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SOR0010.1177/0038026119854273The Sociological ReviewNorris

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The Sociological Review Monographs

Waste, dirt and desire:

2019, Vol. 67(4) 886­–907
© The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/0038026119854273
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Lucy Norris
Weißensee Kunsthochschule Berlin, Germany

Abstract
The consumption of clothing fashioned from recycled textile fibre waste poses a challenge for
buyers not simply due to fears of a loss of quality, but also to fears of ‘dirt’ and contagion.
These concerns appear to reside in cast-off clothing’s intimate links with unknown bodies,
and cultural perceptions of the recycling system’s ability to properly ‘clean’ these materials
and transform them back again into textile fibres that can be worn again on the body. The
fashion industry currently recycles less than 1% of its own cast-offs back into clothing,
despite mainstream economists’ claims that keeping fibres in circulation for longer is not only
environmentally sustainable but also economically advantageous: closed-loop business models
secure resources in an increasingly competitive market still focused upon growth. Here it
is argued that the drive towards a more circular fashion system in Europe brings competing
frameworks of purity into the same field, where cultural values ascribed to clothing hygiene
and cleanliness are confronted with the goals of sustainability and resource effectiveness.
In their attempts to re-make post-consumer clothing fibres back into desirable fashion,
manufacturers and retailers are trying to negotiate these complex value systems, with variable
results. This article explores three, very different, contexts where manufacturers and retailers
experiment with adding value to fashion made from mechanically-recycled wool: an ethical
fashion trade fair in Berlin, textile specialists working with a British high street retailer, and
a yarn wholesaler in Prato, Italy. The examples reveal the current precarity of the symbolic
re-ordering of recycled textile materials as ‘clean and green’ rather than ‘old and dirty’, and
how corporate actors struggle to re-shape their narratives of material sustainability at this
increasingly visible frontier.

Keywords
circular economy, recycled wool, sustainable fashion consumption, sustainable fashion
production, textile recycling, textile waste

Corresponding author:
Lucy Norris, Weißensee Kunsthochschule Berlin, Bühringstraße 20, 13086 Berlin, Germany.
Email: [email protected]
Norris 887

Accumulation of wastes or abundance of materials?

At a sustainable fashion fair in Berlin in January 2018, a hip Basque brand displays a
woollen jumper under the banner ‘Clothes made from Clothes’. On an adjacent rail, their
tunic dress woven from similarly recycled wool is framed only by images of Japanese
chrysanthemums heralding spring – no mention is made of the tunic’s recycled origins.
In 2016, the fashion press heralded Gucci’s ‘recycled’ cashmere scarves, but the yarn
manufacturer is still careful to point out that no post-consumer waste is used – implying
that they only recycle manufacturing leftovers that have never been ‘worn’ on a body. In
a blaze of publicity in 2012, Marks & Spencer launched a coat recycled from their cus-
tomer’s jumpers, but the next season it was no longer in the spotlight. Meanwhile, in
warehouses in the Italian city of Prato, cones of identical recycled woollen yarn are
packed for shipping to weaving mills to be made up into fashion, some in boxes labelled
‘recycled yarn … help the world’, some left unmarked, depending on whether the buyer
has paid for an eco-certification that adds value to the recycled material or intends to
substitute it for more expensive new wool.
These conflicting commercial strategies highlight a deep cultural uncertainty about
the perceived ‘cleanliness’ of recycled clothing and fibres amongst European consumers.
The fashion industry, like many others, faces a potential crisis in resource security, as
well as increasing calls for it to take responsibility for the waste it generates throughout
the production process and supply chain through to end of use. Circular economy think-
ing is proving to be an attractive approach for the fashion industry, but it requires a fun-
damental revision of the hierarchies of value based upon ‘clean’ and ‘new’ fibres. In the
wool sector described in this article, the fashion industry has a history of promoting pure,
virgin animal fibres as highly desirable, while making cheaper products using recycled
wool, a material which has sometimes been concealed as an adulterant at the lower ends
of the market. Claims are now being made as to the high quality that can be achieved by
recycling wool fibre, if a market can be developed for it. Cultural acceptance is arguably
the most important challenge facing the revaluing of recycled textile materials as fash-
ionable fibres in mainstream markets.
The mainstream fashion industry’s engagement with sustainability is partly driven by
the scarcity of material resources to meet the demands of continued economic growth
and rising consumption of fast fashion (Global Fashion Agenda, 2017) but it is only
beginning to address the related proliferation of waste clothing. This waste is still an
externalised economic and social problem for which public bodies have to find solutions,
although France has introduced an Extended Producer Responsibility scheme to push the
cost of waste management back onto clothing suppliers, and the UK government is cur-
rently investigating similar schemes. However, these accumulations of waste are now
being reconfigured as an abundance of materials, a concept that underpins much of cir-
cular economy thinking today (Webster, 2017).
Recycling post-consumer wool fibres back into woollen cloth is an old technology
developed as a cost-cutting strategy that end consumers are often not aware of, and even
trade buyers may not be able to detect. This research reveals how the woollen cloth
industry in Europe is now beginning to consider the reincorporation of recycled wool
back into its production lines as a ‘sustainable strategy’, aiming to improve the quality
888 The Sociological Review Monographs 67(4)

