Recycling

A new consortium is rallying 17 public and private European organizations to establish a circular economy. The project wants to enable the annual recycling of more than 2 million tonnes of PET fibres by 2030.

There’s plenty of evidence that reducing the consumption of clothing by wearing items longer and buying second-hand is preferable to purchasing recycled fibre clothes. But even second-hand fashion isn’t without problems when you consider the scale and pace of clothing production today. Again, most clothing is simply not designed to be recycled. Even when it is, the fashion industry lacks the kind of infrastructure needed to really embrace a circular economy model.

Two activist groups have released a new report 'The Real Truth About the US Plastics Recycling Rate', which documented a recycling rate of just 5-6% for post-consumer plastic waste in the US for 2021. The groups also revealed that while plastics recycling is on the decline, the per capita generation of plastic waste has increased by 263% since 1980.

Doing away with secondhand garments is easier said than done because people do need access to affordable clothing. Founder of Nairobi-headquartered Africa Collect Textiles (ACT), Elmar Stroomer, believes it is time to add a waste tax on imported items and the funds should be invested in high-end collection and recycling infrastructure.

Nairobi-headquartered Africa Collect Textiles (ACT) is run by ordinary people with extraordinary ideas on how to divert textiles from landfills. No one believed recycling clothes would work in a country where a sizeable proportion of people wears secondhand clothes from abroad. Founder Elmar Stroomer tells us why and how it does.

The EU Textiles Strategy is laudable in many ways—it rightly assesses the dominance of fast fashion and disposable textiles, and integrates environmental and social concerns in its analysis. A fundamental weakness is the limited connection to the CO₂ challenge, and the imperative to become fossil-free or fully biobased by 2050. There is a total lack of proposals related to biobased fibres.

The much-awaited 'EU strategy for sustainable and circular textiles' has been announced. It has a broad vision, wants to clamp down on fast fashion and textile waste, and is insistent on action through a slew of measures and a host of guidelines.

A team of researchers in Hong Kong have developed a highly functional textile from recycled common plastic waste.