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MAY 2025

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Understanding the textile waste hierarchy

Understanding the textile waste hierarchy

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The waste hierarchy model, developed under the EU Waste Framework Directive, provides a prioritized approach to textile waste management in Sweden. Learn how waste prevention, reuse, recycling, recovery, and disposal strategies work together to transform textile flows and maximize resource efficiency.

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A pathway to sustainable textile management

Effective waste management is vital for reducing the environmental impact of the textile industry globaly.

The waste hierarchy model provides a structured approach to managing waste by prioritizing actions that conserve resources and minimize harm.

This model, stemming from the EU Waste Framework Directive, outlines five key tiers:

  1. Waste prevention / reduce:
    ‍    The highest priority is to prevent or reduce waste at its source. This involves minimizing production and consumption, choosing sustainable production methods, and optimizing inventory to conserve raw materials.
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  2. Reuse/ repair:
    ‍    Reuse involves keeping garments in service by repairing or repurposing them. By extending the life of a product, reuse helps conserve resources and reduce the need for new materials, ensuring items remain productive.
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  3. ‍Recycling:
    ‍    When products no longer can be reused, recycling processes convert textile waste into new materials. While this process demands extra energy and reduces environmental harm compared to creating virgin materials, it often involves chemicals and substances that can be damaging, and the process of recycling degrades the textile's original structure through downcycling.
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  1. ‍Recovery (energy recovery):
    ‍    For materials that cannot be reused or recycled, energy recovery methods, such as incineration with energy capture. This is described as an alternative that recovers some value from the waste. But in essence, it's only wasting resources by getting rid of the growing volumes of materials from consumption
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  2. ‍Disposal:
    As a last resort, waste that the other methods cannot manage is disposed of in landfills or through incineration without energy recovery. This option is said to be avoided due to its significant environmental impact. However, we can see how the numbers for this category grow with the increased demand for transparency and traceability in the industries and with the increased volumes of low-quality products.

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While the waste hierarchy offers a framework for sustainable textile waste management, its full potential depends on continuous innovation and practical implementation.

The true challenge lies in encouraging higher levels of waste prevention and reuse of the products and its materials.At Flöde, we advocate for a future where the textile industry moves beyond conventional recycling to embrace strategies that minimize waste and maximize resource efficiency.

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We are committed to driving this change by combining innovative upcycling techniques with solid data and practical solutions, proving that textiles can be more sustainable and still be economically viable and environmentally responsible.

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