J.Crew Recovers, Recycles Swimwear for Sustainable ‘Second Life’

Jessica Binns
·5 min read

There’s little to be done with an old swimsuit that has served its purpose. J.Crew hopes to change the paradigm around plastic-heavy swimwear waste with a new takeback and recycling program keeping bathing suits, bikinis and swim trunks away from overloaded landfills.

Rich in petroleum-based synthetics like nylon and polyester, these castoffs contribute to as much as 500,000 tons of textile-born microplastics that taint our oceans each year, according to 2022 data from the European Environment Agency.

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Madewell’s big sister and J.Crew Group’s namesake brand worked with SuperCircle, the Reformation recycling partner which got $7 million richer last year, to build the Second-Life Swim scheme. Under the program launched Thursday, consumers pocket $5 in credit for each pre-owned swimsuit—from any brand, not just J.Crew—they hand over in J.Crew’s 111 U.S. stores or through the company’s website. Up to $20 in these credits can be applied to a new J.Crew swim purchase at the regular MSRP.

Initiating take-backs with the “difficult to recycle” swimwear category illustrates the brand’s ambition to be the “best in swim,” said Lisa Greenwald, J.Crew’s chief merchandising officer.

“For those who are comfortable, we encourage reselling wearable suits to extend their lives, but since swimwear can be considered intimate apparel, we know that customers are not always comfortable with that option,” she said. “We know that swimwear isn’t something you necessarily want to be reselling, so for us, finding a partner who could responsibly take back and recycle this important product category was critical.”

J.Crew is just the latest—but biggest—client win for SuperCircle, the reverse logistics innovator creating a smarter, end-to-end supply chain repurposing textile waste. Since emerging in 2018 it has amassed a fashion and home textiles clientele from A.L.C. to Parachute, touting finely developed logistics and technology capabilities and an easy-to-grasp user experience. But one crucial area of SuperCircle’s expertise caught J.Crew’s attention.

What really “stood out the most,” said Greenwald, “is their ability to facilitate fiber-to-fiber recycling where possible, which is particularly challenging with swimwear.”

Because synthetic-heavy swimwear fabrications commonly include elastic fibers that lend bathing suits their figure-hugging stretch, they’re “notoriously difficult for current fabric recycling technology to process,” she added.

“Swimwear also has many components that need to be separated; for example, a woman’s swimsuit could have a fabric, lining, foam cup, metal underwire, and many other elements that need to be disassembled and sorted in order to be properly recycled,” Greenwald continued. “We were excited to take on this challenge and be the first brand who could offer their customers a recycling solution for this important category—not just for our own swimsuits, but for any brands’, and avoid these products from entering the landfill.”

J.Crew has spent the past few years rebuilding the “priority” swimwear vertical around sustainability goals prioritizing non-virgin components. In 2022, every women’s swimwear product contained a minimum of 60 percent recycled fiber, including recycled nylon and recycled polyester, while even linings featured 92 percent Repreve-branded recycled polyester. On the men’s side, swim garments incorporated at least 57 percent recycled nylon.

“We are looking for ways to continue to grow this percentage, including through recycled cups and underwire, and by exploring innovative new materials,” Greenwald said.

J.Crew’s post-bankruptcy run shows a marked effort to revamp for the long term. The preppy-leaning Americana brand supports sustainable packaging innovators such as Sway, a 2023 Tom Ford Plastic Innovation Prize Winner, and U.S.-grown regenerative cotton. It joined the growing resale economy last year, tapping popular secondhand marketplace ThredUp to launch J.Crew Always alongside a vintage collection of ‘80s and ‘90s-era styles.

The brand, Greenwald said, aims to “strategically embed circular practices” that extend a product’s useful life, minimize waste, employ recyclable and regenerative inputs, and enable easy repurposing.

Several dozen J.Crew employees spent months putting together Second-Life Swim’s in-store and digital branding, dedicated backend portal tracking take-back data, and backroom setup where collected swim garments are stored before they’re shipped to a SuperCircle facility.

“The J.Crew team has really thrown a lot of energy and time and resources behind launching this in a very comprehensive way,” getting cross-company C-level buy-in from the marketing, merchandising, and sourcing chiefs all the way up to the ceo, said Chloe Songer, half of the SuperCircle founding team along with Stuart Alhum, who also helped her birth the sustainable sneaker brand Thousand Fell six years ago.

SuperCircle frequently works not just with retail brands but also with waste management and recycling stakeholders, each with divergent priorities, Ahlum noted.

“We are able to liaise between the two and create feedback loops,” he said.

J.Crew hopes learnings from Second-Life Swim will someday infiltrate the rest of the company and additional product categories. Turning old swimwear into new garments could also be on the horizon, said Greenwald.

“One of the reasons we are excited to partner with SuperCircle is that they have existing relationships with many of the leading fabric recycling companies, which could potentially lead to opportunities to include recycled fibers from our swimwear takeback program into our garments in the future,” she said.

Regulatory scrutiny and a flurry of textile sustainability bills increase pressure on fashion brands to address and ameliorate the dead-end fate facing many clothing items. Though California lawmakers kicked the can on last year’s Responsible Textile Recovery Act, a.k.a Senate Bill 707, Songer believes the Golden State is the tail that wags the dog when it comes to industry-shaking legislation. New York also proposed a similar bicameral law requiring textile producers to create collection programs for certain fabric-based products.

Just the “threat” of incoming legislation is enough to have companies investigate their circular options, said Songer.

Tiffany Hua, research analyst for Lux Research, a Boston consultancy advising companies on sustainable innovation, agrees that the evolving policy landscape will benefit waste-based innovators like SuperCircle.

“Emerging extended producer responsibility policies in the U.S. can help incentivize and fund the adoption of SuperCircle’s service,” she said.