Managing post-consumer textiles in a Swedish municipality : Material flow analysis and life cycle assessment of a post-consumer textile management system in Linköping

Sammanfattning

Consumption of textiles has the fourth highest environmental impact in Europe and Europeans generated almost 7 million tonnes of post-consumer textiles in 2022. These textiles must be managed, which requires collection and sorting to prepare them for reuse, recycling or waste treatment. There is a knowledge gap of the environmental impact of post-consumer textile management systems on a municipal level where heterogenous textile flows are considered. Therefore, this study aims to examine the local Swedish system for end-of-life treatment of post-consumer textiles, including its actors and material flows, while also investigating the challenges and opportunities faced by the different actors. Evaluating the environmental impact of different systems, where local conditions are considered, could help guide the development of municipal strategies towards low environmental impact regarding post-consumer textiles. This study investigates material flows and environmental impact caused by a municipal post-consumer textile management system in a Swedish city using material flow analysis (MFA) and life cycle assessment (LCA). The amount of textiles collected in the system was about 660 tonnes in 2023, which equals 4.0 kg/person. Most of the collected textiles were exported (71%) while 18% were reused locally and 11% were incinerated locally. Most of the exported fraction was reused, which brings the total reuse in the system to 75% while recycling is 11% and incineration is 14%. The LCA showed that reusing and recycling textiles while replacing virgin production offers the most environmental benefits. The recycling process, incineration with CHP and export are the end-of-life activities that contribute most to the environmental impact, mainly global warming, freshwater eutrophication and fossil resource scarcity. Collection and sorting only has small contributions. The normalised results show that freshwater eutrophication contributes relatively the most to the environmental impact in the baseline scenario and fossil resource scarcity contributes relatively the most in the optimised scenarios. The optimisation of scenarios was based on changes to the logistics in the system where end-of-life activities were moved locally to reduce transport distances. Based on this study’s findings, the most effective actions to reduce the environmental impact of the end-of-life activities in the post-consumer textile management system are moving recycling to Sweden, diverting textiles from incineration to recycling and decreasing transportation distances.