We buy–and throw out–more clothes than ever. It’s time for new innovation to lower the footprint of our clothing.

1. Polyester-eating microbes: Polyester–now the most common material used to make clothes, and made from petroleum as a raw material–is hard to recycle without losing quality. But a new type of microbe can eat an old shirt and break the polymer down into a basic raw material that can be sold back to polyester manufacturers. The process even works on fabrics that are a mix of materials, like cotton and polyester. The result is cheaper than making new fabric from petroleum.
2. Recycling food waste into yarn: Orange juice manufacturing results in piles of wasted peels and seeds–maybe as much as 25 million tons of waste a year. One startup has developed a process that turns citrus byproducts into raw material that can be spun into yarn. With a working prototype, the team is ready to start testing the process in other orange-growing regions around the world.
3.  Algae-based fabric: Growing a traditional fabric like cotton usually has an enormous footprint: It can take more than 20,000 liters of water to grow enough cotton for a single pair of jeans, and cotton also uses more insecticides than any other crop in the world. Quick-growing algae, on the other hand, doesn’t require extra water besides the oceans and lakes it grows in, leaving land free for growing food instead. This startup is working on an open-source process for turning algae into fabric.
4. Turning cotton into new clothes: Cotton is hard to recycle; in the past, if you gave your hole-filled jeans away for recycling, they might have been most likely to be shredded up for insulation. But this new process uses an environmentally friendly solvent to dissolve old cotton clothing into a cotton-like material that can be spun into new fibers–eliminating both waste and the problems that come with growing new cotton.