Description
Today, many post-consumer textiles end up in landfills, incineration, or as exports outside service and high-income economies due to challenges in collecting, sorting, and recycling textiles. To align with circular strategies and prioritize the resource utilization of textiles, the European Union must actively begin to reuse and recycle these materials, while also lowering the overall consumption of textiles. To facilitate this transition, the European Union has prioritized initiatives which aim to improve the collection and treatment of textiles, as well as scale technologies to reuse and recycle them. This includes the mandatory collection of textiles as a separate waste stream by 2025.To ensure the success of these initiatives, member states will need accurate predictions of the eligible recyclable textile flows expected in the mandated separate collection flows. Textiles are complex materials often comprised of blended fibres, mixed yarn types, and disruptors (findings, linings, and trims), all of which complicate the sorting and recycling of these materials. Thus, estimating the efficiency of technologies and total mass of textiles or fibre types entering the recycling market is not enough to predict the recycling efficiency or estimate the environmental, economic, or social impacts of textile recycling.
While innovative sorting technologies such as near-infrared (NIR) sorting, can separate blended fibres and yarns, the presence of disruptors can dramatically reduce the mass of recycled material finally expected to enter recycling streams. Based on field studies documenting the composition of the 2021 retail market, we calculate the composition and presence of disruptors by garment type eligible for sorting using NIR at an industrial scale in the Nordic countries. Then in our Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment (LCSA), we evaluate the flows of textiles expected to enter Nordic waste streams in 2025, to estimate the potential environmental and economic, environmental, and social benefits of optimizing fibre sorting using NIR. We assume scenarios for the circular, downcycling, and open-loop recycling futures of the five most common per garment type, expected to enter recycling streams from Denmark in 2025. In this study, we account for the sensitivities and uncertainties of fibre blends, as well as disruptor type, composition, and placement, in each scenario.
This study contributes to state-of-the-art LCSA modelling of textiles by presenting a methodology for modelling the waste flows of textiles accounting for the impacts of blended fibres and disruptors in recycling and treatment scenarios. Such estimates will assist stakeholders in developing the best collection, sorting, and recycling practices, as well as forecast the environmental and economic potential of proposed systems.
| Period | 6 Sept 2023 → 8 Sept 2023 |
|---|---|
| Event title | 11th International Conference on Life Cycle Management |
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Lille, FranceShow on map |