English (en) svenska (sv)
Textile waste is unwanted textiles that people have used or have worn out and that they no longer need. The textile waste includes textile wastes from textile production, for example a lot of textile waste can be found in the sewing steps. Moreover it includes used and worn textile products and clothes that are at the end of their life stage. Textile waste can either be reused or recycled.
Reuse
Textiles can be reused in different ways, both as used clothing, for industrial cleaning and polishing rags or as rug filling. Furthermore it can be reused as upholstery in cars, or in rag rug manufacturing. The main organizations that collect clothes for recycling in Sweden are Myrorna, Emmaus, and the Red Cross.
Recycle
When recycling of textile products is made it is turned into fibers again and from there one can produce new textiles. The fibers are also used for other areas. One problem is that the quality of the fiber often deteriorates on repeated recycling. Another problem that complicates the recycling of textiles are that products of mixed fibers makes fiber sorting impossible. Textile recycling is done either mechanically, thermally or chemically. Recovery of cotton is attractive in the paper market, including banknote production.
Swedish textile waste
Each year over 100 000 tonnes of textiles are sold in Sweden. At the same time about 50 000 tonnes of textile waste finds its way into the household waste every year. This is about 2 % of the total household waste. More than 50 percent of this waste is burned in incinerators and go to energy recovery. Textile waste going to incineration is not an environmental threat in the short or long term. However, there may be alternative methods to take care of the textile waste that is better from a resource saving standpoint.
Naturvårdsverket (Swedish Environmental protection agency) has published a report on the recovery and recycling of textile waste, "Redovisning av kretsloppsdelegationens beställning till Naturvårdsverket om producentansvar för textilier. It states that the dramatic social changes over the past 50 years has affected both our lifestyle and our waste streams. While our grandparents would have repaired, modified and re-used clothing and linens to obtain "maximum useful life" for textiles, it is more common today to throw broken or used clothing.
History
The textile waste industry is known as the oldest and most established recycling industry. The habit of taking care of textile waste is very old and has been in most European countries for more than a hundred years. Usually there were recycling behind the scenes. Products made from recycled materials was regarded as inferior, and the words "shoddy", "open-waste" or "lumpull" where used to indicate bad quality. In developed countries, it was almost taboo to use fabric from recycled materials. In Sweden there were previously recycling on a larger scale with the company Gotthard Nilsson AB in Älmhult as one of the leaders. They were conducted industrial recycling of textile fibers, particularly from textile factories and their waste. Reprocessing of textile fibers meant grading, shredding and decomposing (finer material including blankets). The material that was the output was delivered for spinning, pinning and padding, or in bulk to a particular department within the company, where the material was further processed into sound proofing or insulation products. Recycling was however closed in 1992.
Textile Waste
Previously there were factories which used textile waste and old, worn textile products for the production of new textile units, called shoddy factories. Today there are signs that this production is starting to resume. In a waste project, run by the industry research institute IFP (branchforskningsinstitutet), a number of Swedish textile companies has surveyed for the purpose of considering ways to reduce the amount of textile waste that currently goes to the municipal waste sites. The project aimed for residues from the manufacture in the form of fibers of different types (edge strips, discarded fabrics, etc.) on a large scale should be handled separately from other waste. In this study, based on a survey of 12 companies, 25 % of the waste went to the dumping sites and 44 % is incinerated in plants for energy recovery. The remaining 31 percent is recovered in own processes.