POST-CONSUMER TEXTILE WASTE RE-USE: MAIN STEPS OF A SUSTAINABLE PROCESS

The European Directive 2008/98/EC on Waste provides guidelines for ensuring sustainable waste management. Specifically, a hierarchy for ranking the available management options is established. Highest priority is given to waste prevention, followed by re-use and, only after that, recycling and recovery of materials, energy recovery through incineration and finally, disposal in landfills. However, even the second highest priority, reuse, is often overlooked in favor of recycling, given the existence of well-established technologies. In this paper, re-use of post-consumer textile waste is studied, by specifying the main steps supporting such a sustainable process and by outlining the magnitude of the expected impact. Finally, a case study is presented.