The fibre industry and the fashion industry are two different worlds
Michiel Scheffer studied Geography in Utrecht and wrote a Masters thesis on technological change in the clothing industry in Flanders and Northern France. He continued with a PhD on delocalisation of production in the Dutch, Belgian, French and English clothing industries. From 1991 to 2000, Scheffer represented the Netherlands in Euratex as staff member and director of the Dutch Clothing Industry Association (now Modint). He continued research work and was involved in or led six studies for the European Commission on textiles and three for the Dutch government. He is now Program Manager for Sustainable Textiles at WUR, Chairman of Texplus and Secretary of the Dutch Circular Textile Valley. He has recently contributed to five studies commissioned by the Dutch government on circular textiles. Scheffer talks to Subir Ghosh from the fibre point of view.
There have been widespread calls for a green recovery of the fashion industry from the destruction caused by the covid-19 pandemic. Many feel this recovery should start from the fibre stage itself since it lies at the core of textiles/fashion industry. I have seen a flurry of activities more in terms of fibre innovation than fibre development in the last one year. What is that you have noticed, have there been more activities or is it more of a clutter?
There has been a lot of innovation around, but much of it remains marginal. There is no good business case for upscaling. Making 4,000 tonnes is okay but going to 40,000 tonnes is problematic. In fibre making you must have some economies of scale. About 4,000 tonnes in fibre-making is pilot production and you can have enough material to surprise some clients, but it is not volume. Volume in fibre production is at least 40,000 tonnes. So, alot of innovation remains in small volumes because pricewise it’s too expensive, the functionalities are not perfect, and it remains a niche application. That’s why running by the numbers is important, because (otherwise) they don’t make an impact. The two things that have been successful in recent years. First, polyamide hydrocycling (Aquafil is one of the protagonists there). The other thing promising in Europe is the hemp boom, not because of textiles but because of the medical components of hemp that make a business case. Since there is more hemp for pharmaceutical and nutritional purposes, there is also a large bunch of fibres that is available for almost nothing. Any value you derive from those fibres is profit if you have a good business case.
The other tough one—I like it a lot—is the regenerated viscose from cotton. Renewcell, Refibra, etc, are all very promising, but somehow going slower than expected. That’s because of the lack of financial power behind it. Technically it is an attractive fibre. But there are institutional barriers that slow down the breakthrough. People have been working on it for 10–15 years.
Overall, polyester is a problem, but there is no incentive legally or financially whatsoever to shift away from. Cotton is either stable or even declining for a number of reasons. One is climate change, which is very much the case in Western Africa where the cotton belt is under pressure. It can’t go south because then you get into cacao chocolates, which is more rewarding. You can’t go north because it is too dry up there.
I haven’t been in India in a while. But I guess food crops provide better cash revenue and cotton is being pushed away by other crops that deliver better income. In a country like India, a good farmer having a good crop selection and good method of working and some commercial sense can make several 100s of euros of income per month, whereas cotton provides several 100s of euros of income per year based on one hectare. Cotton is financially a low-yield product requiring lot of work offering only two harvests a year, and lot of other food crops are lot more attractive. That’s something I see because I have been working in an agricultural university. People in textiles don’t see what is happening in food. And food dynamics in developing countries is a very substantial groundswell that is a risk for cotton.
The fibre industry and the fashion industry are two very different worlds that hardly communicate with each other and they don’t speak the same languages. You have polymer chemists on one side and fashion designers on the other who don’t understand each other. There is no good discussion in the value chain on, let’s say, the future of fibres, how fibres can be improved/modified. Somehow the debate is missing. You have the Global Fashion Pact, Global Fashion Agenda, Sustainable Apparel Coalition... but that’s all fashion. They make nice statements and throw something over the wall to others, but the others are not fully engaged as partners. There is also the governance issue. So, we have to shift from stage-y-stage discussion to really a value chain approach.
In certain industries a value chain approach is being developed. So, in hemp now there is a European level, but it is open to non-Europeans, a kind of value chain dialogue model set up—the European Industrial Hemp Association. I think in polyamide (it is farmer concentrated), the value chain approach is feasible as well. But in cotton and polyester, it is very tough to organise.
You talked that there is a big gap between fibre and fashion people, and also that fashion is driven by polyester. Most of the companies are heavily invested in polyester products. Is this one of the reasons why we are still caught in the trap?
