The world’s fashion industry not only emits a large amount of carbon dioxide emissions but also produces an increasingly unmanageable heap of textile waste.
Waste textile fibres, scraps and cutout parts - amounting to more than 92 million tonnes a year - pose a global challenge as textile production has doubled in the last two decades.
Waste could be turned into material for new clothes to curb the use of resources and to protect the environment, but the world’s recycling capacity is lagging behind.
Why is recycling clothing waste important?
Much of the world’s textile waste is managed poorly.
An estimated 61 per cent is buried in land fills or incinerated, harming the environment and human health, according to a 2024 report by Amsterdam-based think tank Circle Economy.
Scientific estimates suggest more than half of textile waste is made from fossil fuel-based synthetic fibres like polyester that never decompose and leave a trail of microplastics - ruining the soil.
Other quick fixes like burning waste to generate energy pollute the air with particles and greenhouse gases.
While landfill and incineration harm the environment, recycling can recover value from waste while curbing the industry’s environmental footprint.
How much waste is being recycled?
The textile industry heavily leans on fresh resources, using up 3.25 billion tonnes of materials a year, said a report by the Swedish H&M Foundation and Circle Economy last year.
Less than 1 per cent of textile waste is recycled into new fibres in Europe, but with investment and technological upgrades, that could be raised to 70 per cent, according to a 2022 study by management consultancy firm McKinsey.
A large chunk of the remaining untreated clothing waste is shipped from Europe to countries in Asia or Africa, said a 2023 briefing by the European Environment Agency.
Some countries turn the imported waste into profitable business.
India, for example, treats 8.5 per cent of the global textile waste in its 900 recycling units, said a study by Fashion for Good, a coalition of businesses and non-profits.
But other countries like Ghana struggle to process just a fraction of the waste coming their way - leaving the rest to clog up their water bodies and pollute their beaches.
How can clothes be recycled?
Textile recycling involves making new products from clothing wastes like scraps, unused material and discarded clothes. The outputs can be new fibres or other products of lower value such as mattresses, carpets or wiping clothes.
Most recyclers mechanically break the scraps down to produce fibres that tend to be lower quality than freshly made fibres.
In recent years, a more advanced technology known as ‘chemical recycling’ can shred waste fabric down to molecules for creating high-quality fibre, but this technology remains too costly, recent studies have found.
What changes could boost recycling?
The recycling industry is largely informal. Governments and fashion retailers often have limited oversight on how textile waste flows from the factory floor to sorting and recycling units and back again as well as the conditions for workers along this chain.
For example, most of India’s more than 4 million workers in the recycling value chains are women sorting the scraps for a small wage in mostly informal businesses, said the study by the Fashion for Good.
For brands, the informal conditions of the waste value chain are a barrier to tracing the waste or supporting the scale-up of recycling capacity, said a paper published by the German development agency GIZ.
The European Union adopted a strategy to ensure that by 2030, clothes sold there use more recycled fibres while ensuring better conditions for workers.
Alongside recycling, researchers are calling for complementary measures to cut the industry’s environmental footprint, such as making longer-lasting clothes with easily recyclable design while promoting repair, resale and renting of secondhand clothing.
This story was published with permission from Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, climate change, resilience, women’s rights, trafficking and property rights. Visit https://www.context.news/.
