To the naked eye, two shirts in the same product line are identical. Since they come from the same brand and from the same collection, it’s easy to assume that each shirt must be inherently the same, minus the difference in sizing.
This, however, is a mistake, according to Christopher Wai, co-founder of Sixone, a tech firm based in Canada that has been using AI to comb through textile waste for recyclable material. Items might look the same, but they do not necessarily have the same chemical composition. That difference matters.
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Sixone tested for this. The company looked into close to 1,000 pieces garments from a brand partner, all in the same style. On the surface, everything looked the same and the brand even said they all came from the same manufacturer. However, Sixone found that the garments had different chemical compositions.
“What we showed was that for that 1,000 products, there were three different chemical paths that those products go down to,” he told Sourcing Journal. “That’s really important because we then have to throw away our perceived expectation that if things look the same, they will react the same. We cannot rely on that.”
This is an important premise to establish when discussing textile waste. When textile waste is recycled, it gets broken down to its chemical building blocks.
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