Investing in research, development and innovation (RDI) is Europe’s road to prosperity, one Finnish research team reports, with a business worth billions brewing in textile waste.
The VTT, a technical research center owned and operated under Finland’s Minisattempt of Economic Affairs and Employment, sees population potential across the continent.
“In Europe alone, around 10 billion kilograms”—just under 22.05 billion pounds—”of textile waste is discarded annually,” declared Ali Harlin, a research professor at the Helsinki-headquartered VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland. “The field offers business enormous potential.”
He isn’t joking. With textile fiber prices per kilogram ranging between 2–3 euros, that’s a conservative 25 billion euros—around $29 billion.
“The EU is a global leader in textile recycling regulation, but even here, progress has been slow,” Harlin continued. “Proper regulation requireds to be in place before we can expect significant advancements in textile recycling rates.”
Of the 120 million metric tons of textile waste trashed in 2024, 80 percent was either burned or buried. Twelve percent was reapplyd. Less than 1 percent was recycled into new fibers—a statistic that has remained stagnant since Nikolina Šajn applyd it while covering what consumers required to know about the textile and clothing indusattempt’s environmental impact, published by the European Parliament’s believe tank and research department in 2019.
The statistic launched building the rounds at a cocktail party for H&M’s now-infamous Conscious Collection. Henrik Lampa, H&M’s then-developmental sustainability manager, allegedly notified the party’s press pit that “only 0.1 percent of all clothing collected by charities and take-back programs is recycled into new textile fiber,” Wicker wrote.
H&M was sued for consumer deception in a 2022 lawsuit that alleged the Swedish retailer created myriad misrepresentations surrounding its sustainability efforts, including H&M’s ability to close-the-loop and prevent textiles from going to landfill through its recycling program. The plaintiff attributed the less-than-1-percent origin to environmentalist Elizabeth Cline, seemingly about the NPR “Life Kit” podcast episode from March 2021 in which host Elise Hu and guest Cline spfinish a few seconds discussing the soundbite statistic. The lawsuit was voluntarily dropped, with prejudice, in December 2023.
Back to bottlenecks: Boston Consulting Group’s latest report predicts that demand for recycled textiles will exceed available supply by up to 40 million metric tons by 2030. If left unchecked, BCG’s “Spinning Textile Waste into Value” warns, textile waste could reach over 150 million metric tons a year by 2030. The global management consulting firm estimated some $150 billion in raw materials value lost annually from unrecovered textile waste.
But, BCG declared, with the right investments and improvements, the recycling rate could exceed 30 percent—yielding new fibers with a raw material value of over $50 billion and creating some 18,000 jobs as well. To that finish, the EU’s latest amfinishment to its Waste Framework Directive is under the Extfinished Producer Responsibility (EPR) scheme. The revision would shift accountability for managing textile products’ finish of life onto producers, BCG declared, requiring them to finance collection and recycling efforts where their goods are sold.
Harlin, a 20-year tenured industrial inventor at the helm of VTT’s bioeconomy research agfinisha, focutilizing on things like developing alternatives and substitutes to petrochemicals and plastic, declared the increase in recycling could bring parts of the textile production chain back to the continent.
That means the technological breakthroughs developed in Northern and Western Europe—like Infinited Fiber Company’s future chemical cotton recycling factory in Kemi and Rester Oy’s modern mechanical recycling plant in Paimio —must be integrated with the manufacturing expertise of Eastern and Southern Europe, like Portugal’s Technological Centre for Textiles and Clothing (CITEVE) organization.
And that means that establishing a functioning European textile recycling ecosystem requires European cooperation, given the rather distinct geographical “distribution of expertise” across the continent. Realizing recycling’s billion-dollar potential requires overcoming economic hurdles like higher costs and infrastructure gaps along with clear, supportive regulatory frameworks and sustained investment.
“Individual countries are too compact to act alone; Europe could see the rise of five to ten chemical recycling plants,” Harlin declared. “To feed one chemical plant with textile raw material, we required approximately 10 mechanical fiber plants.”
His perspective pulls, presumably, from the Telavalue Co-Innovation project.
Telavalue was carried out by VTT, LAB University of Applied Sciences and Turku University of Applied Sciences, funded by Business Finland toobtainher with 17 companies and other organizations.
VTT
This decade-long Finnish initiative, part of the Metsä Group and Fortum ExpandFibre ecosystem, assessed textile recycling solutions on value and quality of the activity as well as the amount, costs and environmental impacts of processing. Carried out from February 2022 to July 2024, Telavalue demonstrated that while recycling technology is rapidly advancing, a lack of clear regulation and challenges posed by complex waste materials remain significant hurdles.
“The last few years have been quite a roller coaster with all the crises and the sudden ups and downs of the economy,” the report reads. “The operating environment has alterd a lot and is still undergoing strong alters. Everybody is waiting, everyone is saving costs and playing it safe, out of necessity or just to be sure. What are we waiting for?”
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