that can be produced in order to introduce it at the higher end of the market. Manufacturers
and brands are uncertain as to how to communicate this to the public, whether to promi-
nently label recycled fibres as an environmentally sustainable resource or continue to
improve their ability to close the materials loop ‘quietly’ through improving quality.
These re-circulated fibres destabilise previous conceptual categories of ‘virgin’ and
‘recycled’, ‘clean’ and ‘dirty’, ‘manmade’ and ‘natural’, and the cultural values associ-
ated with these categories. To be successful as sustainable fashion fibre, these wastes
must be presented to us as something we can consume that allows us to feel connected to
the world and which fits into new ways of thinking (Hawkins, 2006). This may involve
greater transparency around the production, regulation, certification and narration of
material cycles to reconfigure conceptual boundaries. Or it may involve more subtle
strategies of mimicry and substitution that work to reduce the visibility of the recycled
origin of fibres, but relying on a brand’s reputation for doing the right thing to allow the
re-assembled materials to fit into pre-existing cultural categories of value, indirectly re-
framing the end products through their inclusion in the broader narrative of a brand’s
sustainability policy.
Social science interest in materials, their ‘social lives’ and material agency is an
expanding field (Bennett, 2010; Drazin & Küchler, 2015; Hodder, 2014; Ingold, 2007,
2012). Barry’s work on material politics details the ‘way in which the production of
information about materials enables the activity of materials to be managed and moni-
tored, while also generating the conditions within which controversies can proliferate
over the quality and sources of the information produced’ (Barry, 2013, p. 5). Barry has
called for a chemical geography, and claims that we need accounts of the production of
information about materials, and an acknowledgement that the question of what the
properties and behaviour of given materials are, or what they might become, can be the
focus of what is in dispute (Barry, 2013, p. 13). He points out that by assessing the per-
formance of certain materials, and producing, circulating and publicising information
about them, other materials are rendered less visible. Below I focus on the problems
faced by brands trying to introduce mechanically recycled post-consumer wool as a sus-
tainable fibre where it has traditionally been seen as dirty and inferior, and in an emerg-
ing field where, above all, chemical recycling is now promoted as the new, clean
technology.

Re-consuming textile waste

The cycling of clothing’s constituent materials, such as cotton, wool or polyester, through
multiple phases of wear is a concept that is only beginning to have wider purchase in the
global fashion industry, which has hitherto focused on the reuse of garments and textiles.
Estimates for the global flow of clothing materials suggest that over 97% of inputs are
‘virgin’ materials (63% plastic, 26% cotton, 11% other), 2% are recycled materials from
other industries and < 1% from closed-loop recycling in the textile industry itself (Ellen
MacArthur Foundation [EMF], 2017). Of the 53 million tonnes of clothing materials
produced globally every year, 73% is eventually land-filled or incinerated, and 27% lost
during manufacturing, down-cycled or leaked as microfibres. Recycling plastic bottles
into synthetic clothing is not new, but it is having unexpected effects down the line.
Norris 889

During use, it has been recently estimated that half a million tonnes of plastic micro-
fibres shed during washing end up in the ocean and ultimately enter the food chain (EMF,
2017, pp. 66–70) . In other words, we may end up eating our own clothes.
Greenpeace suggests that the fashion industry is still looking to alternative material
wastestreams to secure resources, rather than attending to the wastes of the fashion
industry itself:

‘Circularity’ is being promoted as the latest solution to the environmental problems of our
wasteful society, particularly by the fashion industry and policy makers. However, it is mostly
being tackled from the downstream up, pushing short term waste management approaches,
such as the recycling of problematic plastic waste from other industries as the main solution and
betting against the odds that a technological fix will provide an easy solution. (Cobbing &
Vicaire, 2017, p. 6)

Discarded clothing that ends up in a textile recycling warehouse has been categorised
as ‘dirt’ in Douglas’s sense of matter out of place (1966), but that dirt is itself a produc-
tive category that underpins sorting systems for reuse markets based upon degrees of
relative dirtiness (Botticello, 2012). The clothing that is sorted for textile recycling rather
than reuse (Norris, 2012b) is the ‘dirtiest’ in this schema, and until now it has been
largely down-cycled into wadding and insulation, hidden underneath more attractive sur-
faces. Prototyped chemical recycling technologies for re-processing mixed fibre and cot-
ton textile waste back into fibre are now emerging as a potential driving force in
re-shaping global fashion production, along with developing the incipient social and
economic system change required to turn end consumers into sources of recyclable mate-
rials (see discussion in Norris, 2017; Rhoades, 2014).
In the trade press, fashion fairs and industry events, discarded fashion itself is now
being re-presented to us as new materials rather than recycled objects. This moves us
beyond studying the spaces of second-hand consumption (Gregson & Crewe, 2003;
Hansen, 2010; Le Zotte, 2017; Norris, 2012b; Palmer & Clark, 2004) or creative up-
cycling strategies (Brown, 2013). Two categories of recycling technology can now be
contrasted: established mechanical recycling where waste fibres are processed into reus-
able fibres through tearing and recombining, and chemical recycling. Synthetic oil-based
fibres have been routinely chemically recycled, but with the latest technologies, cellulose
can now also be dissolved before being re-extruded as bio-synthetic fibres. These new
socio-technical systems are starting to re-structure material flows and the politics of
waste, with chemical recycling technologies potentially perceived as ‘cleaner’ than tra-
ditional mechanical technologies.
Having fallen to less than 3% of the fashion market, wool is today experiencing a
revival as a natural, renewable, biodegradable sustainable material. To tackle concerns
about animal welfare and the over-grazing of land, the Responsible Wool Standard is one
way in which codes of conduct and certification are being introduced along the global
supply chain for new wool. At the same time, technologies to bring cast-off woollens
back into the fashion system are also being refined and certified, especially where these
are able to identify high-quality fibres and ‘close the loop’. But the reintroduction of
these high-value fibres appears to face much greater consumer resistance than chemi-
cally recycled oil-based and bio-synthetic textile materials.
890 The Sociological Review Monographs 67(4)

