Key takeaways
- New regulations and global pressure are accelerating the shift toward more sustainable medical garments.
- Most medical textiles are not recycled, contributing to health care’s large climate and plastic waste footprint.
- Startups FIGS and AmorSui are serving sector professionals seeking to reduce those impacts, with “circular” scrubs and lab coats.
The lives of medical textiles are brutish and short. Nurses and doctors often wear scrubs and lab coats to death within a year. Some masks and exam gowns only last for minutes before landing in the trash.
Small wonder that health care, which creates 4.7 billion tons of annual waste, contributes more than 4 percent of the planet’s climate emissions, according to the United Nations. More than two-thirds of that comes from indirect Scope 3 sources, including textiles and other medical supplies.
But a growing number of small makers of “circular” scrubs, lab coats and gowns are finding a niche among health care institutions that strive to reduce waste and emissions — and satisfy emerging regulations.
Meanwhile, researchers are testing ways to keep medical textiles in circulation. For example, scrubs maker FIGS and lab coat brand AmorSui are expanding recycling options.
Regulations and waste piles
Starting in 2026, part of a new California law takes effect that will force health care customers and distributors to manage worn-out lab coats, gowns and drapes in environmentally friendlier ways. The state’s Responsible Textile Recovery Act, which took effect Jan. 1, is among the early extended producer responsibility (EPR) laws in the U.S., and the first to govern garments rather than packaging.
Efforts to expand textile recycling and reuse also come as multinational negotiations continue over a Global Plastics Treaty.
“We want to encourage more circular approaches, where waste is avoided, the materials are reused,” said Will Clark, executive director of Health Care without Harm in Europe. “It’s this hierarchy of preventing waste, reusing products or avoiding single use.”
Textiles make up between 14 and 31 percent of waste in the industry, according to nonprofit Health Care Without Harm, based in Reston, Virginia. Single-use items, such as polypropylene masks, examination gowns, surgical drapes and shoe covers, account for nearly 10 percent of plastic waste in hospitals.
Gowns and scrubs, at least, are already “circular” in some sense because health care professionals re-wear them. Yet these garments often blend synthetic polyester and spandex with cotton, making them hard to recycle. Fluid- or microbe-resistant finishes add further complexity.
Pilot projects
The nonprofit is in the middle of a two-year partnership with the Norwegian Retailers Environment Fund to encourage health care providers to adopt reusable gowns, aprons, masks, wraps and drapes. Health Care Without Harm is working with hospitals in the U.K., Colombia, Brazil and the Philippines to identify the potential for using and scaling similar materials in local markets.
The projects seek to prove the existence of demand for less wasteful practices and products. That’s challenging in a heavily regulated industry in which infection prevention specialists often gate-keep against change, added Clark, a former health service sustainability director.
“A big concern about medical waste, and recycling it back into medical products, is the biohazard risk,” said Marcian Lee, an analyst specializing in plastics at Lux Research in Singapore. “Even if we were to design medical products to be reusable, it takes energy to sterilize them for reuse. So sometimes its just that so much easier, probably cheaper and maybe safer to just use disposable.”
A scrubs solution
FIGS specializes in what it pitches as less “itchy” scrubs. “We want to make it seamless for health care professionals to easily swap out their old scrubs that suck and replace them with FIGS, and to do so without creating waste,” a spokesperson for the Santa Monica, California, company told Trellis.
On April 3, the 12-year-old business launched a recycling program that allowed customers to either mail back their unwanted scrubs or bring them to centers in Los Angeles and Philadelphia. It follows a one-month pilot last year that downcycled more than 45,000 pounds of scrubs into sporting gear filler, carpet underlayment and car insulation.
FIGS’ reverse logistics partner is SuperCircle, based in New York. The 7-year-old infrastructure startup collects, identifies and sorts garments, then provides textiles to 20 specialized recyclers. In working with brands such as Reformation, J.Crew and Guess, SuperCircle says it has prevented the waste of more than 2 million garments. These recycling efforts are profitable and drive customer loyalty, according to SuperCircle.
“Roughly 40 percent of what we process is fiber-to-fiber recycled and turned into new textiles, while about 60 percent go to open-loop recycling, becoming long-life products like insulation or industrial materials,” a SuperCircle spokesperson said. “We only work with open-loop recycling partners who extend the fiber’s life by at least five years. So nothing becomes short-term waste.”
Because scrubs lack complex fasteners and trims, they’re relatively easily shredded for recycling without a lot of prep work. However, FIGS main fabric, FIONx, blends a majority of polyester with roughly one-fifth rayon and a lesser portion of spandex. Conventional recyclers groan about such blends, a technical challenge that microbial and chemical recyclers are competing to solve.
Although it’s not a perfectly circular, textile-to-textile solution, the company is working toward other materials milestones. By 2030, it aims for 75 percent of its scrubs fabric to come from “recycled and upcycled” materials. Another goal is for 30 percent of materials for fabrics, buttons and zippers to contain 30 percent recycled ingredients or traceable fibers.
Nylon lab gowns
AmorSui, by contrast, is focusing on single-material lab jackets and other garments to simplify recycling. It also makes “zero waste” gowns, as well as fire-resistant scrub sets and hijabs.
The company’s garments are used in 15 hospitals across the U.S. In recent months, more health care systems have been asking about end-of-life solutions for textiles, according to AmorSui Founder and CEO Beau Wangtrakuldee.
Since it launched in 2018, the Philadelphia company has seen 100 percent year-over-year growth, she said. Larger hospital systems with established sustainability programs are increasingly interested as they focus their decarbonization efforts toward the carbon footprint of their supply chains.
Scope 3 emissions, including from supplies, contribute to 71 percent of the sector’s greenhouse gases, according to a 2019 study.
AmorSui is transitioning away from polyester, as well as trims such as metal snaps that complicate recycling. “We are moving towards developing a mono-material garment, meaning that all the trims and everything are made from just circular nylon,” Wangtrakuldee said. “It allows us to not have to do a lot of labor in terms of sourcing, which saves costs in a long run and also allows the garment to be 100 percent reclaimed, 100 percent recyclable and 100 percent recycled.”
Compared with polyester or cotton, nylon is light, repels fluids and dries more easily, she added. AmorSui sources the nylon in the U.S. Another partner performs chemical recycling to turn worn garments back into raw material that can be spun into a new yarn. But that involves pyrolysis, which is controversial. This nylon does not generate “forever chemical” PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances), according to Wangtrakuldee.
Established players
In contrast to the startups, a thriving ecosystem of companies that rents reusable textiles to hospitals and clinics emerged from the informal rag trade more than a century ago. The Textile Rental Services Association (TRSA) of Alexandria, Virginia, represents hundreds of members, including uniform provider Cintas and numerous regional laundering services.
The TRSA’s North American members process 40 billion pounds of healthcare textiles, including scrubs, lab coats and bed sheets, each year. Recycling is the missing link in this near-circular industry, due partly to the complexity of blended textiles. “It’s just going to take time, and logistics is just as much of a problem as anything else,” Ricci said.
