Textile Waste Recycling: A Need for a Stringent Paradigm Shift

Abstract

Despite the fact that textile waste is almost entirely recyclable, approximately 75% of it ends up in landfills worldwide. This has serious environmental and economic consequences. This review focuses on textile waste statistics, its contribution to pollution and recycling, as well as the benefits, barriers, types, and technologies of textile waste recycling. Textile production and textile waste generation have increased alarmingly as a result of fast fashion, which emphasizes low-cost production, frequent consumption, and short-term use of garments. This industry is distinguished by scarcity of resources, excessive consumption, and the generation of large amounts of waste. The frequency of consumer purchases is increasing, while the life span of clothing is drastically decreasing. Recycling does not occur as expected for a variety of reasons, so the environmental impact and economic losses from this waste grow over time. The textile industry currently contributes about 8% of the global carbon budget and 20% of industrial water pollution. Every year, $500 billion is lost to the system due to unused clothing and a lack of recycling. A paradigm shift is urgently required to implement an effective textile waste recycling system.

Introductory Chapter: Sustainability from Past to Future

“…Approximately 100-150 L of water are consumed to process 1 kg of textile material [21]. The world's annual water consumption for textile production (including fiber production) is around 93 billion cubic meters [22,23]. The water released after the processes mainly contains much chemical waste.…”

Modified Fibrous Mass of Leather and Paper Waste for the Production of Packaging Paper and Cardboard

“…The extreme limitation of primary cellulose raw materials forces manufacturers to use secondary raw materials in the form of waste paper, cotton linters, fluff, and textile waste to produce paper products. There are objective reasons that limit the proper processing of waste, as a result of which the environmental load on the environment and economic losses increase [1]. Currently, packaging paper and cardboard are almost entirely produced from waste paper.…”

The compostability of denim fabrics dyed with various indigos

“…Potential solutions include re-using, recycling, and finally composting. Denim garment and textile use and reuse can be maximized via second-hand garment systems (Fortuna and Diyamandoglu 2017;Rynk and Ziegenbein 2022) and innovations in textile recycling (Dahlbo et al 2017;McCauley and Jestratijevic 2023;Wagaw and Babu 2023). With landfilling and incineration of both unsold and post-consumer textile products recently banned in a growing list of places (Protection 2022;Reuters 2023), a final end of use solution for cotton textiles could include biodegradation (Mazibuko et al 2019) in composting facilities.…”