Recycling of Low Grade Clothing Waste - Oakdene Hollins

© 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
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