New denim made from recycled used jeans in Tunisia with UN's help

According to a recent report, the pilot project managed to repurpose 6,530 pairs of second quality jeans into 16,000 new pairs of jeans with a composition of 20 per cent of recycled cotton.

Together with Nudie Jeans’ local suppliers, the collaboration with UNIDO could demonstrate the business case for high-value recycling of second quality jeans in the Tunisian textile and clothing value chain, according to a press release from the SwitchMed programme.

According to a textile waste mapping study from UNIDO, Tunisia’s textile and clothing industry generate over 31,000 tonnes of pre-consumer textile waste each year, out of which over half is either 100 per cent cotton waste or ‘cotton rich waste.’

The transport of pre-consumer textile waste from Tunisia to recycling facilities in Europe and Asia increases the carbon footprint and causes up to two-thirds of the total cost of recycled denim. All the recycling and remanufacturing processes in the pilot project were undertaken in Tunisia, within a radius of 180 km, reducing costs and carbon dioxide emissions from transportation.

A second phase of the Nudie Jeans collaboration will pilot the recycling of post-industrial textile waste like cutting scraps. The potential to locally source recycled textile fibres is significant, especially considering that Tunisia has all the production capacities required for this process.

In addition, pre-consumer textile waste is more manageable to reuse than post-consumer textile waste as the sorting, quality and sourcing can be done within the same supply chain.

Fibre2Fashion News Desk (DS)