Nearly a truckload of textile waste is generated in the EU every second, and only 1% of this waste currently gets recycled back into new clothing, with the rest either ending up in landfill within Europe, or exported to markets in Africa and Asia.
Investigates need to carried out into how materials break down at end of life to incentivise a truly circular fashion industry.
Fashion’s hidden problem at end of life
Around 12.6 million tonnes of textile waste is generated across the EU each year. That’s an insurmountable number to imagine – roughly equivalent to a truckload every second.
Many of these truckloads are exported and incinerated in countries in the Global South that played little role in the overproduction that created the waste. The result is a familiar pattern of externalised costs – communities on the receiving end live with polluted waterways, air laced with microplastics, and rising health risks.
And so, a move away from incineration is, by any measure, a step forward. But under new EU rules, this waste will now need to be resold, reused or recycled.
On paper, that sounds like progress. In practice, it rests on an assumption that does not hold up. It assumes that these existing systems can absorb the sheer volume and complexity of what is being produced.
The limits of recycling
Currently, only 1% of textile waste material is recycled into new clothing. And that’s not just because the industry lacks ambition, but because recycling as currently practised is structurally limited when it comes to tackling textile waste.
Polyester, nylon and low-grade blended fabrics – the staples of fast fashion – are, for the most part, unrecyclable. And what can’t be recycled means landfill in Europe, or export to Africa and Asia. The uncomfortable truth is that no scalable technology exists for fashion’s lowest-grade waste, the category that also happens to be the most toxic. Even with new rules against incineration, we still have a growing category of waste that existing systems are not designed to handle.
A radically different approach
Like nature the natural world doesn’t have a surplus problem. That’s because, thanks to decomposition, ecosystems have always turned what one cycle discards into the raw material for the next.
This could be applied to the fashion industry and drive systems change. Current processes largely overlook the potential of decomposition at the end of the textile’s life. Designed decomposition – where materials are engineered to break down safely and completely at end of use.
How decomposition works in practice
In the Netherlands, Circle Economy is combining biological and thermochemical processes to convert hard-to-recycle textiles into biodegradable plastics and other industrial feedstocks – materials that can be used for packaging, coatings and agricultural applications.
In Berlin, the Beneficial Design Institute is using biotechnology to turn low-quality textile waste into high-quality, biodegradable materials. These could be used for medical tools or in construction, helping create more sustainable systems for the fashion industry.