We are in a trap because of price. Polyester is now a much better fibre than it was 50 years ago—in terms of spinning techniques or even extrusion techniques. The big barrier to polyester 20–30 years ago was that it was not a comfortable material; but now it is. The second thing is that by blending polyester with cotton, one is able to use lower grades of cotton. That is also an important trend—that spinners are able to increasingly use lower grades of cotton previously known to be used in cosmetics (like pads and medical stuff, nonwovens). We are more able to use lower grades of cotton more efficiently in clothing which previously we were not able to. The downside is this: it doesn’t stand washing very well. So, the technical part of fast fashion is the use of lowgrade cotton and low-grade polyester and blended together too. There is a kind of addiction to cottonpolyester blends or polyester-viscose blends as well. That is one important dimension.
The other dimension is that if you want to invest in a new material, often it takes 5–6 years before you get something which is market-proof. To innovate, you need a market that works with you to test it—which is a fundamental problem. Say, at Reliance you have scientists and people with PhDs who know that to make something new it takes 4–5 years, to make a thesis it takes four years. So, the fibre trend that still has a scientific backbone has to work with designers who always think of fashion trends only for the next season. Fashion people are not able to work four years ahead. They are not able to commit themselves. A lot of textile companies say: We are aware where the change is, but need a value chain which can stand with us for the next 4–5 years. Very few fashion brands commit themselves for a longer period. So, you have to find segments where commitments exist. In sportswear you see some progressive behaviour. But the fashion industry has no governance or methods to focus on longterm change. The problem is they have the power of the value chain, but they do not have the means to execute that power. The result is what people call greenwashing—good intentions which are not implemented in a way to obtain long term results.
What are the kinds of governance or regulation changes one would like to see?
The two main ones what we lack are together about a mechanism to integrate environmental costs into the price of the products. The first is to integrate the CO2 emission cost in the price of the materials, and the other is to integrate disposal costs into the same. The first one is tough because then you would have to ask the Chinese and Indian governments to introduce a tax on polyester and if they don’t do it, then you don’t have it. There is no way the US or Europe can require that from India or China. The extended producer responsibility (EPR) puts the onus on the one who imports. So, if you import a garment with polyester in Europe, then a levy would be charged to you.
The second element is that we have now been working for 25 years on Fairtrade practices, but have not been tremendously successful in structuring the industry in a way that living wages as paid to cotton farmers or workers in the clothing industry. There was a time when manufacturers in Belgium paid living wages. Someone working in a clothing factory in Belgium could raise a family, women living alone too could support a family. But nowadays for majority of the people working in clothing factories in Bangladesh, India, Pakistan or China, the clothing industry income is a supplementary on which a family cannot live. So, how come we were able to sustain living wages, at least in Europe, in 1945–1950? Since 1990, we have an industry that is no longer paying living wages to its workers.
The clothing industry and the cotton industry survive as parasites. I can see why the clothing industry is surviving in countries like Vietnam and Sri Lanka—that’s because the young women working at a clothing factory stay with parents and provide only a part of the income to their families which also have a piece of land and other revenues. You cannot develop a modern society based on the clothing industry nor on cotton cultivation/farming. The textiles industry now—both in its polyester and cotton components—is a parasite to the petroleum and food industries.
I am a big fan of Sri Lanka. There the clothing industry is nicely aligned with the rural economy, in which the clothing workers get cash income which completes the income of the whole family. In Sri Lanka, when the farmers’ revenues go up, the need for a secondary income declines. So, people move out of the clothing industry. And there are some people who say that we have to give good working conditions, otherwise we won’t get people to work for the factories anymore.
Those are the two things—there is no good governance to get a fair price of materials taking into account the cost of the work, and we don’t have good mechanisms to provide fair incomes to workers. My belief is that a lot of manufacturers cannot provide fair incomes to workers because they do not themselves get a fair price from clients. I don’t think manufacturers are evil. But if they don’t get fair conditions from clients, it’s tough for them to give fair conditions to their workers.
So, will we see dominance of cotton and polyester for some time to come?
If you look at the spinning capacities, the dominance of cotton spinning is huge, shortstaple is huge. The alternatives are the longer ones. Hemp, say, is anyway long. The inertia or lock-in of the massive short-staple spinning capacity is one barrier, and the second barrier is the huge investment that has already been done in polyester. The built-in capacity in polyester is huge. So, if you want to shift to other fibres, hundreds of billions of euros or dollars would be required to shift, and that doesn’t happen in one year. So, moving away from polyester is really 30-40-50 years of transition.
If we talk about fibres like jute, why did they not grow beyond a point and people still talk about them as alternative fibres? Is it because of economies of scale, or is there some other reason?
A very good book was written 6–7 years ago (The Empire of Cotton; Sven Beckert; 2014)). Cotton was a very attractive product because it was easy to industrialise. Cotton was not a European crop. Cotton before 1800 was popular in Asia because of its comfort properties. Linen and hemp do not have the same comfort properties, and they are hard to industrialise because you require wet spinning and the fibres are longer. So, intrinsically there are a number of benefits for cotton over linen, hemp and jute in terms of fibre fineness, comfort properties and industrialisation, and then of course there is the effect of skill. We now have over 250 years of industrialised cotton; so, there had been a 250-time gradual improvement over improvement of the cotton process. And there is a whole industry that has been built on building equipment for cotton.
