What do we do with our worn-out t-shirts, knickers, deflated pillows or stained duvets? Many of us donate our still-wearable clothes to charity shops or hand children’s clothes down to friends or family. However, we are in a quandary as to what we do with our old textiles. In EPA’s 2012 National Waste Report, 5.6% of the collected household waste was textiles.If we look at the fashion industry, we can see that the new standard of “cheap fashion” on the average high street, which has a turnover of new collections several times a year, leads to significant textile waste. If we add to this the fact that many people live in areas without widespread textile collection as part of their recycling and we can see how imperative it becomes that we look at the life cycle of the items we use and how to keep this material out of the waste stream. Ireland already has some community exchange and recycling initiatives operating across the country, such as SMILE, which allows businesses to exchange resources. Also, more and more companies are now incorporating recycling into the life cycle of their products by giving customers the chance to return their used items to the companies to be recycled.H&M and Marks and Spencers, for example, now give customers the opportunity to return their unwanted textiles to their stores for recycling. This garment collection initiative gives customers a convenient alternative to simply disposing of these items, particularly, for customers who may not have full recycling services in their area. H&M has also introduced its ‘Close the Loop’ line of clothing which is a collection made using these recycled garments. H&M’s CEO states “Creating a closed loop for textiles, in which unwanted clothes can be recycled into new ones, will not only minimize textile waste, but also significantly reduce the need for virgin resources as well as other impacts fashion has on our planet.”There have been some well-publicised ventures that use off-cuts and[caption id="attachment_3350" align="alignright" width="286"]

Dolly Textile Recycling[/caption]recycled fabrics (see Mamukko bags in Kinsale), textile recycling companies such as LenRec in Kilkenny and Dolly Textile Recycling which sends wearable clothes to charities here and abroad and shred the rest to create flocking for use in carpets, mattresses and other uses. Additionally, many of these textiles are sent off to Africa to be sold and repurposed there.There is a great opportunity for innovation to repurpose these textile wastes into new products. For example, there are four pilot programmes in the Netherlands, through their Circular Textiles Program, ‘to develop and establish a commercial and scalable model for closing the loop for post-consumer textiles in the EU.’ Similar programmes could be supported in Ireland to reduce the amount of textile waste and use such as raw materials for new commercial ventures.