Second skins and the threat of bodily contamination

It is rarely mentioned by those involved that as part of the processes of collecting, sorting
and processing old clothes, the garments themselves accumulate dirt: stained with food
and bodily excretions from previous use, gathering dust from collection bins, transport
and factory sorting, and piled high in stinking, hot mountains of textile waste awaiting
recycling. The open fibres of old woollens especially absorb the stench and spills of use
and abuse, material evidence of their abject status. But charities, recyclers, up-cyclers
and sustainability campaigners avoid reference to the need for rubber gloves for han-
dling, and face masks and odorisers to combat the smells of urine, food and faeces – tex-
tile collection bins are all too often treated as dustbins.
The fear of contagion from wearing someone else’s old clothing includes the fear of
disease-spreading germs, the belief in hygienic practices’ ability to maintain the borders
between clean and dirty, and uncertainty about the moral character of others in maintain-
ing those practices (Stallybrass & White, 1986; Shove, 2003, cited in Pickering &
Wiseman, this volume). One simply does not know whether old clothing of unknown
origin has been appropriately ‘cleaned’. Pickering and Wiseman draw on Latour’s
insights that germ theory gained acceptance since dirt management practices were simi-
lar to those associated with miasma-based theories of contagion (Latour, 1988). In the
case of the exchange and circulation of old clothing, these fears can also overlap with the
threat of ritual pollution conveyed by wearing garments from those lower down in social
order, thereby failing to maintain the body boundary properly (Ginsberg, 1980; Lemire,
1988; Norris, 2010).
In the nineteenth century suspicions about the capacity of textiles to pollute both
physically and morally were extended to reused fibres as recycling technologies devel-
oped on an industrial scale. The recycling of woollen fibres for reuse as clothing dates
back to 1813, when the technology to ‘pull’ woollen garments, i.e. shred them to reclaim
the fibres, was invented in Yorkshire. From the early nineteenth century, ‘rags’ were
imported for recycling from Europe, the USA and across the British Empire, and sorted
into dusty, stinking heaps in huge warehouses. Regenerated wool, known as ‘shoddy’,
was an inferior substitute for new wool, and for the next hundred or so years, its use was
linked to the availability and relative price of virgin wools (Malin, 1979). Due to the fact
that re-processing shortened the fibre length, the quality, durability and feel of regener-
ated wool were significantly worse than pure new wool. Blending techniques could
reduce costs for the lower end of the market, but also gave manufacturers the opportunity
to conceal the inclusion of shoddy in products. Shoddy was the ‘devil’s dust cloth …
manufactured for sale but not for use’ (Engels, 1887). In Douglas’s sense it was doubly
‘out of place’ since it also failed to fit properly into the functional category of cloth, and
became a marker of the poor. Since the rags were never washed, unpleasant odours
absorbed into the fibres were difficult to remove (see Norris, 2012a, for a discussion of
odour in the Indian textile recycling industry). However, as Malin reports for the nine-
teenth and twentieth century:

[I]t would seem remarkable that the aura surrounding ‘shoddy’ generated a persistency of
criticism experienced by no other industrial raw material or product over such a long period.
The rag and shoddy trade could not be accused of being alone in the use of a raw material with
Norris 891

unpleasant associations – the paper, glue and leather industries were but three others… .
Undoubtedly the opponents of shoddy could exploit fully the deep-seated psychological fear of
wearing clothing manufactured from worn-out rags of unknown origin that existed to a far
lesser degree in writing on paper made from cotton rags, using glue manufactured from old
bones, or wearing leather gloves dressed with the products of Mayhew’s ‘pure finders’.1 (Malin,
1979, pp. 553–554)

The use of regenerated wool declined between the first and second world wars due to
‘changing consumer preferences, rising standards of living, and, most importantly, a
marked erosion … of its price competitiveness with pure wool’ (Malin, 1979, p. 556).
The Wool Products Labelling Act of 1939 (USA), known as the ‘truth in fabrics law’,
was the first attempt to label woollen goods with their fibre content. One of the targets of
the law was the ‘unrevealed presence of reworked wool, cotton and rayon in products
which simulated wool in appearance’ (Freer, 1946, p. 46), which amounted to nearly half
of all the woollen products for sale. Three classifications of wools were defined: ‘wool’
fibres which have never been reclaimed from any woven or felted product; ‘reprocessed
wool’ which has been reclaimed without ever having been used by a consumer; and
‘reused’ post-consumer wool. ‘Wool’ products continue to slip between these three cat-
egories and blur their boundaries today, in the effort to re-frame shoddy as an ethical and
clean choice.
This fear of contamination from unknown bodies is therefore doubly heightened
through the function of clothing as a second skin that has been unwrapped from one body
and wrapped around another. As Turner puts it, ‘the surface of the body, as the common
frontier of society, the social self, and the psycho-biological individual, becomes the
symbolic stage upon which the drama of socialization is enacted, and bodily adornment
(in all its culturally multifarious forms, from body-painting to clothing and from feather
head-dresses to cosmetics) becomes the language through which it is expressed’ (Turner,
1980, p. 112). The skin, like clothing, is ‘a surface upon which social identities and rela-
tions are made visible or erased’ (Masquelier, 2005, p. 5). Masquelier points out that
notions of transgression are often bound in categories of dirt and power (2005, p. 3), and
‘in diverse colonial and civilizing contexts … the body surface was – and still can be – a
central terrain on which battles for the salvation of souls and the fashioning of persons
were waged through sartorial means’ (Comoroff, in Masquelier, 2005, p. 2). Furthermore,
in the social enforcement or transgression of boundaries through the treatment of the
body’s surface, it is women’s bodies that have been important sites for ‘contesting the
porous boundaries of moral worlds’ (Masquelier, 2005, p. 4). The body’s surface is there-
fore a morally charged surface upon which alternative moral visions are performed, and
upon which political action can be situated.
The sustainable fashion movement and evolving circular economy thinking is focused
on addressing the loss of value, ineffective use of resources and waste at every stage in a
garment’s life cycle, from initial design through to materials recycling, and systems
change is a key area of research. But as technology develops and resources become ever
scarcer, it is, however, the challenge to change beliefs and behaviours that underpin cul-
tural values that is increasingly seen as the main stumbling block. This must include the
re-ordering of systems of symbolic classification to include recycled fibres that were
892 The Sociological Review Monographs 67(4)

once considered dirty, contaminating and contagious, and re-frame the narratives about
their transformation to persuade consumers that they have been properly processed. I
argue here that this project is highly precarious, with prototypes still failing to convince
consumers of their transformed status.
This article examines primary data from three different research contexts focused
upon strategies to re-introduce recycled wool back into the fashion cycle, alongside the
introduction of innovative new technologies and materials. The information was col-
lected through a combination of observational field visits, interviews and follow-up con-
versations between April 2015 and January 2018. The first context examined here is the
bi-annual Ethical Fashion Show (EFS) and Green Showroom (GS) in Berlin, a combined
trade fair where youth-orientated sustainable fashion brands promote their products to
trade buyers, and visitors can learn about the latest developments in sustainable textiles
and recycled materials. I was able to conduct on-site interviews with participating brands
followed up by email.
The second context is a small heritage wool industry in Yorkshire in 2016–2017,
where experts in wool production have been working with Marks & Spencer (M&S) to
keep materials in circulation and develop local circular economies. The project was to
prove the concept of local closed-loop wool recycling by making a high-quality British
coat, following on from their experiments with the highly-publicised ‘Shwop coat’ in
2012. I interviewed materials specialists and partners in the UK and Italy working on the
project. This was followed up by site visits to the manufacturers to see the materials and
processes first hand.
The final context is the textile manufacturing industry in Prato, Italy, a city well
known for its recycled wool industry. I interviewed key figures in the local textile manu-
facturing and recycling industry, the Chamber of Commerce and the Textile Museum,
and made site visits to local wool spinning and weaving mills, finishing units and pack-
ing warehouses in the local area.

