At the 62^nd Dornbirn Global Manmade Fibers (GFC) conference held in the Austrian town from September13-15, it was clear that new ideas for recycling post-consumer textile waste are currently mushrooming in response to the European Union’s new Textile Strategy, which forms part of the bloc’s larger Green Deal.

As previously reported on Innovation in Textiles, starting in 2025 within the European Union, over seven million tons of waste textiles will be separately collected each year – paid for by the brands who put them into the market via a new Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) scheme and no longer eligible to be landfilled, incinerated or moved on to other countries.

This will create a 30+ million-ton mountain of new waste by 2030 without very urgent action.

Fibre demand

By 2030, however, it has also been estimated that the global demand for all fibres will have increased to an annual 140 million tons. Allowing for existing under-utilisation at established plants, this still calls for a further 24 million tons of additional capacity, with both synthetics and cellulosics meeting demand.

Read the full Dornbirn 2023 report on Innovation in Textiles