Management of textile waste in the European Union: a contribution to a robust technical basis for strategic decision-making

In the European Union (EU) the consumption of clothing, footwear, and household textiles is the fourth highest environmental pressure category after food, housing, and transport (European Environment Agency, 2019a). In the last two decades, Europeans have been purchasing more pieces of clothing and of lower quality, exacerbating the triple planetary crisis (Sahimaa et al., 2023; UNEP, 2022). As the consumption of textiles in the EU is expected to further increase in the future (Huygens et al., 2023; Napolano et al., 2025), both excessive consumption and production, as well as their negative environmental and social impacts, need to be addressed urgently. With the predominant use of incineration and landfilling as waste management methods and limited reuse and recycling capacities, the EU faces major challenges in managing its textile waste (European Commission, 2023b; European Environment Agency, 2019b; Gözet et al., 2021). To address this, in 2022, the European Commission adopted the EU’s Strategy for Sustainable and Circular Textiles with a set of environmental objectives (European Commission, 2022). Different potential solutions are available, e.g. emerging recycling technologies, circular economy policies or changes in consumption patterns. However, it is unclear to what extent these solutions may contribute to achieving future regulatory goals, what benefits they could offer, how much they would cost and how they should be prioritized depending on the most pressing matters in the society.

An ex-ante evaluation of potential solutions is needed to enable informed decision-making (Samset & Christensen, 2017). However, the current assessment procedures could benefit from a good understanding of the drivers of unintended policy effects to ascertain potential improvements to this process. The currently used methods are deemed insufficient to address unintended effects from circular economy initiatives, which is crucial for a robust basis for decision-making (Niero et al., 2021; Tukker, 2024). It is, however, unclear how unintended effects could be better accounted for in ex-ante impact assessments and which scientific tools are fit for purpose.

The overall goal of this PhD thesis is to contribute to the technical basis for informed EU textile policymaking. Specific goals include 1) performing integrated environmental and socio-economic impact assessments of technology and policy scenarios, as well as 2) exploratory identification of potential improvements in the ex-ante impact assessments and scientific contributions to a robust technical basis for decision-making.

The selected waste management technologies for impact assessment included preparing for re-use ¹ , mechanical recycling (closed-loop, and open-loop), chemical recycling, dissolution technologies, enzymatic recycling as well as incineration with energy recovery and landfilling. It was found that preparing for re-use was the most preferred technical solution among considered technologies for all selected fibre types and both under current and future framework conditions. It offered the largest net CO₂ savings (varying for different fibre types from -2 384 to -4 486 kg CO₂-eq/t under current conditions and 2 363 to -4 964 kg CO₂-eq/t in the future) and cost savings (internal cost savings from -18 to -91 EUR/t and external cost savings up to -1 201 EUR/t). In addition, it offered the highest primary material replacement potential for most of the investigated fibre types. Under current CO₂ prices, recycling showed not to be competitive (from the full environmental cost perspective) relative to incineration with energy recovery. This was because the internal costs of recycling exceeded its external cost savings. Recycling could become competitive only when the CO₂ price was significantly (approximately five times) higher than today. Therefore, it was shown that internal costs of recycling technologies need to decrease going forward.

Capitalizing on the results from the assessment of technology scenarios, an impact assessment of policy scenarios was performed. The selected policy interventions included recycling information requirement, a deposit-refund scheme, upscaling of closed-loop recycling, a ban on textile waste exports and waste prevention via slow fashion. From the circularity and greenhouse gas (GHG) emission reduction perspectives, the combined policy interventions (deposit refund scheme, upscaling closed-loop recycling and a ban on exports of unsorted textile waste) topped with waste prevention measure was the most preferred among the investigated policy interventions. It offered the highest primary material replacement rate (150 kg per tonne of waste) and the largest net CO₂ savings (-1 868 kg CO₂-eq/t). Waste prevention as a single intervention was shown to be the most preferred when looking at internal and external costs relative to status-quo (-678 EUR/t net saving). The estimated investment needed at present to make the investigated policy scenarios a reality amounted to 7-33 billion EUR, and they are significant compared to available funds. Even though they are higher than estimates in previous studies, they are likely underestimated due to unknown cost of prevention. Future research to address this is encouraged. Putting results in the perspective of the total GHG emissions from the textile sector in the EU, only prevention scenarios offered net savings up to 18%. The findings clearly showed that sound textile waste management can effectively improve circularity and help reduce greenhouse gas emissions and pollution. However, without addressing excessive consumption and production, the sustainability goals will be challenging, if not impossible to achieve.

An in-depth understanding of textile waste composition was shown to be critical for decision-making as the same technology can perform differently depending on the input. As distribution between different management pathways both within and outside the EU was found to be one of the parameters driving impact assessment results, it is imperative that the technical basis for decision-making related is based on a robust mass flow analysis. It was demonstrated that focusing on individual impact types, regardless of whether these are environmental or socio-economic, or generalizing all environmental impact category results with a single impact category is insufficient for well-informed decision-making. Both perspectives (environmental and socio-economic) bring different insights and, therefore, should be included. The most preferred solution may be different depending on societal priorities. To provide even more complete basis for decision-making, a quantification of rebound effects of future EU textile policies and assessment of related social impacts are suggested
for future studies.

To better account for unintended effects of policies, and ultimately improve the ex-ante impact assessments, the following suggestions from policy development experts were collected: (i) address technical limitations of micro-level modelling via e.g. combined micro- and macro-modelling, (ii) increase stakeholder engagement, (iii) extend consideration of resilience and impacts on third countries, and (iv) include the behavioural component. Based on all findings across this thesis, a four-step iterative framework is proposed with intention to support impact assessment practitioners. The framework includes recommendations on actions before, during and after an ex-ante impact assessment. This research contributes to an evidence-based decision-making related to waste management and circular economy in the EU.