Ethical fashion on show

In January 2018, the bi-annual Berlin Fashion Week took to the stage, hosting a number
of trade fairs (‘shows’) in the German capital’s glamorous and edgy venues. The Ethical
Fashion Show (EFS) and the Green Showroom (GS) chose Kraftwerk as their location
for the three-day event, a cavernous former power station built in the 1960s to power
East Berlin. Shut down after reunification, then transformed into the techno club ‘Tresor’,
Kraftwerk is now the epitome of urban cool; it promotes itself as ‘a space resonating with
energy’, staging large-scale events right in the centre of town. The re-purposed industrial
powerhouse has been described as ‘Tate Modern Berlin style’ with ‘raw, ruinous beauty’.2
To fill this space is an extraordinary achievement for two sustainable fashion trade
fairs, albeit Europe’s largest: the EFS focuses upon the urban zeitgeist, the GS on the
luxury sector. Grassroots sustainable fashion shows organised by small committed
groups of Berlin designers, fashion start-ups and self-proclaimed ‘disruptors’ have been
staged alongside Berlin Fashion Week for over a decade. However, it is the sponsorship
of global trade fair giant Messe Frankfurt that has enabled them to scale up. Messe
Norris 893

Frankfurt own major yarn, textile and apparel trade fairs in Europe, North America and
Asia, and the sustainable fashion shows give them a young consumer-facing platform for
sustainable materials innovations in the pipeline.
Trade fairs ‘provide a venue for the (re)enactment of institutional arrangements in a
particular industry’s field and for the negotiation and affirmation of the different values
that underpin them’ (Moeran & Pedersen, 2009, p. 4). Drawing on Goffman (1974),
Moeran (2011, p. 3) shows how trade fairs are a framing mechanism that enables partici-
pants to perceive themselves as acting in a social field – trade fairs make markets possi-
ble (where markets are understood as real communities), and markets are frames. Over
170 labels from 26 countries took stands at the EFS and GS in 2018, with two-thirds
coming from outside Germany. The smaller GS focuses on high-fashion garments, pri-
marily made from ethically-sourced, virgin organic materials such as Cocoon’s Indian
‘peace silk’ (extracted without the usual killing the of silkworms), and Edelzeige’s fairly-
traded Mongolian cashmere. These luxury brands depend upon high-quality materials,
classic styles and product durability, but they rarely mention sustainability first in their
marketing, instead appealing to lifestyles, comfort and style. Eco-credentials are left to
the labels tucked away inside. As Skov notes, the size and location of a stand and its
material attributes are indicative of the success and relative positioning strategy of the
exhibitor (2006). The EFS, on the other hand, features a more diverse range of approaches,
with more affordable labels often combining several strategies for sustainability into one
product range and often communicating these loudly. While some of these fashion labels
are start-ups that have sourced and developed their own material processes, many are
working with new fibres and fabrics being brought onto the market by larger commercial
entities. Fashion brands are the crucial intermediaries between material innovators and
the end consumer, and their biggest challenge is how to tell a story about sustainability
that engages the trade buyer and will sell to the public.3

Sustainable materials in the spotlight

Oil-based synthetic fibres, such as recycled PET (polyethylene terephthalate) derived
from plastic bottles, are a significant area of development. Vaude’s outdoor collection
includes recycled polyester fibres, with some garments designed to be completely mono-
material, making them easier to recycle in the future. Several brands use Econyl, a poly-
amide yarn recycled from abandoned fishing nets. Econyl is used for lingerie, sports
clothing and swimwear featuring fishing nets and other self-referential images. It is also
used in carpets, neatly allowing the fibre to be used both for two outfits worn at the Green
Carpet Fashion Awards in 2017 (an eco-alternative to the red carpet fashion at the Oscars)
and for the actual green carpet itself that the models stand on.4 The manufacturer, Aquafil,
describes how ‘ghost nets’ clog up the oceans, release dangerous toxins and entangle
marine plant and animal life, and they have partnered with organisations such as the
Zoological Society of London to support local communities in Cameroon and the
Philippines to collect discarded nets through a programme called ‘net-works’.5 However,
it is arguable that green fashion will not solve the myriad problems of marine waste nor
provide sustainable incomes for poor communities living near the oceans. Similarly,
while recycling PET bottles finds a use for plastic waste, using refillable flasks and
894 The Sociological Review Monographs 67(4)

