To succeed with the EU’s textiles strategy, a systemic shift in the textiles system is needed, moving towards higher quality, longer use, reuse, repair and recycling. The European Environment Agency’s (EEA) new module of the Circularity Metrics Lab (CML) on textiles analysed 14 metrics and came up with some key findings.
There is significant room for improvement in separate collection systems for waste textiles in EU-27 with about 11.6kg per person of textile waste ending up in mixed household waste.
Even as the EU Strategy for Sustainable and Circular Textiles seeks to stop the destruction of unsold and returned textiles, a new study has found that the volume of textiles and textile products destroyed in Europe can be as high as 594,000 tones every year, with lower range estimates pegged at 264,000 tonnes.
