With millions of club shirts going to waste every season, a radical recycling rethink is needed

When Joanna Czutkowna buried a Manchester United jersey, a cotton T-shirt and a wool-cotton jumper in her Lancashire farm and dug it up a year later, the video went viral. The T-shirt had disappeared, apart from the seams (sewn with polyester thread), the jumper was 80% gone, but the United shirt remained – grubby but indestructible. (Insert joke here)

The big reveal was not a surprise, certainly not to Czutkowna, who has worked in textiles and sustainability for 20 years, but it was a reminder: a football jersey is not just for Christmas, or even the next hundred Christmases.