85% of clothes, textiles in US dumped in landfill or incinerator: NIST

In the report titled ‘Facilitating a Circular Economy for Textiles’, scientists recommend strategies to address this problem and is based on a three-day workshop held at NIST in September 2021 that brought together manufacturers, industry associations, recyclers, waste managers, researchers, policymakers and several major fashion brands that share the goal of increasing circularity in the textiles industry.

Key challenges facing the current system identified in the workshop include lack of well-established infrastructure and systems for consistent, convenient and widespread collection of quality (clean, dry) waste textiles and the current uneconomical textile circularity system. Large-scale reuse, repair and recycling are hindered by high transportation, labour and processing costs and decreasing quality and cost of new products.

There are other challenges as well. Sorting and grading of textiles rely on expensive manual labour, even though it is not possible to visually identify fibre composition. No harmonised sorting standards or criteria exist, challenging downstream markets. Commercial-scale recycling processes for textiles are fibre-type dependent, require pure, reliable, high-volume feedstock, and generally cannot process mixed material inputs (fibre blends). Separation of blends and removal of dyes, additives, and finishes (e.g., functional coatings) often require or generate hazardous substances that require proper disposal. Limited recycling processes exist for select fibre types.

“Textiles are one of the fastest growing categories in the waste stream,” said Kelsea Schumacher, an environmental engineer working with NIST who co-authored the report. “But there are a lot of opportunities to reduce waste in this sector that would bring big economic and environmental benefits,” she said.

The report defines textiles to include clothing, shoes, bedding, towels, upholstery fabrics and carpeting. However, the main type of textile in the municipal waste stream, according to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), is discarded clothing.

On an average, each person in the United States discarded roughly 47 kg of textiles in 2018, the most recent year for which data is available.