T-REX Project has concluded
After three years of collaboration, innovation, and shared ambition, the T-REX Project has officially concluded.
I am a principal sustainability expert at Quantis, a leading environmental sustainability consultancy, where I support organisations in developing sustainable solutions and help our team deliver quality work.
Quantis is partner of the T-REX Project consortium, working on developing a harmonised EU blueprint and business opportunities for closed loop sorting, and recycling of household textile waste.
Our role in this project is to analyse the environmental aspects of the technologies developed within the project by performing a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of all three pathways, from collection and sorting to the demonstrator product. This study will help assess the hotspots of the value chain and identify improvement potential for the three types of recycled fibres (cotton, polyester, polyamide) examined in this project.
One of the greatest challenges of waste textile recycling is the variety of blend, yarn and fabric types, and the different types of finishing, while on the other hand, the recyclers have specific requirements for the input of their process. Some characteristics of the fabric or the garment can prevent recycling altogether, such as products with multicomposition of the textile part (with more than two materials), or products with electrical or electronic equipment.
The T-REX Project will bring very interesting insights and solutions with regard to the collection and sorting of waste textiles at the industry level. This will hopefully help brands to consider this aspect when designing new products. Currently, most clothing and footwear isn’t designed to be repaired or recycled, and even when it is, the infrastructure needed for both brands and consumers to really embrace a circular model isn’t available. For circular business models to work, brands must address product circularity and sustainability by harnessing an ecodesign approach, which looks at the environmental impacts of products across their life cycle.
The amount of textile waste is immense: around 16 kg per person per year are discarded in Europe, of which only a quarter is collected separately for reuse and recycling, while the rest ends up in mixed household waste. This is a great opportunity to create new value chains within Europe by collecting, sorting and recycling. There are many areas for innovation, starting with sorting technologies, but also for recycling new materials and not to forget, designing for circularity.
To meet the challenges which we face in terms of environmental impacts and climate change, the textile value chain will have to provide easily recyclable garments by 2050, which have such a high quality so that many consumers can enjoy them for a long time. Great innovations in the recycling industry and in the design of garments will allow this evolution.
By 2050, I hope that consumer awareness of the environmental impacts of overconsumption and the take-make-waste model will have grown, so that sustainable fashion habits become more widespread.
