By showing that there is demand for these new fabrics, other parts of the system—like mills and factories—will be willing to invest in them too,” he says.