In another step forward in the race against the clock to slow global temperature rise, Ireland recently issued an ambitious national Waste Action Plan for a Circular Economy, which includes a section on textiles.

As an EU Member State, Ireland is naturally working within the larger framework of the European Green Deal – Europe’s plan for becoming the first climate-neutral continent by 2050 and transforming its economic growth model from linear to circular.

As was touched on in a previous post (Circularity Adds Resilience to Your Supply Chain), a principal building block of the European Green Deal is its Circular Economy Action Plan from March, 2020, which identified textiles as one of seven “key product value chains.”

Simply put, these value chains are industry sectors with high resource use and high waste streams, but where the potential is also high to convert them to circular systems that prevent, recapture, and recycle waste for further use, generating jobs and increasing GDP in the process. (The other six are electronics and ICT[1]; batteries and vehicles; packaging; plastics; construction and buildings; and food, water, and nutrients.)

Already as of December, 2019, Ireland had announced its intention to ban textiles from household bins, landfills, and incinerators in an effort to curb fast fashion waste. This ban is now among the highlights of the new waste plan.[2]

Other highlights include education and awareness campaigns, working with Irish designers to promote eco-design, and – crucially – creating framework proposals for separate textile collection that will take into account impacts to the international trade in used textiles.

Separate textile collection is also a measure in line with a larger EU mandate – its revised Waste Framework Directive of 2018. Under this revision, all Member States must add textiles to the list of waste categories already collected separately by January 1, 2025 at latest. Only France already legislates mandatory textile collection.

While a major milestone in the effort to divert textile waste from landfills, the implementation will raise serious challenges. The reasons are twofold. 

First, used textiles already constitute a huge global commercial market, with multiple actors (e.g., charities, commercial collectors, sorters) at multiple levels, across multiple countries and continents. (Details to be covered in a future post.) This economy stands to be severely disrupted.  

Second, because of this market, some used textiles cannot be classified as waste, while the rest can. If destined for resale, they are considered reusable (i.e., re-wearable); have higher commercial value; and are not classified as waste. Non-reusable textiles, by contrast, have lower-to-no commercial resale value (at least at present) and are generally classified as waste. It’s the latter category that is either recycled or ends up in landfills or incinerators.  

But where to draw the line between the two categories is not as clearcut as it may seem; nor how to organize the separation process between reusable and non-reusable streams, since human judgment must come into play in assessing usability.  

In Sweden, for example, even within the category of reusable textiles, grade levels exist, ranging from “Cream” to A to B, where “Cream” gets re-sold in Western Europe; A goes to Eastern Europe; and B is exported to parts of Asia, South America, the Middle East, and Africa. Textiles deemed non-reusable are further categorized as C and are funneled for recycling.[3]

Still, the overall picture is clear: once the separate collection mandate goes into effect, the volume of lower value, non-reusable textiles entering the collection/sorting system will increase dramatically relative to higher value reusable textiles, the volume of which will remain more or less constant.

This is what makes the impact on the used textile trade significant. Studies by the Danish EPA looking at six EU countries, as well as WRAP in the UK, have already concluded that the influx of non-reusable textiles along with reusable will “deeply challenge the economic viability of collection” – enough that commercial and charitable collectors in the sector could disappear.[4] In keeping with the pledge to leave no one behind, Ireland and other Member States will therefore have to figure out forms of economic compensation to support continued collection and processing systems.

At the same time, there will also be measures to help improve and boost the market for recycled textile output. This is where innovative sorting and recycling technologies will play a role, as will the use of economic instruments like Extended Producer Responsibility and incentives for use of recycled over virgin fibers. Such measures will in turn increase the commercial value of non-reusable textiles.

[1] Information and Communications Technology

[2] https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/textiles-to-be-banned-from-the-bin-to-reduce-fast-fashion-waste-38821215.html

[3] http://mistrafuturefashion.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Mistra-Future-Fashion-2018.04-M-Elander-D.3.3.4.1.pdf

[4] https://www.wrap.org.uk/sites/files/wrap/CFR005-001%20Recycling%20Grade%20Textiles%20Public%20Facing%20Final.pdf; https://www2.mst.dk/Udgiv/publications/2020/06/978-87-7038-202-1.pdf