Ultra-fast-fashion volume makes the average garment cost more to sort than it is worth

The problem

A sorting line is paid by the value it extracts per tonne. That value is falling because the composition of what arrives has changed. Ultra-fast-fashion has pushed large volumes of cheap, short-lived garments into circulation, and those garments reach donation banks within a season or two. Two consequences follow:

• Lower output value. Cheap blended fibres (poly-cotton, elastane mixes) with bonded trims mean a larger share is too worn, too low-quality, or too unfashionable to resell. Blended or contaminated fibre is hard or impossible to mechanically recycle into anything valuable. More of each tonne ends up as near-zero-value rag, energy recovery, or waste.
• Higher processing cost. Sorting is manual and item-by-item. More items per tonne, more fibre-blend checks, more rejects to handle — labour cost per saleable kilo climbs before disposal of the reject fraction is even accounted for.

France caps energy recovery (refuse-derived fuel) at a small share of collected volume under the EPR specification, so operators cannot simply burn the reject fraction to recover the economics.

Why this is its own problem

This is distinct from the export collapse. Even if export demand recovered tomorrow, inflow quality would keep dragging per-tonne margins down — bales are worth less because of what is in them. The cost problem originates in production decisions made years earlier and far upstream.

That points resolution upstream: the cheapest reject to process is the garment that was never made disposable in the first place. Fixes acting only at the sorting centre treat a symptom.

Sources: Carenews and Techniques de l'Ingénieur coverage of the 2025 textile crisis; Refashion materials.