By now you’ve probably heard that by 2025 the EU imposes a separate TextileWaste collection, for a.o. household textiles.
How and what to do with the sorted textiles, is still🤷♀️
The collected textiles, will include everything from dirty worn-out socks, unworn FastFashion to industry collected pre-consumer waste. The textiles will represent a wildely scattered variety in conditions and quality, and is estimated to a potential of the 5 million tons(!!) of annual textile waste from the EU.
Of course the best solution would be that we all buy only the garments that we actually wear and wear our clothes til it’s worne out. Or at least pass them on to bring others joy.
But we’d like to share a few ways to Reuse, Resell & Recycle textiles. ♻️
Reuse
Region Midtjylland started donating hospital duvets which are no longer meeting hospital standards. Instead of ending up in the trash, they are remade into smaller duvets and cherished for nap-time at the local kindergartens.
Aalborg Universitetshospital is Upcycling Duvets into warm quilted jackets for the employees at the covid test facilities in a collaboration with Upcy aps
Resell
Only a small amount of the average 11 kilos of clothes discarded annually by every European consumer, is donated to charity.
In order for them to resell the garments, the textiles are hand-sorted and only 5-10% resold nationally. With no large scale solution in place, dirty and unwashed donated clothes is discarded.
Recycle
At Textile Pioneers we are already able to recycle industry textile waste. In order for us to recycle post consumer textile waste, it has to go through a sorting process first.
And this is where NewRetex is working on a scalable technology, scanning for qualities and sorting compositions and colours.
We love that the European Union & EURATEX recognize the value in waste textiles too.
At Textile Pioneers we only produce using waste, and we are anxious to help solve the issue with these enormous amounts of textile waste.