About the event
Have you done one of the things that we are about to tell you? You find a hole in your socks, and you throw them in your garbage bin. You realize that you just have way too much clothes in your closet, and you really need to do some serious work to clean it up. You pile up your unwanted clothes, and put them in a bag. You think that you should leave the bag at your local charity because a lot of the clothes are completely fine to use. But you have to bike in the rain with a bag full of clothes. That is too much work, and it is troublesome. So you decide to put it in the garbage bin. Feels good, your wardrobe is clean, and your work is done.
Consumers throw away clothes because they are broken, they are too small, they are not trendy, or simply because we are tried of them and our wardrobe is full. How we consumers get rid of clothes is related to our personal habit, knowledge, economy, and waste collection possibilities. In Sweden, we throw away over 7.5 kilos of textile to incineration plants every year, which means that the valuable resources used for producing our clothes are lost forever.
A more sustainable textile management is not just about sustainable and responsible production. It should be about the whole value chain, from production and consumption to waste management. Today textile is not managed according to the waste hierarchy, which means that we end up burning them instead of recycling them just like how we do with plastic and paper. However, according to EU's new waste policy, we should separate our textile waste by 2025. There is now an ongoing discussion in Sweden and Scandinavia regarding a more sustainable way of textile waste management.
This panel discussion is all about textile recycling. How far are we from recycling textiles in Sweden? What are the important factors for efficient recycling of textiles? What can we do about them after recycling? How can cities make textile recycling easier for consumers? Our experts from NSR, Wargön Innovation, and city of Malmö will help answer these questions with their knowledge and insights.
This event is part of the project "Helsingborg, en cirkulär textilstad tillsammans" organized by Future Fashion Collective with financial support from city of Helsingborg and Visionsfonden.
