It’s no secret we’re beleaguered by an overwhelming textile waste problem. In 2020, the EU produced an average of 16 kilograms of textile waste per person, roughly equivalent to 50 garments—the vast majority of which was tossed by consumers rather than manufacturers or retailers. Shockingly, a mere 12 percent was reused or recycled, with the majority of discarded textiles landfilled or incinerated with general waste.
Even in the Netherlands, which boasts better recycling statistics than many other EU nations, more than half of all textile waste is still discarded in household rubbish bins and ultimately incinerated. The waste problem is only set to worsen: one of the world’s fastest-growing waste streams, textile production is spiralling upwards, reaching a record high of 116 million tonnes in 2022 and expected to hit 147 million tonnes by 2030 if business as usual continues according to Textile Exchange. Current recycling efforts are falling far short of what’s needed to tackle the growing mountain of fashion waste—leaving us grappling with a broken system afflicted by impossible-to-manage waste volumes, hard-to-recycle products and a general penchant for profit over planet.
Written by Ana Birliga Sutherland and Andrew Keys of Circle Economy. Circle Economy and the Biomimicry Institute’s Design for Transformation pilot is a pioneering effort to process mixed textile waste in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. You can download the full technical report in the Circle Economy website.
New laws, old problems
A wave of green legislation in the EU may herald slowly shifting tides. The Waste Framework Directive will mandate Member States to implement separate textile collection systems by 2025, for example, while the Netherlands’ pioneering Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) scheme for textiles, launched in 2023, aims to prevent producers from shifting the waste management burden onto others.
Promising, yes—but certainly not a silver bullet. The textile recycling industry—still in its infancy and largely dependent on mechanical recycling—is facing major challenges. Mechanical recycling, which shreds textiles back to fibres, works best with natural, mono-fibre fabrics without chemical coatings (for waterproofing or stain-resistance, for example). Currently, natural, mono-material, non-toxic fabrics are something of a rarity, at least at the overwhelmingly large scale of global textile production. Clunky components like zippers and buttons pose added hurdles, as they need to be removed by hand before an item can be shredded.
The Dutch recycling market is drowning in this ‘worst-of-the-worst’ textile waste without sufficient means—capacity and capital—to manage it: sorting facilities bear the cost of incinerating non-rewearable, non-recyclable textiles. Although nascent, chemical recycling shows promise: unlike mechanical recycling, which shreds textiles into weaker fibres, chemical recycling breaks garments down to the molecular level, enabling the creation of high-quality yarns that are comparable to new, virgin fibres. Unlike mechanical recycling, it can also break down blended fabrics, but only those common on the market—while a 50/50 poly-cotton blend may be fine, for example, chemical recycling may not work for niche fabric blends with shifting proportions of this, that and the other.
Even if chemical recycling technology was ready to go at the scope and scale needed to put a dent in the Netherlands’ growing tidal wave of waste, other hurdles remain: textile sorting isn’t carried out based on material type, a necessity for recycling but unfortunately a far slower approach than current sorting methods carried out based on product type. And for an already struggling market, slow is equivalent to unprofitable.
We need solutions—and fast
So what does happen to used textiles in the Netherlands? They’re sorted by quality and type and either slated for resale within the country, export abroad, downcycling or incineration—with only a small portion recycled. While the long-term goal is to ultimately decrease textile production, scale up chemical and biochemical recycling technologies, and advance circular design practices that favour simple, durable, recyclable materials—interim solutions are urgently needed.
Thermochemical technologies established for plastic recycling—pyrolysis and gasification—are now being piloted for textile waste, although not without criticism. Regardless of material type, gasification uses very high temperatures to convert any kind of textile waste into a primarily gaseous mixture that can then be used to produce products such as synthetic fuels, chemicals, and plastics—outputs flagged for being particularly non-circular. This feeds back into the same fossil-fuel-based system instead of encouraging systemic change—and also fails to conserve material value, unlike fibre-to-fibre recycling, which keeps fibres intact for reuse. However, it’s a better alternative than incineration for the short- to medium-term, especially since this technology could be ready for scale-up soon—unlike chemical recycling, which is on the brink of commercialisation but still years off from being applied at scale.
In fact, gasification, already being piloted in the Netherlands, is emerging as a critical stopgap, buying us time while we scale up more circular technologies. These include innovative biochemical methods, like enzymatic hydrolysis and fermentation, recently piloted in a project carried out by Circle Economy, the Biomimicry Institute and local innovators. These methods use biological processes to break down textiles into their most basic components, allowing for the recovery of fibres that can then be used for new materials. The big benefit: biochemical recycling processes generate less environmental impacts and can produce more sustainable outputs than thermochemical recycling. But although effective for natural fibres like cotton, these processes are once again complicated by blended fabrics—a poly-cotton t-shirt, for example, must be separated into its component parts, with the polyester part processed through gasification. The pilot project proved that in combination, biochemical and thermochemical processes can transform tricky-to-recycle mixed textile waste into useful products. The next step: making these processes even more efficient and using biochemical processes—over thermochemical—to the greatest extent possible.
We can’t lose sight of the long game: progress over perfection
When it comes to the circular economy transition, perfection can be the enemy of progress. Recent attention afforded to greenwashing has put the efforts of all under scrutiny—fairly so, but we mustn’t let that prevent progress. The circular economy transition will require a rethinking of systems spanning geographies, value chains and actors at a scale never before seen, and we must start implementing available solutions now, even if they are not perfect.
Stopgaps will be needed across sectors: electric vehicles will be needed as an intermediary for creating car-free cities, and waste-to-energy incineration is—while problematic—still better than landfilling in countries lacking infrastructure for recycling. Criticising these technologies for their flaws, while valid, misses the bigger picture: the world won’t change overnight, and we need to start somewhere. But it’s important that we don’t rest on our laurels either, ensuring intermediary solutions graduate to something more permanent.
The textile waste problem is vast and growing. We don’t have the luxury of waiting for perfect answers. Learning, testing, evaluating and re-evaluating will be inevitable, and we need to dive in with both feet. By embracing available technologies—no matter how imperfect—we can begin laying the foundation for a circular future, one step at a time.
