To make this 100% recycled jacket, Reformation had to get creative
By Adele Peters | Published: 2025-11-03 10:45:00 | Source: Fast Company – co-design
It looks and feels like any other luxury cashmere sweater. But Reformation’s new large cast is made entirely from recycled fibres, a significant milestone in three years.
The brand now manufactures Woolen jacket, crew, neckAnd five other styles from a carefully developed blend of 95% recycled cashmere and 5% recycled wool – the unexpected material that made 100% recycled fiber possible. Some other pieces in its collection still use a small amount of virgin cashmere, but Reformation aims to eliminate it entirely.
“It really has a very large, impressive footprint compared to other fibres,” says Kathleen Talbot, chief sustainability officer at Reformation. In 2023, the company calculated that although virgin cashmere made up less than 1% of its source materials, it was responsible for nearly 40% of the brand’s carbon footprint.
Most cashmere comes from Mongolia and China, where cashmere goats are combed once a year for their fine, soft wool; One sweater can use cashmere from four or five goats. As demand grows, there is now More than 90 million Of goats in and around China 25 million More in Mongolia. Overgrazing turns grasslands into desert. Goats also produce methane, a potent greenhouse gas.
Making recycled fibers work
Using recycled cashmere helps avoid these environmental challenges, but this has historically been difficult to do. Recycling shortens the fibers, which can make them weaker and more prone to pilling. “We don’t want to offer a recycled product that doesn’t perform the same or is less good or less durable,” says Talbot. “This to us is not a sustainability play.”
The company worked with suppliers to develop a proprietary method of twisting, washing and finishing the yarn for the right hand feel and durability. First, they achieved a blend of 70% recycled cashmere and 30% virgin fibres, then 90% recycled, then 95% recycled. “At each of these milestones, to be really honest, we thought this was going to be our upper limit based on yarn performance and product performance,” Talbot says.
When they reached 95%, they asked suppliers why they couldn’t reach 100%. Suppliers said this was technically possible. But because the shorter recycled fibers are more likely to break, the yarn must be spun very slowly. That would make the material so much more expensive to produce that it would not be commercially viable.
That’s why the design team turned to wool to create a 100% recycled product. Even after recycling, the wool was “a little longer and thicker than cashmere fibres,” says Talbot. “Our suppliers felt confident that it would give it the right stability and really hold up in the spinning and knitting process.” The blend’s carbon footprint is 96% smaller than virgin cashmere, and it uses approximately 90% less water in production.
After dozens of tests, they went ahead with it and then spent months testing clothes made from it. Internally, the company’s Better Materials team, made up of about 20 leaders, wore the new recycled jackets around the office and home, washed them, and monitored whether they held up as well as jackets made from raw materials. “We never want to promote something just for the sake of impact, and not include a compelling value proposition at the same time,” Talbot says.
Scale up
When the company first started incorporating more recycled cashmere, sourcing recycled yarn was a challenge. Now, due to high demand for recycled fibers, the supply chain has responded. “The supply of recycled fiber is no longer the same as it was five years ago or 10 years ago,” she says. Currently, most of it comes from cashmere waste in factories. But as Reformation and other brands collect more used clothing for recycling, post-consumer cashmere could eventually become a bigger resource, too.
Going forward, the company may make some products from a blend of recycled and “renewable” cashmere — which is produced with sustainable grazing methods — because a small percentage of customers have wool allergies. But it also plans to continue offering 100% recycled materials in more products.
“Not every problem will have a technological solution,” Talbot says. “But these are the types of problems we can solve. We have seen tremendous progress in the last three years
The early deadline for Fast Company’s World Changing Ideas Awards is Friday, November 14, at 11:59 PM PT. Apply today.
(tags for translation) Fashion
ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ
