While the world is increasingly aware of the effects of consumer fast fashion on textiles waste, the issue of expired personal protective equipment (PPE) and workwear remains a sleeping giant.
Global environment action NGO, the Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP) – with which MYGroup is partnered under its Textiles 2030 agreement – estimates that just 1% of end-of-life garments worldwide are recycled back into new textiles. Within this figure, it is thought up to 90% of all end-of-life decommissioned PPE, workwear and corporate uniforms currently end up in landfill.
MYGroup has been a leader in the PPE recycling market since its pioneering efforts during the COVID-19 pandemic, which saw it recycle over 15 million face masks, visors, goggles, aprons and swabs, as well as lateral flow devices, at a time when incineration was seen as the only possible option for this mountain of waste.
The company launched its Workwear and PPE recycling scheme over three years ago through its sub-brand ReFactory, a dedicated business for reworking, reusing, redesigning and remanufacturing waste streams to add value, longevity and circularity to waste materials.
As part of the textiles process, the ReFactory team decided to look at some of the novel materials getting lost in the push to recycling of ‘fast fashion’; some of the materials and textiles items that are necessary in our fast-paced world today cannot be easily redesigned by manufacturers, often due to the technical specifications for their use – workwear being the obvious example.
Due to strict health and safety requirements across industries, workwear is a dedicated textile-based item that must be used and also fit for purpose. By its very nature, it’s hard to redesign, hard to change the legislation and hard to recover back into a material for another workwear item – it’s difficult to ‘close the loop’.
ReFactory wanted to focus on this market space and develop a Fibre-to-fibre process around this sector – key to the business’ long-term vision. This journey has successfully begun with a partnership with the University of Leeds, to investigate workwear fibre-to-fibre processing, in which we have also joined up with some of the largest workwear manufactures including Arco and Pulsar.
Industry PPE takeback
MYGroup now operate successful PPE takeback services through box and pallet box schemes with multiple market-leading blue chip companies including Amazon, PepsiCo, Arco and Astra Zeneca.
Over 250,000 single items to date have been collected and processed at MYGroup’s Hull facility, including fluorescent vests, jackets, trousers, hard hats and gloves, making this one of the largest and most successful post-consumer workwear recycling systems in the UK.
Zero waste PPE recycling
The ReFactory recycling process starts with the collection and sorting of this vast array of items, before cleaning and full deconstruction of materials.
The team always look to primarily upcycle the materials by remanufacturing into new products for resale; this has been a great success and enabled the business to place a whole range of high-quality products back into the workplace, with bags, tool bags, spill kit bags, spill kit socks, shrouds, covers and more going back into service at customer sites. ReFactory designers also get creative, making some amazing products and materials for festivals, schools and everyday use.
Visit the ReFactory store here.
That’s 1000s of new products with extended life now put back on the market.
Textile-based MYboard™
Once everything possible has been removed and reused, the off-cuts, damaged, stained and rejected materials are then shredded to a sub-4mm grade before being added to our MYboard™ process at a ratio of up to 50%. This ‘textile’ board has higher acoustic and insulating properties than the standard board. Continuing the MYGroup circular philosophy, the first products made from this board are the bins and pallet boxes which collect the textiles, further expanding the scheme.
Learn more about MYboard™ here.
Over 1,000 ‘textile’ MYboards have been manufactured, with over 200 new textile bins in service.
Using every single shred of material means it can all have a new purpose, with nothing being incinerated or landfilled. Trials are now strongly focused on fibre-to-fibre technology which will enable some of the PPE material to be put back into direct workwear manufacturing.
MYGroup hope to have the first fully circular fibre-to-fibre products in prototype and performance trials by mid-2025.
