For most of us at Circle Economy, we are pretty well versed in the insane amounts of "waste" that we are continually throwing "away". When our newest team member, Magnus, joined Circle Economy, we got a chance to revisit the feelings we all had when we first realised the immense mountains of "waste" we generate. The story below is Magnus' recounting of his first experience to a textile collecting/sorting facility.Last week, members of Circle Economy set out to conquer the Netherland’s tallest mountain. That’s right, you’ll be quick to quip, the country isn’t exactly famous for its ‘above sea level’ statistics. Well, quip on friends, we’re not talking about a literal summit. Rather, our mountain was a metaphorical one, the Dutch clothing mountain, and while we did climb on top of the clothes at various points, that wasn’t our initial objective.
We were taking part in a sorting trial for Circle Economy’s Fibersort project. The Fibersort automatically sorts large volumes of post-consumer garments and finished products by fibre composition so that they can be recycled into new, high-quality textiles. With the end goal of a fully operational and commercialized Fibersort machine, Circle Economy employees joined forces with Worn Again, a chemical recycler and Fibersort partner, to do some initial testing of Fibersorted outputs. While this information will be crucial for the development of the technology, from a personal perspective, the experience of spending time at a textile collecting/sorting centre laid bare the scale of the problem ahead of us in physical terms. It’s often difficult to put the daunting statistics into meaningful terms. The 235,000 tonnes of post-consumer textile “waste” produced annually in the Netherlands is equivalent to 20 times the weight of the Eiffel tower. For those living in NWE, the 13kg of waste we produce individually is the same as throwing away over 90 medium sized t-shirts each year! Seeing that towering mountain of discarded clothes bailed and stacked to the ceiling exposes in concrete terms the relentless waste the clothing industry produces. Book your day out at a local collecting/sorting centre now, to get an insight yourself.
Inside the facility, reusable and recyclable materials travel vertically, horizontally, back and forth between different sensors and sorters before they end up neatly packed in cubes. The process is efficient, relentless and endless.Every few hours the break bell rings and the sorters rush off for cups of coffee and 10 minutes of rested legs. The warehouse falls eerily silent. Walking through towards our own lunch, crates and crates of packed clothing tower overhead. Recognition of the scale of the operation underway and the challenge ahead is humbling. It also made us wonder where these mountains of material will end up. We have to turn to those aforementioned statistics to answer that question.
Of those 20 Eiffel towers generated in the Netherlands alone, only 90,000 tonnes are collected annually. With the remaining 62% being incinerated, our current best efforts reprocess just over ⅓ of potential waste available. The Wieland/Smart Fibersorting facility (where Fibersort currently operates) just north of Amsterdam, sorts 200 tonnes of clothing per week. Of that, around half can be reworn but only 5% will be resold within the county, while the rest is exported. The remaining clothes that cannot be reworn would ideally be recycled into new textiles, however, the actuality is that most are downcycled for other industries or incinerated. These statistics highlight many issues. The high export rate raises questions about the merits of exporting unwanted clothing, particularly to less economically developed countries; and whether the costs of landfilling/incinerating textiles should be diverted to build new systems/technologies that can recycle these old garments into new textiles..
On the practical side, it was a week of hard work. Together we pre-sorted 4.9 tonnes of textiles, with 3.3 tonnes of this being sorted by the Fibersort machine. We then carried out a quality control step on 228 items and picked materials for 3 “products” for various testing. These textiles were then all weighed according to their feedstock batch and Fibersort grade, and are now packed up ready to be shipped for further testing and recycling trials.The new data we produced with this trial is already proving very useful. It showed that the Fibersort is able to sort for the necessary inputs required for Worn Again's chemical recycling technology; it found cotton and polyester make up over 96% of the content in what is considered representative feedstock, with polyamide, acrylic and other fibres in very low quantities.In addition to our contribution toward the development of the Fibersort technology, from a personal perspective, the experience was invaluable. As a new recruit to Circle Economy’s Textiles Team, for the first time I came face to face with the mountains of waste we produce in real terms. Facing up to that reality, often hidden behind dizzying statistics, is both daunting but necessary. Overcoming the sense of helplessness that facing up to our environmental crisis often inspires, the massive potential for improvement is clear. While technologies like Fibersort make closing the material loop an approaching reality, there are also several steps you can take as an individual to accelerate that transition towards efficient recycling of post-consumer waste:
As a brand/ business you can also take concrete steps by taking part in an upcoming post-consumer textile recycling pilot. Learn more about Circle Economy’s Recycling trials here.
A new strategic framework has been developed through a collaboration with the Dutch Green Building Society (DGBC), Metabolic, SGS Search and Circle Economy that defines circular buildings. It describes indicators that could be included in the sustainable certificate BREEAM-NL to better evaluate circular buildings. The frameworks are detailed in the report ‘A Framework for Circular Buildings: Indicators for possible inclusion in BREEAM’.
“Scaling is what we need right now to make the built environment circular. This report presents an overview of practical strategies to construct and design circular buildings around the world. Incorporating just one of these strategies in a leading sustainable building standard like BREEAM represents a massive opportunity to future-proof our built environment."
Ben Kubbinga, Lead Built Environment Program Circle Economy
Presentation during Expo RealThe first copy of the new report was presented to Shamir Ghumra, director of BREEAM on 9 October 2018 during the real-estate trade fair Expo Real in Munich. The report includes a framework for defining circular buildings and concepts for developing measurable indicators. The essential indicators that define a building’s circularity were developed by an expert group with six indicators developed in more detail. The indicators will be field-tested in follow-on studies.
Steven Traast (SGS Search), Edwin van Noort (DGBC), Clemens Brenninkmeijer (Redevco), Annemarie van Doorn (DGBC) presenting the report to Shamir Ghumra (BREEAM) during Expo RealCooperationThe author organisations, supported by the Redevco Foundation, investigated how circularity can be incorporated in the urban environment using BREEAM-NL, which is a sustainability certificate for buildings that has been widely adopted by the market since its introduction in The Netherlands in 2010. Over nine million square meters of real-estate have been certified to BREEAM-NL standards. The certificate has a holistic approach to sustainability and includes many concepts which can be used for circular buildings.Exceptional developmentShamir Ghumra, director of BREEAM: “Material resource efficiency and circularity lie at the heart of much of the research carried out by BRE over the years, work that continues today with leading roles in projects such as the BAMB (Building as Material Banks) project. It is great to see the DGBC, as our BREEAM National Scheme Operator in the Netherlands, proactively researching issues such as this and thereby contributing to the ongoing evolution of BREEAM with this report.”Edwin van Noort, development manager at DGBC, calls the framework an exceptional advancement: “Over the years, many definitions have been proposed for sustainable buildings, but practical definitions hardly ever materialised. That has now changed.”Clemens Brenninkmeijer, board member at Redevco Foundation says, “Redevco Foundation supports initiatives that aim to increase the understanding of and accelerate the transition to a more sustainable, low carbon-emission and circular built environment. We are very happy with the outcome of this research project and the proposed incorporation of these measures within the existing BREEAM-NL framework – and hopefully the BREEAM International framework too. It will encourage even more parties to think about tangible measures to make our real-estate sector more resource-efficient, less wasteful and more competitive.”[cta link="https://www.circle-economy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/A-Framework-For-Circular-Buildings-BREEAM-report-20181007-1.pdf"]Download the full report[/cta]
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