Not many outside of Europe would have heard of the Finnish town called Lahti. Perhaps, not so much within Europe even. But the town of 120,142 people is becoming an exemplar in showing the big cities around the world how an incentive-based system of textile recycling can work through a change in consumer behaviour.
Ths city's latest endeavour in managaing textile waste is a textile deposit programme which aims to investigate if a citywide reward system can incentivise locals to recycle their textiles. The trial began in late May, and within a matter of weeks the recycling rate for textile waste went up a mindboggling 500%.
The way it plays out is simple. Kiosks and drop-in boxes have been installed in prime locations around the city. People can walk with a bagful of textile waste, and exchange them for vouchers for local services. These can be just coffee voichers or passes to the local pool. Small incentives, one can say, but these work. And how!
The Communications Director of the City of Lahti, Veera Hämäläinen, is upbeat, and describes the move as a runaway success. She says: "With the (Textile Deposit) scheme, the weekly result for a single collection point was 350kg of textiles, which is five times the previous amount. The results we’ve seen are a positive signal for systemic incentives for recycling. A nationwide deposit-based recycling system for textiles could give a significant boost to the recycling rate."
So, how did this incentive-based system for recycling textiles come about? Hämäläinen responds: "Inspired by the country’s (Finland) highly effective deposit system for beverage containers, we wanted to pilot an incentive-based system for recycling textiles. An average of 3kg of textile waste per person (in Finland) ends up being incinerated every year. It’s about one grocery bag’s worth of fabrics and fibres that could be salvaged for further use. Recycling of textiles became a lot easier this year, as separate collection points for discarded textiles were rolled out throughout Finland.
"The textile deposit scheme is a great example of an everyday innovation that directly aims to minimise the amount of waste (thrown away) and showcases the potential of discarded textiles as a raw material for industries and design. The project started in late spring and was launched in the end of May. Adopting a culture of experimentation can truly benefit cities and organisations and increase awareness fairly short time, in this case textile recycling."
Textile waste in Lahti had been an issue that needed attention. Salpakierto, a municipal company that operates waste management in the Lahti region, has currently six collection points for textile waste. In the last one year, the collection points averaged around 420kg of recycled textiles per week, averaging around 70kg per collection point.
The underlying idea was this, according to Kimmo Rinne, Development Manager at Salpakierto: "Our future depends on a circular economy, but it can’t just be the consumers’ responsibility to take care of recycling. With this pilot, we wanted to ask what countries, cities and companies can do to help make recycling easier and more attractive to people. Deposits have worked well before in Finland; maybe there could be one for textiles too in the future."