making drinking water publicly available avoids it altogether. The connections are a
solution to existing problems rather than a forward-thinking plan to avoid them in the
first place.
Bio-synthetic fibres are favoured for the strategy to transition to a bio-economy.
These polymers are made wholly or partly from renewable sources, and can be classified
as: first generation, derived from crops such as corn and sugar beet; second generation,
derived from agricultural waste; and third generation, derived from alternative forms of
bio-mass such as algae, fungi and bacteria. Fibres such as lyocell, made from renewable
forests, are ubiquitous at the shows; those made from recycled waste sourced from a
variety of other industries are now heavily promoted, while new materials such as Seacell
made from naturally harvested seaweed are still niche products.
Biodegradable wastes that are being re-purposed to produce new fibres and materials
include new ‘vegan leathers’ appealing to an expanding niche market (e.g. Piñatex made
from pineapple fibre waste from the Philippines), or vegetable-tanned animal leathers
that avoid the heavy metals associated with traditional tanning methods (e.g. Olivenleder’s
‘wet-green’ process using discarded olive leaves). Orange Fibre, a Sicilian-based textile
start-up, has developed cellulose yarns from citrus fruit by-products. Some of the ‘new’
materials being widely publicised at the show are redevelopments of much older tech-
nologies. Hannover-based QMilch makes fibre out of soured organic milk, a milk protein
product that is hypoallergenic and anti-bacterial. Previous attempts to make regenerated
casein fibres as substitutes for wool in the 1930s failed due to poor quality and the advent
of the Second World War. QMilch’s felted fabric has now been incorporated into the lin-
ings of walking boots and the inside straps of rucksacks by Vaude.
Sustainable, scalable and systemic end-of-life solutions for fashion are still surpris-
ingly hard to find at the trade fairs, though there was much talk of system change in the
packed, parallel FashionSustain conference. According to cradle-to-cradle principles
(Braungart & McDonough, 2002), materials should be either compostable or technically
recycled without loss of quality. Ultrashoes from Portugal produce various models using
recycled materials from local cork and leather industries, up-cycled pieces from produc-
tion waste and recyclable materials, with one range being fully biodegradable.
Composting is largely an untested means to effectively recycle textiles at volume, and
attaining the toxic-free quality of material input required for human health is still a chal-
lenge (Greenpeace International, 2012) in order to create high-quality compost as an
important next step in enriching the materials cycle. Swedish outdoor brand Houdini
describe their ranges of biodegradable garments as ‘edible clothing’ and see their natural
fibre products as moving beyond zero waste to becoming a ‘regenerative life force’.
While brands do use sustainable new and/or recycled materials, it is still much less
clear how recyclable they are and whether they will be turned back into clothing. Where
they claim that the materials could be recycled, brands are frequently relying on third
party initiatives to develop technologies for identifying different materials (e.g. infra-red
fibre scanners and QR code readers), and commercial infrastructures for collecting, sort-
ing and re-processing these materials (Norris, 2017; Palm et al., 2014; WRAP, 2013).
Often brands still assemble organic and inorganic materials in such a way that it would
be almost impossible to separate them out again without capital intensive machinery or
cheap manual labour. Strategies that prolong the life of clothing make the material
Norris 895

resources used last longer, but they do not ultimately prevent the problem of vast amounts
of textile wastes ending up in incinerators, landfill or illicit rubbish dumps in developing
countries after they have been exported for reuse markets.
Scientific breakthroughs promise that there are new chemical recycling technologies
in development which will close the loop on textile fibre production by returning cellu-
lose-based clothing to a pulp and producing new fibres from it. This is of particular inter-
est to Nordic countries whose material resources and technologies already feed into
industries such as forestry, wood-pulping and paper-making, and crossovers between
these. Swedish start-up Re:newcell is now able to take used cellulosic fibres such as cot-
ton, dissolve them into a ‘slurry’ (sic) and re-extrude them as filament yarn through a
process similar to that for making viscose.6 Blend Re:Wind is another Swedish-funded
technology able to separate out cotton from polyester in poly-cotton mixed fabrics, each
then being chemically recycled separately.7 Neither of these technologies is yet available
at scale as fabrics for the fashion industry, but their promotional material, networking
events and industry talks are striking in that graphics focus upon clean images of liquid
solutions, glass chemical flasks, balls of fluffy white fibres and spools of silky white
yarn, often set against green pine forests; a technology of enchantment reflecting the
enchantment of technology (Gell, 1992). The difficulties of developing comprehensive
collection systems and the dirtier reality of sorting used textiles (Botticello, 2012;
Gregson, Crang, Botticello, Calestani, & Krzywoszynska, 2014), before extracting suit-
able materials for recycling and re-weaving is barely hinted at, and the systems level
complexity is simplified by an arrow from a wardrobe to a factory, sometimes via a
textile bin.
There is a proliferation of new, synthesised materials, derived from both organic and
inorganic sources, that acquire sustainable credentials through their origin as wastes
diverted from one arena of manufacture into another through chemical processing, dis-
solution and re-extrusion, thereby creating new categories of value. Similarly, new
chemical technologies that promise to keep ‘pure’ textile materials cycling in closed
loops are also purported to be clean and green solutions to resource management that
ignore the wear, tear and dirt created through use and discarding practices. Material sto-
ries are dissolved at the same time, processes of identification and singularity are erased
as materials are constantly re-commoditised (cf. Kopytoff, 1986), and new narratives can
be drawn out. These innovations destroy the previous form of a discarded thing, the
orange peel, fallen leaves, cotton fibre, empty bottle or watery ghost-net, and take it all
the way back to its chemical constituents. There is, as yet, no equivalent process for
wool.

Skunkfunk: Material strategies

Skunkfunk is one of the few labels to put the issue of used clothing going to waste right
up front and literally in their customers’ faces. With a large trade stand in the centre of
Kraftwerk (Figure 1), banners greeted visitors with the message: ‘we are Basque, we are
designers, we are sustainable, we are Skunkfunk’. Information about the supply chain
was prominent, and a corner of their stand was devoted to displaying their raw materials
in glass jars, and explaining the advantages they offer in terms of reduced energy, water,
896 The Sociological Review Monographs 67(4)

Figure 1.  Skunkfunk, Ethical Fashion Show, Berlin, January 2018. ©Skunkfunk.

dyestuffs, fibres or recycled content. All are produced with particular manufacturers who
share their philosophy and they work together to achieve certification and transparency.
These materials included recycled polyester from PET, recycled leather cutting waste,
linen, organic cotton, recycled organic cotton paper, lyocell, ramie, hemp, recycled cot-
ton scraps and the most recent, recycled woollen thread. Sourcing used woollen knitwear
from the charities Emmaus and Caritas, their partner manufacturer has apparently devel-
oped the technology for opening up the fibres so that they can now retain 95% of the
fibre’s original length, hence making it softer and stronger than previously possible.
A bright orange and beige pullover was displayed at the front of the stand, backed by
an image of heaped used clothing, and with a large tag ‘Clothes made from clothes’
(Figure 2). A nearby graphic explained the principles of recycling woollen clothing into
new yarns. During a conversation we had at the stand, Skunkfunk’s Creative Director
suggested that using only pre-consumer waste could be considered mere green-washing;
recycling post-consumer waste back into desirable clothing is the real technological and
cultural challenge for them, to create something ‘fashionable, feminine and fluid’. She
explained that the yarn was knitted up in Morocco (the brand states that they only work
with trusted suppliers, but these are distributed worldwide). We both agreed that it was
still slightly scratchier than virgin merino wool, but that apparently hadn’t put off visitors
so far, despite the company’s initial concerns; Skunkfunk are waiting to see what hap-
pens when they go on sale in their shops. One or two visitors to the stand had asked about
the jumpers’ cleanliness, so she had explained that the used clothing is treated in an
ozone chamber, which kills bacteria and removes odours. In contrast, she pointed out a
dark grey tunic dress, also made out of recycled wool spun in France but woven in China,
Norris 897

