Nearly Half The Cotton In A T-Shirt Is Wasted Before Anyone Wears It

Fashion’s Recycling Push Is Focused on the Wrong End of the Problem, Study Suggests

Most people assume the environmental cost of a cotton t-shirt starts when it gets tossed in the trash. New research says a major part of the waste happens long before the shirt reaches a store shelf.

A study published in the Journal of Circular Economy tracked a single cotton t-shirt through its entire life, from cotton fiber entering production through manufacturing, use, disposal, sorting, and recycling. The study is a model of a simple white cotton t-shirt, not a measurement of every shirt or every brand’s supply chain. Researchers found nearly half of all the cotton fiber that goes into making a t-shirt never makes it into the finished garment. It’s lost during production, before anyone gets a chance to wear it.

That finding upends the way governments and clothing brands have been thinking about textile waste. For years, the focus has been on what happens after clothes get thrown away, building recycling programs, collecting used garments, keeping fabrics out of landfills. But this research shows that strategy is missing the bigger picture, and that cotton disappearing on factory floors in Asia may be just as big a problem as anything in European trash bins.

A T-Shirt’s Journey Around the World

To understand where fiber goes, researchers Rakib Ahmed, Christina Meskers, and Johan Berg Pettersen built a model of a single white, short-sleeve cotton t-shirt weighing 110 grams. They traced every gram from production to its final destination, whether a recycling facility or an incinerator. Manufacturing was modeled in Bangladesh, one of the world’s largest garment exporters. The shirt was consumed in Norway, sorted in Lithuania, and sent to India for fiber recycling, reflecting how the global textile trade actually works for European consumers.

What the model revealed was sobering. To produce a single 110-gram t-shirt, the process starts with about 197 grams of raw cotton fiber. Fiber disappears at every step. The biggest losses happen during yarn-making, where roughly 49 grams are lost. Another 17 grams vanish during chemical treatment and dyeing, and another 17 grams during cutting and sewing. By the time a finished shirt rolls off the line, about 44% of the original fiber input has been discarded, much of it treated as waste or moving through poorly tracked channels in producing countries.

Only 17 Grams Come Back for Every 100 That Enter the Supply Chain

After the shirt is worn and discarded in Norway, things don’t get much better. Only about 40% of used clothing in Norway gets collected separately for recycling or reuse. The rest goes out with regular household garbage and gets burned.

In the model, mechanical recycling could recover only about 33 grams of fiber from the original 197 grams, about 17%. The authors note that real-world recovery could be lower, because garments diverted to reuse, resale, or repair aren’t available for closed-loop recycling.

Pre-consumer losses from factories and post-consumer losses from used clothing contribute in roughly equal measure to total waste. That matters, because European policy has focused almost entirely on post-consumer waste.

Cutting Factory Waste Delivers Bigger Gains Than Collecting More Old Clothes

The researchers tested four scenarios. Boosting Norway’s separate clothing collection rate from 40% to 90%, in line with new EU requirements, increased material recovery to 37%. Climate benefits were modest, only about a 2% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, though water use and land impact improved by around 10%.

A second scenario imagined factories getting better at not wasting fiber. By reducing losses in yarn-making, dyeing, and sewing to levels the best-performing factories already achieve, the total cotton needed to make a shirt could drop by nearly a quarter. That produced the largest environmental gains, roughly 10% lower greenhouse gas emissions and reductions of 20 to 25% in other categories.

A third scenario imagined collecting and recycling factory production waste in Bangladesh rather than sending it to landfill. This produced the highest material recovery rate, 44%. A fourth scenario explored a cleaner electricity grid in Bangladesh, cutting climate-related emissions by about 9%, though it had little effect on water use and land impact, driven primarily by cotton farming.

Cotton T-Shirt Recycling Policy Needs to Go Upstream

The EU has set ambitious targets for the clothing industry, requiring textile products to be recyclable and contain recycled fiber by 2030, with mandatory separate collection of used textiles starting in 2025. But according to this research, those policies are largely aimed at the wrong end of the problem.

Current EU regulations don’t require factories in Bangladesh or other producing countries to track, reduce, or recycle the fiber wasted during manufacturing. Pre-consumer waste often flows into informal markets where working conditions can be poor and environmental oversight is limited.

Reaching EU circular economy goals will require action well beyond Europe’s borders, including requirements for brands to track factory-level waste, financial incentives for suppliers who reduce material losses, and investment in recycling infrastructure in producing countries. Designing simpler, more recyclable products would help at both the factory stage and the end of a shirt’s life.

Fixing the bin at the end of the road matters. But so does patching the holes in the pipe that runs from a cotton field to a closet in Northern Europe.

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Disclaimer: This article is based on a peer-reviewed modeling study. The findings represent a scenario-based analysis of a single hypothetical cotton t-shirt supply chain and are not measurements of any specific brand, manufacturer, or real-world recycling program. Results may vary depending on supply chain conditions, regional waste management infrastructure, and manufacturing practices.

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