Recycling of Low Grade Clothing Waste - Oakdene Hollins

More documents

Recommendations

Info

© Oakdene Hollins Ltd, Salvation Army Trading Company Ltd Nonwovens Innovation & Research Institute Ltd September 2006 The disposal figures are consistent with the LCA studies reviewed, which show disposal impact to be 0‐3% of the total. 8.5.4 Conclusions Therefore, our conclusions on the overall environmental impacts of clothing are: • Life cycle impacts are dominated by consumer use, even though these may be somewhat overstated. • Re‐use of clothing compared to recycling saves up to 29kg CO2e per kg of clothing compared to recycling and up to 33kg CO2e/kg compared to disposal. • Recycling of clothing in the UK currently saves approximately 4kg CO2e per kg of clothing compared to disposal. • The CO2e impacts of re‐use and recycling occur largely through displacement of virgin clothing and fibre manufacture respectively. • Thus UK charity shops and textile recyclers and their overseas sales chains have an impact of about 7.3m tonnes per year CO2e from their recycling and re‐use operations. • The differences in the CO2e impact of different disposal methods such as MBT, incineration or landfill are not significant in the context of the whole product lifecycle. 8.6 Policy Proposals and Extended Producer Responsibility 8.6.1 Waste Management versus Resource Management The current waste management framework provides little incentive for Local Authorities to encourage clothing re‐use or recycling: • In contrast to packaging materials such as glass, wood, plastic and metals, there are no specific targets for textile re‐use or recycling. For Defra Page 74
© Oakdene Hollins Ltd, Salvation Army Trading Company Ltd Nonwovens Innovation & Research Institute Ltd September 2006 • On the other hand, textiles are assumed to be 50% biodegradable when Local Authorities calculate diversion of biodegradable waste from landfill in order to meet LATS targets. The outcome from this framework is that current textile recycling delivers diversion from landfill of only 0.3m tonnes per year out of a total of 1.2m tonnes clothing consumption per year. However, Section 8.4 demonstrates that there are comparatively high CO2e benefits from increasing the level of re‐use and recycling of textiles and diverting clothing waste from landfill and energy recovery. These conclusions are reinforced by the draft conclusions of other research currently being undertaken in the Defra Waste Research Programme 34 . Policy frameworks that optimise resource management with respect to greenhouse gas emissions have already been published 35 . Therefore, if a framework were to be implemented in future in which Local Authorities are set resource management targets that minimise greenhouse gas impact, then textile re‐use and recycling would be given a higher priority. 8.6.2 Economic Considerations The existing market structure depends to a large extent on the donation of clothing through collection from the door‐step and delivery to charity shops or textile banks. The value of these donations is approximately £250 million annually (i.e. the value to the charity sector of selling the clothes donated to them plus the sale of ‘rag’ to the merchants). At low recycling rates these ‘bring’ systems will dominate clothing collection, assuming that the value of the clothing stream remains modest, as shown in Figure 6. Marginal costs of collection and sorting and onward sale (MC) increase as the proportion of clothing collected increases and greater effort is required to abstract smaller and smaller proportions of textiles from the waste stream. Typically for high rates of clothing recycling, doorstep collection would be required, which has higher costs than the ‘bring’ systems. MC would be improved by reductions in costs of the collection and sorting process, such as sorting overseas in lower labour‐cost countries or nearer to the main end‐markets for re‐use. The principal reason for any decline in the level of recycling and re‐use is that new clothing and fibre can be purchased at lower prices as restrictions on international trade are removed, which will lower the prices achievable for clothing or fibre by the recycling industry. In Figure 6 this change is represented by a leftward shift in the marginal revenue curve (MR) to a new position MR1. This shift makes door‐step collections uneconomic and causes the closure of some charitable retail activity. Evidence for this includes the focus of certain charity shops (eg Oxfam) on non‐clothing sales For Defra Page 75
Page 1 and 2:
© Oakdene Hollins Ltd, Salvation A
Page 3 and 4:
Page 5 and 6:
Page 7 and 8:
Page 9 and 10:
Page 11 and 12:
Page 13 and 14:
Page 15 and 16:
Page 17 and 18:
Page 19 and 20:
Page 21 and 22:
Page 23 and 24:
Page 25 and 26: © Oakdene Hollins Ltd, Salvation A
Page 75: © Oakdene Hollins Ltd, Salvation A
Page 127 and 128:
Page 129 and 130:
Page 131 and 132:
Page 133 and 134:
Page 135 and 136:
Page 137 and 138:
Page 139 and 140:
Page 141 and 142:
Page 143:
show all

Recycling of Low Grade Clothing Waste - Oakdene Hollins

Create successful ePaper yourself

Delete template?

Save as template?