Figure 2.  ‘Clothes made from clothes’, Ethical Fashion Show, January 2018 ©Skunkfunk.

hung quietly amongst other garments on a rail in front of a poster of Japanese girl in a
forest, with the text ‘Kiku’ (‘chrysanthemum’ in Japanese) and ‘winter becomes spring
in the chrysanthemum’s hand’. Information about the materials was tucked away on the
garment label inside, and poetic metaphors of regeneration provided the underlying
message.
The brand’s attempt to ritually purify these cast-offs draws on a complex mix of bio-
chemical cleansing processes, various ethical, environmental and cultural values and the
need for economic sustainability in global capitalist markets. Skunkfunk have made their
new jumper part of a mixed collection of social and material experiments, each of which
tries to tell a coherent narrative in different ways, and which is performed alongside
community-based initiatives to reinforce their values, such as in-store swapping events
898 The Sociological Review Monographs 67(4)

and used clothing collections. Their strategies can be understood as a means to negotiate
multiple competing frameworks of purity within one brand narrative (Benthall, 2018).
Just as Skunkfunk strives to tell a coherent story across their multiple projects, so the
EFS and GS try to bring together a wide range of competing material strategies and puri-
fication frameworks within the field of ethical fashion. But as Benthall (2018, p. 28)
points out, ‘purity is correlated with sterility. It goes with cleanliness, control, coherence,
precision and asexuality, whose antonyms are all dangerous but essential to life and
creativity.’ This tension between pure and impure plays out in a number of ways within
the field of sustainable fashion, no more so than between global capital investing in
the continuous growth of fashion consumption, and the ethical agenda to support social
justice and keep production within sustainable levels of material and energy use.

Doing the right thing?

In 2008, UK high street retailer Marks & Spencer (M&S) introduced their ‘shwopping’
campaign with Oxfam, encouraging people to bring back their used clothing in exchange
for M&S store vouchers.8 As of 2017, about 12% of returns were their own products.
Unwanted clothing is either sold to the public through Oxfam’s own shops, or sent to
their own warehouses for sorting. Reusable clothing is exported to various markets, the
remaining clothing is sent for recycling, mattress fillings and car insulation. Fronted by
actor Joanna Lumley, the partnership aims to raise awareness around clothing waste and
increase funds for charitable work. It is part of M&S’s ‘Plan A’, the social and environ-
mental plan launched in 2007 that aimed to put tackling climate change, waste, resources,
fair partnerships and health at the centre of their business plan. The new goal is that ‘by
2025 every one of [our] products will have Plan A attributes that address every single one
of its material social and environmental impacts. For example, covering the key raw
materials, factory, use and disposal stages in a product’s lifecycle’ (Marks & Spencer,
2017, p. 20).
In 2011, the first ‘Shwop coat’ was introduced, a limited edition of 500 double-
breasted women’s coats that were made from recycled wool and cashmere processed
from shwopped garments (Figure 3). A highly publicised version was launched in 2012,
costing half the price of a new wool coat at £89.9 Yet production of the coat was never
scaled up, and the range was not expanded. M&S’s own internal retail buyers were not
convinced that promoting this coat as a recycled product was the most appropriate strat-
egy. Focus group research had apparently shown that customers expected M&S to be
‘doing the right thing’, and they supported the idea of recycling old clothing. But when
customers physically encountered someone else’s used clothing actually reincarnated
into a new garment, some of them apparently physically recoiled.
The experiment revealed the hurdle faced by retailers on the high street such as M&S
to market the value of sustainable initiatives effectively to their more conservative cus-
tomers, and specifically to overcome negative perceptions around wearing recycled
fibres. Furthermore, internal research suggested that there is more resistance amongst
women to buying recycled fibres than men, and hence women’s clothing is no longer a
major focus of experimentation. Recycled fibre continues to be used successfully in
Norris 899

Figure 3.  M&S’s ‘Shwop coat’.

men’s outerwear, but without the campaigning around it. Internal marketing staff and end
customers alike needed to be persuaded that it is possible to change negative public per-
ceptions around the quality of recycling through effective story-telling.
It was striking how one expert became animated as he spoke of his admiration for
wool, as an intrinsically sustainable and high-quality fibre, and for the producers with
whom he had worked for many years throughout his career. He conveyed the weight of
responsibility he felt in trying to achieve sustainable goals within a large organisation,
and the burden he carried within him to push them through despite opposition or a lack
of understanding in other areas of the business. Trying to improve traceability and trans-
parency was an impossible task for one company alone, but collaborating with other
retailers through joint platforms helps enormously, developing guidelines such as the
new Responsible Wool Standard together with farmers. In 2012, M&S was the world’s
biggest retail buyer of British wool and cloth, and they are still the largest retailer of
woollen clothing on the UK high street. But in the eyes of the materials experts I spoke
to, wool has become an underutilised and devalued fibre, and their biggest problem is
how to add that value back.
900 The Sociological Review Monographs 67(4)