Nettle for example was quite popular a fibre to blend with wool until 1920. In eastern Europe, everyone had a field of nettle for making fibres. The last patent on nettle came in 1890. Since then, no research has been done. Hemp is a bit the same. Hemp is relying on all techniques. If you look at the plants for hemp and flax, they have not been optimised for end-use, but for low agricultural costs. There has been a lot of technological developments where cotton has been increasingly fit to meet our requirements at lower costs. In hemp, flex and jute—those investments have not been made. You could imagine that with adequate research—and my colleagues are doing it—it would be feasible to come up with hemp and linen that would have finer fibre qualities with less lenient content. There is lot of space to optimise, but there hasn’t been enough research.
And then there is also the matter of getting used to something. For example, Europeans in 1870s. Men would wear linen shirts, but the linen was of much finer quality than now. Also, aesthetically we have got used to the cotton feel, the soft look, and culturally we are no longer accustomed to coarse, rigid or sturdy kind of hemp or flax. So, there is also a cultural dimension.
When flax became cheaper because of the end of the Multi-Fibre Agreement (MFA) in 2005, suddenly more people started buying linen shirts because it became affordable. So, taste and price can also relate to each other and change.
There are other factors too. PLA melts if you iron it too hot, the colour absorption of PLA is not as good as cotton. So, we are used to certain aesthetics, and manufacturers are used to certain efficiencies that you don’t have if you simply move on to new fibres.
Industry news is flooded with announcements about new fibre innovations/developments. Do you think there are far too many different fibres in the market, with each claiming this or that? Do you think there is so much of a clutter that both apparel makers as well as end-consumers stand confused?
There is a dynamic of too much running around and looking for some novelty. In the Dutch language, we often misuse the word innovation for novelty. Those are two different words but close. So, a small modification is branded as something new. There is a demand for new things, but not always is something new, and some are even outright retrograde. For example, this vegan leather kind of fashion. Maybe it is a good idea to develop something step by step which is a good alternative too. I understand that technically you don’t succeed at once—you start by blending a plant extract and a classic polyurethane because you haven’t mastered it totally. But what is essentially an experiment and partly successful is sold as a novelty; blending a plant-based substance with polyurethane is totally unsustainable. The other danger of vegan leather is its lifespan—the durability of vegan leather is far less than plastic leather. A good pair of shoes made from leather can last 10 years, whereas most people I know who have vegan leather shoes say it’s not wearable after one year.
Then there are unfair comparisons. They compare their processes—which very niche—with the dirtiest of the dirty tanning units that are on the banks of the Ganga. That’s not a fair comparison. You compare your own state-of-theart technology with the most primitive technology in the other one, while there are tanning factories in India, Pakistan and China that are state-of-theart in terms of water treatment, etc. So, that is not a fair comparison.
But the vegan leather case does show that there is a need for something new, but that is tough to brand in a fair way and scale up in a good way so as to expand its use and reduce its price.
This is where the volume question comes into play once again. For fashion people, 1,000 tonnes is a huge volume, whereas in fibre production it is nothing. So, fashion people think that “Oh, it’s an important trend;” people who know about materials know that it is interesting but not substantial. That creates what, you say, looks like a flurry of new things, but in the end nothing really stands.
There are huge investments involved and cost of moving from one fibre to another is humongous, apart from the fact that the consumer may not be wanting something new.
My main argument is we won’t get out of this by market forces alone. The market is able to promote experiments and smallscale production of alternative stuff, but markets do not enable scaling up. So, intervention is needed. One of the major interventions could be that we increase the price of polyester just like petrol or diesel. Here in the Netherlands, 60 per cent of the value of petrol is taxation and maybe the station/store that takes some profits. But polyester has no levies. A kilo of polyester is cheaper than a litre of petrol. So, in the price of polyester, we should integrate all the other costs—cost of CO2, the cost of microcontaminants. If we increase the price of polyester by €1 per kilo, which is substantial, then cotton farmers will have more space as well because cotton prices have remained depressed due to the price of polyester. And, because polyester is basically the standard, all the alternatives come across as far too expensive. They are often 2–3 times more expensive than polyester without giving two or three times as many benefits.
We should move to a system where the environmental costs of polyester must be integrated into the price that can be done either by extending the producer responsibility (linked to recycling or end of use) or let’s say a levy based on CO2 use and that levy should be very substantial; otherwise, you don’t create a level-playing field for other fibres.
