The Prime Ministers recent announcement of a $20m fund to grow the Australia recycling industry, and his commitment to ban the export of plastic, paper, glass and tyres has generally been seen as a positive initiative to deal with our poor track record on real recycling. What struck me as missing from the whole discussion was the lack of any mention of textile waste; the exporting of textile waste or textile recycling in Australia.
The facts are well known and have been raised time and time again by programs such as ‘War on Waste’ yet seem to generate no interest or engagement from Government. We waste 23kg of clothing per capita each year, that is over 500,000 tonnes of clothing, but unlike glass and plastic, we do not measure these figures accurately across the country. For me, this explains why Government do not talk about it, the old management rule of ‘what gets measured, gets managed’, clearly applies to textile waste. Not measured and not managed!
This was particularly bought into sharp focus for me when our own Prime Minister talked about the ‘appalling record of Australian plastic recycling’ and made no mention of textile waste.
This is driven, in part, by the lack of meaningful data, but also the personal relationship we have with our clothes. Would you take your ‘beautiful’ drink bottle collection, that contains memories of friends and great times, and leave them with a charity store to sell so someone else can appreciate them? No, of course not. They would be disposed of properly in a yellow top bin because they are plastic, and plastic is bad, and plastic hurts the planet!
Yet do we know, do we realise, that over 65% of the worlds clothes are made of PET, or polyester, which is exactly the same material as a drink bottle, and when our clothes go into the bin, or landfill, that is exactly the same environmental impact as burying a drink bottle?
Last year, we produced 50million tonnes of polyester for garments; 50 million tonnes of the same material that is used for drink bottles and only 13% of that was recycled, and only 1% of that was chemically recycled back into reusable polyester. The rest was burnt or buried…that is a poor reflection on our knowledge of our garments and our belief that they do less damage than plastic bottles.
So, if we now did know this, would we allow our textiles to end up on landfill or would we take different decisions about recycling our textiles? Would be take a stronger view of not allowing textile exports for somebody else’s landfill? I think we probably would.
Returning to the Prime Minister’s announcement. Government cannot be a quiet observer regarding the issue of textile waste as it is growing relentlessly and is causing massive harm in the land, the air and the ocean. France has recently passed laws banning supermarkets from disposing of unsold food and is reviewing extending this to excess clothing and electronics.
Whilst this may feel ‘heavy handed’, there is increasing frustration at the lack of product stewardship in relationship to textile waste. No one appears to own the problem; we just pass it from retailer to consumer to charity to exporter to landfill. Who pays for this? Who takes accountability for the problem?
I would encourage Government to continue to drive the right behaviour in the whole recycling space but with particular reference to textiles:
Measurement – treat textile waste with the same seriousness as plastic, as it is the same thing, and start to gather accurate data on what is disposed of, where to and from whom?
Legislation – extend and enforce mandatory government procurement of recycled polyester. Insist that their own departments procure locally produced recycled polyester from our own textile waste. Introduce textile kerbside collection so textiles can be sorted and reprocessed before they enter landfill.
Innovation – extend and simplify R+D legislation and innovation grants that then allow Australian start-ups in the textile recycling sector, to develop innovative and environmentally sustainable solutions to scale and quickly. Become more entrepreneur friendly and innovation focussed. Take some more risks. Use the landfill levy to directly support waste reduction grants.
Textile waste should be recognised for the damaging issue that it is and be treated as seriously as plastic waste. We have now banned plastic exports, maybe the time is now to ban textile waste exports and build a vibrant textile recycling industry in Australia?
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