A report stated that despite the commitments of major retailers to reduce clothes waste, there are still significant obstacles. They require up to six billion euros in investment, and hundreds of recycling facilities.
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Corina Pos
Helen Reid / Reuters BARCELONA and LONDON
In a warehouse on the outskirts of Barcelona, Spain, women stand at conveyor belts, manually sorting T-shirts, jeans and dresses from large bales of used clothing — a small step toward tackling Europe’s towering problem of discarded fashion.
The sorting centre run by the charity Moda Re, which promotes garment recycling and reuse, plans to increase its volume to 40,000 tons per year within a single calendar year.
“This is just the beginning,” said Albert Alberich, director of Moda Re, which is a part of the Spanish charity Caritas Internationalis and runs Spain’s largest second-hand clothing chain. “Increasingly we are going to turn used clothes into raw material from Europe for fashion companies.”
Photo: Reuters
Moda Re will be expanding its facilities in Barcelona, Bilbao, and Valencia. The expansion is part-funded by Zara’s Industria de Diseno Textil SA.
Also in Spain, rivals including Hennes & Mauritz AB (H&M), Mango and Inditex have created a nonprofit association to manage clothing waste, responding to an EU law requiring member states to separate textiles from other waste from January 2025.
Despite such efforts, fewer than one-quarter of Europe’s 5.2 million tonnes of clothing waste are recycled, and millions of tonnes end up as landfill every year, the European Commission said in July.
There are no precise statistics on clothing waste growth, but the collection of used and recycled clothes has gradually increased in many European countries since about 2010.
Fast fashion, or making and selling cheap clothes with a short lifespan, is “highly unsustainable,” the commission said in July.
It added that the textile industry was a significant contributor to environmental degradation and climate change.
Inditex announced its sustainability goals in July and stated that it would use 40% recycled fibers for garments.
“The main problem that we are facing is overconsumption,” said Dijana Lind, environmental, social and governance analyst at Union Investment, a Frankfurt, Germany-based asset manager that holds shares in Adidas AG, Hugo Boss AG, Inditex and H&M.
Lind stated that she has been in contact with Adidas, Hugo Boss, and Inditex to discuss the importance of increasing textile recycling and the use recycled materials by these companies.
Hugo Boss said in a statement that “overproduction and overconsumption are, in general, an industry-wide problem,” adding that it was using data analysis to better adjust production to demand.
Between 6 billion and 7 billion euros (US$6.46 billion and US$7.54 billion) of investment would be needed by 2030 to create the scale of textile waste processing and recycling that the EU is aiming for, consultancy McKinsey & Co said in a report last year.
Reuters was unable to determine the current level of investment in this industry.
Lind said that companies had introduced some first steps, but “more needs to be done.”
Inditex announced that they would be investing 3.5 million Euros in Moda Re in three years, and have recycling bins in each of their Spanish stores. The company did not reply to an inquiry about the idea that it should do more.
In a statement, H&M said it recognized it was “part of the problem.”
“The way fashion is produced and consumed needs to change — this is an undeniable truth,” H&M said.
The challenges of reducing the amount of clothing that is wasted are enormous, even with the EU’s crackdown on the issue, the industry commitment to sustainability, and the Moda Re initiative.
McKinsey’s report stated that hundreds of plants of this type, as well as investments in technology and interventions in the market, would be required to achieve industry goals of recycling 2.5 million tonnes textile waste by 2030.
Fashion For Good surveyed over 57 textile recyclers in Europe for its report published in September of last year.
The EU has not set specific targets for recycled content in garments, but by 2030 aims for all textile products sold in the bloc “to a great extent” be made of recycled fibers, as well as being durable, repairable and recyclable.
To create the capacity to meet the goals, ReHubs Europe, an association set up by garment lobby group EURATEX, promotes investments in “fiber-to-fiber” recycling: processes that turn used garments into yarn to make new textiles.
EURATEX has not responded to the question of the investment level in this technology. This process, which is currently being refined, recycles less than one percent of all clothing. Separating different types of fibre into feedstock that is suitable for recycle can be a challenge.
The higher price of new fabric in comparison to recycled fabric is a major barrier for widespread adoption.
The Barcelona factory receives garments from over 7,000 donation bins located in supermarkets, Zara stores and Mango shops.
Inditex donated infrared equipment to identify fiber composition of clothing, speeding up the manual sorting.
Around 40 percent of clothes Moda Re gets are sent out to be recycled. Moda Re expects that 70 percent of the fiber-to fibre recycled clothes will be sent to other facilities in three or four years.
Most of the products recycled are dishcloths and other lower-grade items.
Nearly half of the donated clothes to Moda Re go for resale, including in Cameroon and Ghana. Moda Re states that its clothes can be reused.
UN data shows that EU exports of used textiles increased by more than two times in the last decade.
The EU said that not all of those clothes are reused. Exports from Europe to Africa could lead to environmental pollution if clothes which cannot be sold end up on dumps.
The proposed European Commission regulations seek to crack down on unscrupulous exporters of damaged goods destined for landfills. They would also require that countries demonstrate their capability to manage material sustainably.
Moda Re says it is aiming to reduce its volume of clothing sent to Africa.
Only 8 percent of the donations are resold at Moda Re’s secondhand shops, the method widely seen as the more efficient way of reusing old clothes. Similar amounts end up in European landfill.
It said that the company plans to expand to 300 secondhand stores in Spain within the next three to four years, from the current 100.
Moda Re’s employees say that, despite their challenges, they are happy with the work they do.
“We take the clothes that have been thrown away to make new clothes,” said Aissatou Boukoum, a young Senegalese worker, feeding garments through a machine that slices them into ribbons to be sent for recycling. “For me, it is good.”
Puma SE, in addition to Inditex’s efforts, has established partnerships with the garment sorting and collecting companies I:CO and TEXAID Textilverwertungs AG, both in Switzerland, and Vesti Solidale, in Italy.
Adidas, Bestseller AS and H&M have invested in Finnish start-up Infinited Fiber Co Oy, which manufactures fiber out of textile waste, cardboard and paper.
The European Commission’s legislative push includes rules to make retailers contribute to the cost of collecting used clothes for reuse and recycling.
In July, the Commission proposed that retailers pay 0.12 Euros per piece for each item of clothing sold as part of a group. This fee would be higher for items which are difficult to recycle.
The same associations as those in Spain would be formed in every country. Refashion, a French organization that has been operating since 2008 in France, is the system currently being used.
Reuters asked 10 leading fashion companies including Adidas, H&M and Primark Stores Ltd how the fees would affect their profitability. A single company did not provide an estimate. They all expressed the hope that the fees will be similar across Europe.
“It’s a tsunami of legislation,” EURATEX sustainable businesses director Mauro Scalia said.
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