Nike says its World Cup uniforms will be made using “advanced chemical recycling” from 100 percent textile waste, using mixes of scraps and used clothing. But researchers and advocates warn that chemical recycling only works smoothly under tight conditions—esp
This month, athletes from 16 countries are set to take the field wearing uniforms made from recycled fabric—possibly a blend of scraps and old clothes.
Nike is framing the move as more than marketing. The company says it used “advanced chemical recycling” to create its first elite performance apparel from 100 percent textile waste. and it has leaned into the idea that the result is truly “circular”: clothing that can be recycled repeatedly. eventually reaching everyday consumers rather than staying trapped in pilot projects.
Yet the details are where the promise starts to wobble. Nike has signed deals with two chemical recycling companies. but little has been publicly established about their technology or whether their approaches can scale fast enough to change what people buy. Experts who study chemical recycling say the day when shoppers can wear chemically recycled clothes. return them. and send them through the cycle again is not around the corner—at least not in a way consumers would recognize.
Veena Singla. an environmental health researcher at the University of California. San Francisco. put it bluntly: “Yeah. it’s technically possible. ” she said. “But is it going to happen in reality?” She and others who study chemical recycling do not think so—at least not in the manner consumers might expect. She described a future that may come. but not soon: the cycle is more likely to expand in the direction of industrial scrap fabric than toward the kind of mixed. post-consumer clothing piles that make everyday recycling so difficult.
The stakes are hard to ignore. Nike and other apparel companies say they have a sustainability problem they can’t just talk away. Apparel companies produce more than 100 billion articles of clothing every year. In the process. they generate up to 10 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions and an “unfathomable amount of waste”; the vast majority of textiles end up landfilled. incinerated. or sent to unofficial dump sites in poor countries. Nearly 70 percent of clothes are made from oil-derived fabrics. with polyester—the same kind of plastic used in water bottles—forming the most common base.
Faced with that footprint, the industry has pledged to boost the “circularity” of polyester, largely through recycling.
There are limits to the strategies companies have tried so far. Traditional mechanical recycling, which relies on shredding and grinding, breaks fibers down. Any fabric made from the result has to be blended with 70 to 80 percent virgin material so it doesn’t pill and tear.
Another approach has been recycling plastic bottles into new polyester. Patagonia pioneered this strategy in the early ‘90s. and by the start of this decade virtually all recycled polyester was sourced from old bottles. But companies have increasingly faced lawsuits and regulatory scrutiny from those pushing for bottle-to-bottle outcomes.
That pressure is part of why chemical recycling has moved to the center of “circular” fashion plans. Chemical recycling uses solvents to dissolve fibers into their base chemical units—building blocks that can be spun into new fabrics. Proponents argue this is genuinely circular because it does not rely on bottles. and that the process can convert used polyester shirts or running shorts into new ones over and over again without losing fabric quality.
This vision is being sold widely. including by fast-fashion brands like Gap. H&M. and Levi’s. many of which have signed multi-year agreements with chemical recycling startups. Last fall. Nike said it would source “circular” polyester from two companies: the Swedish firm Syre and Loop Industries in the United States.
Research does support some of the hype. Chemical recycling can produce virgin-quality polyester, and at least one method—methanolysis—can preserve that quality through repeated rounds of recycling.
But limitations show up fast when the question shifts from what works in controlled settings to what’s available in the real world.
Diana Ferreira. a textile researcher at the University of Minho in Portugal. said textile-to-textile chemical recycling is limited by whether suitable fabric is available. She explained that if chemical recycling is dealing with clean. well-sorted. polyester-rich waste streams. it can produce material with properties comparable to virgin polyester. But she said that when the input is post-consumer textile waste, “the situation is much more complex.”.
That complexity is the difference between industrial scrap and a closet.
Chemical recycling works best with industrial scraps, which are more uniform than piles of used clothes. Post-consumer textiles often include blends of cotton, nylon, wool, spandex, and acrylics, plus dyes, chemical coatings, thread, labels, and zippers. Those contaminants make chemical recycling much less feasible—at least without meticulous sorting and repeated rounds of pre-treatment to chemically remove the contaminants.
Singla said that if anyone wanted chemical recycling to work, clothes would likely need to be 100 percent polyester, along with the need to get rid of so many toxic chemicals.
Beth Jensen, of the nonprofit Textile Exchange, offered a more expansive view. She said “all solutions,” including chemical recycling, are needed to reduce the fashion industry’s dependence on fossil fuels. But she agreed that the infrastructure required for companies to accept used clothing and process it through technologies like methanolysis is still some distance away. and she questioned who would build it—companies like Nike. governments. recyclers. or a collaborative mix.
Even if chemical recycling meets optimistic targets, the scale mismatch is still glaring. The industry would need chemically recycled polyester to compete with what the future looks like on production lines. Dionisios Vlachos. a professor of chemical engineering at the University of Delaware. said Syre’s goal to produce even 3 million metric tons by 2032 is “too aggressive.”.
And while people may hear “circular” and imagine widespread household participation. projected volumes suggest chemically recycled fabric would remain a small slice of the total market. Even if the industry hits optimistic targets by the early 2030s—whether from scrap or from people’s old clothes—production of “circular” fabric would likely pale compared with more than 169 million metric tons of polyester projected to be manufactured annually by then.
Nusa Urbancic, CEO of the nonprofit Changing Markets Foundation, argued that the answer isn’t just better recycling. Companies need to “reverse the trend of fast fashion. ” meaning making less clothing overall. whether it contains recycled or virgin materials. She said growth in recycled polyester last year—mostly from bottles—was dwarfed by an even larger increase in fossil fuel-based polyester production.
Urbancic described chemical recycling as “an excuse to keep producing plastic clothes.” She also pushed for a shift away from polyester altogether, citing that the material sheds microfibers and may expose consumers to hazardous chemicals.
Beyond the technical hurdles, transparency remains a fracture line. Nike. Syre. and Loop Industries did not respond to interview requests or detailed lists of questions. leaving a lack of openness that Singla. Vlachos. and others said Grist spoke with described as a transparency problem. Industry confidentiality makes it difficult to know what’s actually happening inside these firms—and whether “#TheGreatTextileShift” promised by the companies represents a real departure from earlier chemical recycling initiatives that failed.
There are additional red flags around specific players. Loop Industries has never turned a profit since its founding in 2010. The company is under investigation by the SEC following a 2020 report accusing it of systematically misrepresenting its technology to regulators and investors. In 2022, it settled a class-action lawsuit over similar accusations.
Syre, meanwhile, has not explained how the “gigascale” factory it plans to build in Vietnam will process consumers’ old clothes, given the country’s ban on used apparel imports.
In the end, the most human takeaway may be the simplest: for now, “circular” fashion sounds closer to a promise than a system.
“It remains to be seen whether [Nike’s announcement] amounts to anything,” Singla said. For the foreseeable future, she said chemically recycled polyester will likely be limited to niche products like World Cup uniforms.
Nike World Cup uniforms chemical recycling circular fashion textile waste methanolysis polyester Syre Loop Industries sustainability greenhouse gas emissions microfibers