One of the projects being prototyped in 2016 was a closed-loop woollen coat pro-
duced in Yorkshire, another step further on in terms of circular thinking. M&S have a
sustainable sourcing policy for their wool and cashmere, and buyers say they have
worked closely with suppliers in East Asia to make it achievable. Using their own stocks
of used clothing collected in-house, returned faulty items and pre-consumer waste, they
wanted to take M&S wool and cashmere jumpers and recycle them into new products
within Britain. Given the fact that 95% of all returns in-house are less than a year old, this
means that the fibres are quickly available to be put back in cycle. The advantage would
be that they know exactly how the original fibres have been sourced, spun, woven and
chemically treated, and can be confident that the recycled yarn is as sustainable as the
original product. One of the problems with using recycled fibres from a variety of sources
is that manufacturers can’t claim that standards for animal welfare or land management
have been adhered to, nor do they know how the fibres were originally processed so they
can’t exercise ‘chemical due diligence’ and avoid toxic contaminants (see also Norris,
2012a, p. 394). The goal of the new project is to experiment with ‘opening up routes to
recycling so that they are ready for when the market catches up’. This includes trying to
induce customers to bring more clothing back; but stores are struggling to improve col-
lection rates.
Keen to demonstrate the quality that could be achieved by local heritage industries, one
of the M&S textile consultants invited me to visit the village of Saddleworth where the new
coat fabric was being produced, east of Manchester and bordering the Pennines. Sitting by
the river Tame at the top of a small valley was the Pingle spinning mill, founded in 1777
and now run by the Gledhill family. My host beamed with pleasure as he pointed out the
sun shining weakly on a sprinkling of snow on the hilltops. This was a project very close to
his heart, working with a firm he knew well, pushing themselves to prove a concept. The
three Gledhill brothers inherited the mill from their father, and were born in the house on
site. With pride, one of the brothers showed us samples of woven herringbone cloth in two
colour ways, made from 70% recycled wool. A small run of the cloth had been woven a
mile down the road, at Mallalieus, an internationally renowned woollen cloth manufac-
turer, established in 1863. The intention was to have the cloth made up into garments
designed by a well-known British designer and manufactured by a high-quality garment
maker in Manchester. The coats could potentially be sold in the ‘Made in Britain’ range,
helping to keep the small heritage industry in business and prove the viability of the circu-
lar concept using local manufacturing rather than shipping it further afield. To date the
project has not gone into production, but the team continue to work with recycled materials
and routes to market, ‘to be ready to scale it up when the time is right …’.

Prato: What the buyer doesn’t know?

M&S has been working with specialist wool manufacturers in Italy for many years, and
Oxfam were selling donated cashmere sweaters to a highly skilled recycling mill in Prato
long before the ‘shwopping’ tie-up. The Italian city of Prato has had a flourishing wool
industry since medieval times, competing with neighbouring Florence and Biella. In the
early nineteenth century it began to industrialise by copying French textile technology
that was years ahead of its rivals. The town boomed after adopting wool-recycling
Norris 901

technologies from Yorkshire in the mid-nineteenth century. However, today local people
in the textile industry all pinpointed its huge success in the years after the Second World
War, when the European market was flooded with military uniforms and used US cloth-
ing sent via the Marshall Plan. The town built up a comprehensive networked infrastruc-
ture for processing used clothing, from sorting vintage garments and specialist theatrical
costumes, to second-hand clothing for reuse markets, all the way down to rags for regen-
erated yarn. The capacity of Prato’s wool manufacturers to accumulate vast hoards of
used woollens, and the haptic skill of sorters who can identify different wools, such as
Shetland or merino, cashmere, camel and other noble fibres simply by touch are famous
within the global industry. Prato firms were known for stockpiling material and sorting
into 20 shades of each colour, thus able to produce recycled yarns in any wool fibre and
any shade upon request.
At the same time, Prato’s wool manufacturers are proud to have built up a reputation
for fine fabrics and fancy yarns since the 1970s, and have worked hard to rid themselves
of the lingering suspicion that they make inferior cloth from cast-offs. This may partially
explain why no one talked about the historic pre-war recycling industry, and referred
only to a post-war period of scarcity and necessity. Prato’s Museo del Tessuto documents
how the wool industry survived the First and Second World Wars by making regenerated
winter textiles, but really took off when the ‘Made in Italy’ label was launched at the
Palazzo Pitti in 1952, opening up the British and US markets. Swatch books on display
reveal how Prato manufacturers visited trade shows by fashion houses such as Balmain,
Hermes, Ricci, Laroche and Dormeuil in Paris in the 1970s, clandestinely snipping
square inches of fabric from the inside seams of garments, and bringing them back to
copy the designs.
About 80% of the town’s wealth is based upon the textile industry. There is little verti-
cal integration in Prato, textile manufacturers put out various stages of manufacture to
thousands of small factories in the town, making it difficult to track which companies are
using which materials and processes. During my visits in 2015, prominent local business
people expressed visible anxiety about putting the recycling industry forward as an
emerging green industry when asked, since it appeared to risk tainting their existing busi-
ness. Textile firms are still run as family businesses, and older heads of families are
resistant; a younger manager recounted a story of a French journalist, who visited the
town in the late 1980s and accused it of poor quality copies of French designs in a
national newspaper; his father is still angry about it. The danger of being too closely
associated with impurity lingers over decades and generations when it comes to a town’s
reputation, and the museum presents a narrative that shows how it was technically profi-
cient in recycling in the past but has now developed into new areas.
However, in acknowledgement of the recent commercial interest in making textile
recycling more profitable in Europe and the problem of ‘green-washing’ in the textile
industry, the Prato Camera di Commercio launched ‘Cardato Regenerato’, a sustainable
certification for recycled wool. It is based on an assessment of the carbon footprint, water
and energy requirements offset through the purchase of green credits (Figure 4). Only a
couple of factories still ‘pull’ the old clothing to open up the fibres for reclamation, using
water to retain fibre length, and fewer than 10 yarn makers are spinning it. One spinner
confirmed that they buy up woollens from across Europe but also from India, where for
902 The Sociological Review Monographs 67(4)

Figure 4.  ‘Cardato Regernerated’, Prato 2015. ©Lucy Norris.

the past 10–15 years they have been partnering with dealers in Panipat, Kandla and
Baroda. Woollen cast-offs are sorted in India, and zips, buttons and seams are removed
by hand, and garments chopped into pieces (cf. Norris, 2012c). But once exported back
to Prato, each bale (Figure 5) is again sorted by hand by four men to re-check fibre con-
tent and colour matching; one sorter laughed and said that the sorting in India was terri-
ble. The owner claimed that while the technology and old machines had been sold to
Turkey, Eastern Europe, Tunisia and India, no one else knew how to make regenerated
yarn properly.
As we walked around the factory, we came to the stock room where cones of yarn are
boxed up. In one half of the room, yarn was being packed into boxes labelled ‘Cardato
Regenerated: Help the World’, in the other, into plain boxes. Our host explained that some
customers were prepared to pay the higher fees for a certified carbon-neutral yarn, while
others were simply happy to pay less for it in an unmarked box and feed it into their
production line as a substitute material. This was the moment which revealed alternative
constructions of the value of this fibre: it became clear that the quality of recycled yarn could
be good enough to pass unnoticed in high street markets as it has done for decades, whereas
a green certification could give it added value in smaller sustainable fashion markets.
Norris 903

Figure 5.  Rags for recycling, Prato 2015. ©Lucy Norris.

