What: Fashion for Good and the Dutch Circle Economy foundation researched to provide insight on the value of investing in scaling up their sustainability efforts.

Why it is important: The study of six European countries looked at the textile volume of post-consumer waste, the composition of recyclable textiles, and the capacity to sort and store the textile waste.

The research found that 494,000 tons of post-consumer textiles are available and usable for recycling. The study was conducted in Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain and the UK. Despite the varying volume of textiles collected across these six countries, the research concluded a connection with the local sorting capacity.

Fashion for Good calculated the potential price per kilo for the recycled material equaling 74 million euros in total. There remains a need to invest financially in improving recycling technologies and the automation of sorting.

Textile recycling could bring 74 million euros to EU countries