As Good as New: Attitudes and Willingness to Pay for Chemically Recycled Clothing

Circular clothing production and consumption is necessary to mitigate the environmental harms of conventional clothing production. However, traditional recycling methods cannot process the most common form of textile waste into pure components: cotton-polyester blended fabrics. Chemical recycling offers a promising solution for processing these blended fibers, but industrial-scale production of chemical recycling hinges on how consumers view the recycled products. That is, consumer adoption is critical for widespread implementation of textile recycling in the fashion industry. Consumer purchasing decisions are shaped by an array of individual and contextual factors, as well as product attributes. We identified the factors related to willingness to pay for chemically recycled clothes through three complementary studies. In Study 1 (N = 50), we qualitatively examined participants’ evaluative reactions to (chemically recycled) clothes using a thought-listing method. In Study 2 (N = 1,009), we used network analysis to quantitatively measure the association between willingness to pay for chemically recycled clothes, and the demographic factors, psychological factors, and evaluative reactions identified in Study 1. Consumers who were younger, higher in income, and more concerned about the environment, were willing to pay more for chemically recycled clothes compared to their conventional counterparts. In Study 3, we experimentally manipulated environmental concern. Watching a video highlighting the environmental impact of conventional and chemical clothing led to (a) [greater/equivalent/lower] willingness to pay for chemically recycled clothes in a task with real financial consequences, (b) [stronger/equivalent/weaker] preferences for brands that use chemical recycling, and (c) [greater/equivalent/lower] support for policies promoting chemical recycling. [2 sentences here interpreting the results].