Prato textile mills routinely use pre-consumer manufacturing waste from local wool-
len industries in their production, and it is an open question as to whether manufacturers
can or should call such usual business practices ‘recycling’. About 80% of all ‘noils’, the
shorter fibres that fall out of worsted spinning, return to Prato mills. Re.Verso, a fabric
made in Prato through a partnership with Gucci,10 is widely advertised in the trade press
as being made from recycled fibres, but expressly states that the pre-consumer clippings
have never been ‘used’.11 In the ‘Shwop coat’ project, fibres had been tested extensively
to make sure there were no harmful residues of dyeing and finishing processes, and the
aim was to make a high-quality fabric that was as good as the original. The Prato manu-
facturer’s materials are all finished in the same finishing unit, whether they contain recy-
cled fibres or not. He is still supplying M&S with fabrics that include recycled fibres,
along with many other high street retailers, but few of them draw attention to the fact.
Although public perceptions of recycled textiles is that they are low quality, in fact often
not even a lab test will reveal if fibres are recycled, and sometimes the only clue is the
writing of ‘mixed fibres’ on the inside of a garment label.

Conclusion
The evidence from spaces where different attempts are being made for creating value
around recycled wool is that it has precarious value, that contexts are unstable and brands
are unsure how to develop narratives around them that ensure that they are perceived as
being properly ‘cleaned’ and of high enough quality. In this era of transition, there are
904 The Sociological Review Monographs 67(4)

clear differences between sectors of the market that take different approaches. Young
brands such as Skunkfunk are using waste as a way of making a protest against the status
quo of the fashion industry, both foregrounding a product in a way that might backfire,
yet also quietly introducing recycled fibres as part of a mix of sustainable materials
which have an overall narrative of collaboration with respected partners and of taking
sustainability seriously. The more conservative-facing, and much larger, M&S brand has
a far-reaching and radical commitment to shifting to a sustainable business model, but
even Plan A is not communicated loudly to the public, and they prefer to do the arduous
work of developing material supply chains and sustainable products quietly, reinforcing
existing perceptions that they are a trusted company without making it explicit what this
might really mean. Finally, the spinning mills of Prato are indeed able to construct high-
quality woollen yarns at reasonable prices that their buyers can choose to go either way,
claiming a more expensive carbon neutral green product or quietly saving money by
substituting recycled fibres for virgin wool.
Chemical recycling is coming to the fore as the fashion industry’s new hero technol-
ogy; it stands in for the whole socio-technical apparatus of sustainable production and
responsible capitalism, and has successfully managed to push the dirty, messy business
of collecting, sorting and transforming people’s worn clothing into more obscure terri-
tory. Investing in new technologies supports continued capital growth, but it also appears
very likely that there are positive connotations of cleanliness attributed to technological
processes that involve dissolving textiles in liquids to disassemble even natural materials
such as cotton fibres into their smallest chemical constituents, and re-assemble them into
new materials. These technologies of dissolution then lead to processes of re-ordering
that construct new systems into which cellulosic compounds ‘fit’, they are matter ‘in
place’ and have been properly ‘cleaned’. Mechanical recycling is only really successful
for fashion fibres when it manages to keep the wool fibre in as close a state to new wool
as possible, limiting the destructive power of recycling technologies, but increasing the
ritual work of purification that has to be done to make these fibres perceived to be ‘clean’
and culturally acceptable once more.

Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the organisers and exhibitors at the EFS and GS, especially Skunkfunk. Tim
Hoyle, Phil Townsend, Tony Clark and Claudio Calabresi generously shared experiences of the
recycled coat project in its various former iterations. I thank Meghna Gupta, Andrea Cavicchi,
Daniela Degl’Innocenti and Filippo Guarini, Silvia Gambia, Barbara Bigagli and Silvia Tarocchi,
Cristina Guarducci and Silvia Lucchesi for their help in Prato. Lucy Pickering and Phillippa
Wiseman have been generous and encouraging editors.

Funding
A Pasold Research Fund grant funded my initial visit to Prato in April 2015.

Notes
  1. A reference to the children who collected dog faeces to sell to tanners in nineteenth-century
London (Mayhew, 1861).
  2. See www.kraftwerkberlin.de/en/press.html
Norris 905

 3. Products are often certified by one or multiple international bodies (e.g. GOTS: Global
Organic Textile Standard, and Fairtrade) that are developing standards for sustainable materi-
als, processing technologies and labour conditions across various stages of the supply chain.
These certifying bodies also have stalls at the show, each explaining their systems to trade
buyers.
  4. See www.econyl.com/blog/cote-ai-green-carpet-fashion-awards-italiani-con-il-filo-econyl/
  5. See www.econyl.com/blog/special-projects/net-works/
  6. See https://renewcell.com/
  7. See http://mistrafuturefashion.com/rewind-recycles-cotton-polyester/
  8. Information in this section is either already in the public domain, or is drawn, with permis-
sion, from conversations with textile specialists working on the project to develop a prototype
for a circular wool economy. The summary analysis here is my own.
  9. See www.cosmopolitan.com/uk/fashion/news/a17617/Marks-and-Spencer-launch-first-fully-
Shwopped-garment-the-Shwop-wool-winter-coat/
10. See www.classecohub.org/re-verso-eco-fabrics-made-in-italy/
11. See www.classecohub.org/re-verso-filatura-c4/

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Author biography
Lucy Norris is Guest Professor of Design Research and Material Culture at Kunsthochschule
Berlin Weißensee. Her research is grounded in anthropological approaches to materials and
material culture, with a focus on the social and economic spheres of rubbish and value transfor-
mation. She has carried out research in India and the UK on cultural perceptions of waste, sec-
ondary markets and recycling economies with a focus on textiles and clothing, and concepts of
sustainability in the field of fashion design. She is currently researching developments at the
intersection of design, material innovation and the construction of speculative social fields, in
particular local wastestreams, open source production networks, and the use of living organisms
in biofabrication.