In a time when “fast fashion” is having a devastating impact on the environment, you might think that the answer lies in making clothes that are built to last. Not so, however, when it comes to the textiles that make up so much of the apparel being sold today.

The problem is man-made microfibers, which are non-biodegradable and responsible for huge amounts of microplastic pollution. The fibers that are shed from natural use, laundering and disposal in landfills are especially hazardous to marine life, and big contributors to the millions of tons of plastic waste that are clogging the world’s oceans.

An obvious solution is to develop new materials for textiles and apparel supply chains that don’t stick around in the environment for decades after use. Intrinsic Textiles Group, a Silicon Valley startup specializing in the manufacture of employee uniforms, was using recycled polyester (rPET), but that wasn’t enough to offset the huge amounts of microplastic pollution being caused by non-biodegradable microfibers. (Man-made polyester and nylon are found in more than 60% of the world’s textiles; 71 million metric tons of polyester fiber were created in 2023 alone.)

In 2018, Intrinsic Textiles Group joined with Parkdale Advanced Materials, a global manufacturer of spun yarns, to form Intrinsic Advanced Materials. The new entity created CiCLO techology, an additive that gets blended with polyester and nylon at the beginning of the fiber-making process. Permanently embedded into materials, CiCLO allows polyester to biodegrade at a rate similar to that of wool, says Andrea Ferris, co-founder and chief executive officer of the joint venture.

Today, Ferris says, the technology is present in McDonald’s uniforms, as well as in apparel brands such as Hanes and Billabong, and sold by major retailers such as Target, Macy’s and Bed Bath & Beyond. “The application for polyester is incredibly wide-ranging,” she says.

Much more remains to be done. Despite CiCLO’s initial success, the apparel industry’s adoption of it and other types of sustainable and biodegradable materials is at an early stage. “Textile and apparel supply chains are incredibly complex, very fragmented and global,” Ferris explains. “A lot of people are working on solutions within the industry, and ultimately it does come down to cost and availability of new materials in solving these problems.”

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Regulators are stepping up to give producers a push. There wasn’t much of a business case for recycling or alternative materials when Intrinsic Textiles Group was launched in 2012. “No legislation was driving it, and it wasn’t affordable for industry,” Ferris says.

That’s changing fast. The European Union has imposed mandatory rules for Extended Producer Responsibility, making manufacturers liable for the impact of their products’ full lifecycles, including recycling, waste and disposal. California enforces a collection of EPR programs for multiple industries under the state’s Department of Resources, Recycling and Recovery, or CalRecycle. Technologies such as CiCLO, addressing polluting materials at the earliest stages of manufacturing, can go a long way toward satisfying those growing regulatory requirements.

Ferris says the industry should also expect more labeling requirements, so that consumers can easily see what’s in the products that they buy.

The technology for recycling apparel, whether through melting or stripping down clothing to its basic materials, has been available for decades, Ferris notes. But only recently has the impetus been there for action on a broad scale.

Additional efforts underway in the apparel and plastics sectors include Reju, a developer of proprietary technology for creation of a “circular ecosystem” for textile recycling; Syre, a joint venture of H&M Group and Vargas Holding to create “textile-to-textile recycling at hyperscale,” and another joint initiative among Technip Energies, IBM and Under Armour to recycle items made of polyethylene terephthalate (PET).

Fast-fashion retailers, meanwhile, are feeling additional heat from the Trump administration’s move to eliminate the exemption from U.S. duties for individual import packages with a value of less than $800 — a privilege that has been a boon for sellers of cheap apparel such as the Chinese e-tailers Shein and Temu.

As for CiCLO, Ferris expects the additional cost of incorporating it into apparel to become less of a factor as the technology matures, regulators press for tougher laws, and adoption increases. “As of today,” she says, “we’re working with some very large manufacturers. But growing a global technology like this takes time.”