This summer, the Finnish city of Lahti has been piloting an incentivised recycling scheme for textile waste. The Textile Deposit pilot scheme wanted to see whether it could get locals to actively sort and recycle their old textiles. Thanks to a small reward, the recycling rate for textile waste has jumped by a staggering 500%.
Worldwide, a truckload of textiles is landfilled or incinerated every single second, and it is a solvable problem needing a straightforward solution. The Finnish city of Lahti seems to have created one, and in this feature, we’ll look at what it has done and how it works.
The textile deposit is an experimental project set up by the City of Lahti in Southern Finland to see if small incentives provided by the city could positively affect the recycling rate of textile waste, which is currently one of the least recycled types of waste.
Collecting the Textiles
Making things as simple as possible for people is one of the key aspects of making any pilot scheme work, and this is where Salpakierto comes to the forefront. Salpakierto is a municipal company that operates waste management in the Lahti region, and it currently has six collection points for textile waste.
In 2023, its collection points received around 420kg of recycled textiles per week, averaging approximately 70 kilograms per collection point.
Thanks to the incentivised Textile Deposit scheme, the weekly result for a single collection point jumped to 350 kg of textiles per collection point, which is a five-fold increase.
“The Textile Deposit has been a runaway success. The results we’ve seen are a positive signal for systemic incentives for recycling. A nationwide deposit-based recycling system for textiles could give a significant boost to the recycling rate. In Finland, we’ve seen it with bottles and beverage cans; their recycling rate is well above 90% – could these kinds of incentives be applied across the board?” says Veera Hämäläinen, Communications Director for the City of Lahti.
A New Waste Act Will Promote Circularity
Finland took a step towards a circular economy for textiles at the beginning of the year, as a new law requiring cities and municipalities to make separate collection bins for textile waste available to all Finns came into effect. The separate collection of textile waste allows discarded clothes and household textiles to be reused and turned into recycled fibre.
“Our future depends on a circular economy, but it can’t just be the consumers’ responsibility to take care of recycling. With this pilot, we want to ask what countries, cities and companies can do to help make recycling easier and more attractive to people. Deposits have worked well before; maybe there could be one for textiles in the future”, says Kimmo Rinne, Development Manager at Salpakierto.
Cities are in a key role in making recycling easier
As a leading environmental city and the European Green Capital 2021, Lahti has set an official goal of becoming a zero-waste city by 2050. The Textile Deposit is an example of an everyday innovation that directly aims to reduce the amount of waste. In the pilot, locals could exchange their textile waste for coffee vouchers and passes at the local pool.
“The textile deposit is a great example of an everyday innovation that directly aims to minimise the amount of waste and showcases the potential of discarded textiles as a raw material for industries and design,” says Communications Director Veera Hämäläinen from the City of Lahti.
Lahti’s National Design Competition
The City of Lahti is also launching a national design competition to find new and creative uses for discarded textiles. The competition runs from 30 May to 13 August 2023. With the design competition, Lahti wants to promote innovation and entrepreneurship in the field of circular economy.
The competition is organised in collaboration with the Sustainable Lahti Foundation, LAB University of Applied Sciences and Salpakierto.
The textiles collected in Lahti will be processed into recycled fibre at Finland’s largest textile processing facility in Paimio. In the spirit of circular economy, the recovered fibre will then be used to produce new products, such as thread, insulation materials and acoustic panels.
The issue of textile waste is both a huge issue and a huge opportunity: The average European throws away 11kg of textiles every year, while around the world, a truckload of textiles is landfilled or incinerated every single second.
According to a report by McKinsey & Company, fibre-to-fibre recycling at scale could be achieved by 2030, creating a new and sustainable circular industry in Europe.
*EU Commission: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/QANDA_22_2015.
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