Nearly 90% of textile waste ends up being incinerated. How can we change this?

Manuel Morales Rubio, June 2025

The Conversation

Did you know that today only 12% of textile waste is recycled and reused in the European Union? This is an extremely low figure when compared, for example, to the 75% of cardboard and 80% of glass recycled in France. The vast majority of textile waste produced by industry is therefore sent directly to landfill and will ultimately be incinerated.

So why is so little recycled? Is this situation set to remain unchanged? Not necessarily.

Where does textile waste come from?

But before we look at how things could change, let’s first take a look at what textile waste is and why so little of it is recycled.

Textile waste comes from manufactured clothing. It consists of fabric scraps, fibres and other textile materials that have reached the end of their life cycle, after use or production. Ready-to-wear and fast fashion, with their rapid renewal of collections, exacerbate the problem of management and treatment with increasing quantities of textile waste from overproduction and overconsumption.

The challenges of recycling

But if a large proportion of these textiles end up in landfill, contributing to pollution and waste of resources, it is also because there are no suitable or economically viable recycling solutions.

There are two main reasons for this: the first is technical and the second stems from poor existing standards and institutional regulations.

In fact, textile waste recycling faces many technical challenges due to the complex and heterogeneous nature of textile fibres and manufacturing materials, the lack of infrastructure and collection facilities, the high costs of sorting, and a lack of technical support and advice from recycling experts.

With regard to current standards, it should be noted that prior to 2022, there were no regulations prohibiting fast fashion players (brands, retail stores and manufacturers) from destroying unsold and returned products.

Turning textile waste into a business opportunity?

However, in 2022, the European anti-waste law for a circular economy (Agec) changed the game by requiring ready-to-wear players (brands, retail stores and manufacturers) to find alternative uses for their returned and unsold textile and clothing products, thus avoiding landfill or incineration.

To give these textiles a new lease of life, one opportunity remains underestimated: collaboration between the textile industry and other industries that could use textile residues that were previously burned.

Unsold or returned textiles and post-industrial textile waste could, for example, be transformed into raw materials that can be reused as thermal and acoustic insulation in buildings, industrial cloths, automotive foams or mattress padding. This synergy between industries offers several advantages: it reduces waste, limits the extraction of virgin resources and promotes a more sustainable circular economy. By pooling expertise and needs, players from different sectors also optimise production chains while contributing to more responsible management of end-of-life textile materials.

However, for the time being, the complexity of cross-sector cooperation means that the recovery of textile co-products and waste remains low.

But these initiatives between industries, known as industrial symbiosis, have long existed in other fields and therefore suggest that things could be different.

The reuse of waste from a production process has been documented in the production of soap from animal fat, the production of fertilisers from agricultural and animal residues, and the use of animal skin and bones as raw materials for leather and weapons.

This practice of reusing residues has even become very common today in other industrial sectors such as petrochemicals, organic chemistry, energy and agro-industry since the second half of the 20th century. The first case of industrial symbiosis identified in scientific literature dates back to 1972, when a group of private companies from different industrial sectors had to deal with water shortages in the town of Kalundborg in Denmark. By working together, they were able to optimise overall water use through reuse.

Cross-sector collaboration: a key strategy for circularity

However, if we look at the quantities of textile waste, this possibility of recycling textile waste by developing interactions between industries will not be enough. The other major challenge remains initial production. Behind the excessive growth in textile waste worldwide in recent years is the overproduction and overconsumption of textiles, which has quadrupled in the last five years with the proliferation of fast-fashion platforms such as Shein and Temu.

The aim is therefore to reduce the volume of virgin raw materials needed to manufacture a growing number of garments. This could be achieved by reducing consumption or by reducing our need for virgin raw materials. Here, the use of reconditioned textile waste may also prove useful. It offers the advantage of achieving two virtuous goals at the same time: reducing our waste and limiting our need for textile raw materials.

In Europe, however, less than 2% of total textile waste is currently reconditioned to make new garments. This percentage is so low that it is hard to believe, but it can be explained by a disconnect between those involved in the end-of-life cycle of clothing, the heterogeneity of materials, which makes it difficult to recycle them to produce clothing of the same quality, and lax regulations and enforcement.

Recycling operators and waste collection centres communicate little with the associations that manage textile collection points, sorting and the sale of second-hand clothing (Mains ouverts, Emaus, Secours populaire, among others).

Digital platforms such as Vinted are unaware of the volumes handled by players in the physical ecosystem. Furthermore, the initiatives to recover and reuse used clothing implemented by major brands such as Zara and H&M represent only a fraction of their total sales and are therefore unable to change the trend towards a closed-loop textile economy.

Ready-to-wear: in search of sustainable solutions

This is why it is crucial to activate all these levers in view of the environmental impact of the textile industry, which emits 3.3 billion tonnes of CO₂ per year, as much as international flights and maritime freight transport combined.

The textile industry is also responsible for 9% of the microplastics found in the oceans and consumes around 215 trillion litres of water per year when the entire value chain is taken into account. Textiles and clothing are therefore the most water-intensive industries in the world, second only to agriculture and the agri-food industry.

The textile sector is also associated with pollution from chemicals and detergents used in manufacturing processes and in the washing of clothes.

On a global scale, the prospects for overproduction and overconsumption are worrying, as it is estimated that by 2050 the total volume of ready-to-wear clothing could triple.

To prevent our clothes from having such a harmful environmental impact, one obvious solution would be to encourage more local production.

Today, the textile value chain remains highly globalised and the clothes it produces are becoming less and less durable. Raw material production is highly concentrated in Asia, particularly in countries such as China, India and Bangladesh, which account for more than 70% of the total market for fibre production, fabric and yarn preparation (spinning), weaving, knitting, bonding and bleaching/dyeing.

Faced with this reality, the implementation of a territorial symbiosis strategy could also reduce excessive dependence on unsustainable production systems by relocating production capacities to strengthen short and more territorial supply chains in Europe.

Sources

To go further