By Helen Chen
As part of Europe’s ambitious push towards a circular economy, new laws will go into effect requiring EU member states to significantly enhance the collecting and recycling of discarded textiles.
However, the textile industry is struggling to keep up, and there are rising concerns that large amounts of collected textiles will be burnt or exported if the sorting and recycling infrastructures are not significantly expanded.
Textiles have a significant carbon footprint because of the energy-intensive processes involved in their production, ranging from the cultivation of fibres such as cotton to the chemical treatments used during manufacturing. When these materials are not recycled or reused, the environmental cost increases.
To tackle this problem, the EU Waste Framework Directive (WFD) made an amendment targeted strictly on textile waste in 2023, requiring all member states to develop separate used textile collection systems by 2025. The amendments were made in line with the vision of the EU Strategy for Sustainable and Circular Textiles.
This is a significant shift, given only around half of EU countries presently have such systems in place, and the volumes collected are still small in comparison to overall textile waste generated.
On the 21st of May 2024, the European Environmental Agency published an analysis that revealed the poor situation of textile waste treatment in Europe. In 2020, Europe generated 6.95 million tons of textile waste which is 16 kilograms per person – but only 12% was adequately recycled or reused.
Shifting the Waste Hierarchy
The fundamental purpose of the new EU textile waste legislation is to move textile waste management higher up the waste hierarchy, away from landfilling and incineration and towards reuse and recycling.
The concepts of reuse and recycling, though sounding very similar, are vastly different. According to the report “Waste Management in Europe’s Circular Economy” by authors Jana Deckers, Tom Duhoux, and Sanna Due, reuse refers to using the items in their original form, whereas recycling entails breaking them down to create new products.
Reuse is a more ecologically friendly alternative to recycling. It’s mostly done by small enterprises focused on upcycling, reusing, or selling second-hand textiles.
In recent years, the concept of circular economy and sustainable fashion became popular across Europe, and second-hand fashion shops, alongside charity shops, are commonly seen in cities.
Jørgan Jalving is the team leader of the Copenhagen branch of Blue Cross Secondhand, a Christian social aid organization that has multiple secondhand charity shops across Denmark.
“All the clothes we sell in the store come from big collection bins we place in the streets,” said Jalving. “I’m very glad to hear great feedback from customers when they find clothes they want to take home. I like to think we’re helping the environment at the same time as we’re helping the society through charity work and societal responsibility.”
Photo by: Helen Chen/DMJX
However, according to the European Environment Agency, as of 2020, only 12% of textile waste is captured in Europe, meaning that the other 88% ends up in mixed municipal waste and ends up being incinerated or put in landfills. This means that the portion of used textile that is made into secondhand resale cannot be higher than a mere 12%.
What’s more bleak is what happens to the 12% even after they get collected by secondhand resale shops like Blue Cross Secondhand.
According to Jalving, the collected clothes and textiles from the bins come in very different qualities, and a large portion of them cannot be repurposed or resold, so they must go into recycling instead of reusing.
“People basically use us like a dump,” joked Jalving. “They donate because they don’t have anywhere else to throw the clothes or because they don’t know how to deal with them.”
Photo by: Helen Chen/DMJX
Exportation Does Not Equal Solution
Jalving drives a car with unsellable donated clothes to a centre twice every week, and inside the centre, thousands of tons of waste textiles are piled upon each other.
“From what I know, we send it to export,” he said, “because some big firm in Germany buys those clothes, and they sell it to other countries.”
“I asked up in the system (of the Blue Cross organization) if it’s our clothes that are laying in a riverbed in some foreign place, and they say they hope not. That’s what I’ve been told, and I just have to trust that,” said Jalving.
According to data from the European Environment Agency, the volume of used textiles exported from the EU has tripled over the previous two decades, rising from slightly more than 550,000 tons in 2000 to about 1.7 million tons in 2019.
In 2019, across all of Europe, 46% of used textiles ended up in Africa while 41% ended up in Asia.
On the 25th of March 2024, Denmark, Sweden, and France called for textile waste to be covered by the Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and Their Disposal to restrict exports to developing countries.
“We believe this approach could bring about significant environmental and health benefits in developing countries without impairing second-hand clothing tracks, and be a way for the EU to show global leadership and responsibility in alignment with the EU strategy for sustainable and circular textiles and in the framework of the ongoing negotiation of the treaty to end plastic pollution,” wrote the joint statement published by the three countries.
Textile Waste, a Threat but also an Opportunity?
With the severe limitations on reuse and export, people in Europe, as well as across the world, are looking for alternative ways to lower the burden on our planet in terms of textile waste.
From the 3rd of November 2023 to the 8th of September 2024, Design Museum Denmark is carrying an exhibition called AKUT #5, CARE & REPAIR, where displays of sustainable textile design are shown and the dilemma of consumption versus sustainability in clothing and textiles are discussed.
Photo by: Helen Chen/DMJX
One of the visitors to the exhibition, Linette Høgh centres a large part of her life around upcycling and repurposing textile materials. She believes that the future of true sustainability in fashion is through the root of the problem—the textiles themselves.
“Rather than constantly scratching our heads at the complexity of sorting and recycling, I believe the government should crack down on the material of clothing. If we limit the selection of materials to sustainable ones and ones that are easy to upcycle or to break down, or even search for technologies that create a green fabric that has the idea of circularity built into it, it will solve such a big part of the problem,” said Høgh.
Professor James Clark teaches green chemistry at the University of York. He calls the option “a benign, by design approach,” which he thinks is the eventual ideal target but also too far down the future in terms of the situation right now.
To him, the biggest issue is the lack of communication.
“There are available technologies already that help with carrying out separation for fabric without adding a lot to the environmental footprint known to us,” said Clark, “but at the moment, you’ve got your green technology companies on one side, you’ve got your fabric industry on the other, and I don’t see a lot of communication in between there.”
“Admittedly, a lot of green technologies are new and just beginning to emerge in the marketplace, but they’ve taken several years to get going,” assessed Clark.
He also mentioned that “there’s a psychological barrier, almost, for companies to embrace something which they’re not comfortable with, something new.”
“We really need to get the fabrics industry to recognize and become aware that it is in fact possible that we (green chemistry) can do more and can be circular in fabric waste valorization. There’s a lot of opportunities here to be explored.”