Transforming the Textile Industry: Learning to Manage Waste, Better

The textile sector is producing more and more waste every year. With production volumes rapidly rising, the sector is outpacing nature’s capacity to provide resources. It is also outpacing the capacity of people to deal with the waste. Each year, 92 million tonnes of textile waste is generated — or the equivalent of a truck full of clothing incinerated or discarded in landfills every second. In 2023, only 8% of textile fibres were made from recycled sources, with less than 1% of the total fibre market coming from textile-to-textile recycling. And as global trade in new textiles has grown, the quality of materials has decreased, driven by the increasing use of cheaper, low quality synthetic materials. As a first step, ensuring a product does not become waste, through reuse or recycling, replaces the need for something new, thus avoiding the impacts from another production process. But once an item has been produced, if value can be recouped before its disposal, this could reduce the product’s environmental impacts across its entire life cycle. Improving the management of waste can therefore alleviate significant material and economic losses.