Fast Fashion Firms Prepare for EU Crackdown on Waste Mountain

In a warehouse on the outskirts of Barcelona, women stand at conveyor belts, manually sorting T-shirts, jeans and dresses from large bales of used clothing - a small step towards tackling Europe's towering problem of discarded fashion.
Within a year, the sorting center run by garment re-use and recycling charity Moda Re plans to double the volume it handles to 40,000 metric tons annually.
"This is just the beginning," said Albert Alberich, director of Moda Re, which is a part of Spanish charity Caritas and runs Spain's biggest second-hand clothing chain.
"Increasingly we are going to turn used clothes into raw material from Europe for fashion companies."
Partly funded by Zara-owner Inditex, Moda Re will expand sites in Barcelona, Bilbao, and Valencia, in some of the first signs of a planned ramp-up in garment sorting, processing, and recycling capacity in response to a barrage of new European Union proposals to curb the fashion industry.
Also in Spain, rivals including H&M, Mango and Inditex have created a non-profit association to manage clothing waste, responding to an EU law requiring member states to separate textiles from other waste from January 2025.
Despite such efforts, less than a quarter of Europe's 5.2 million tons of clothing waste is recycled and millions of tons ends up as landfill every year, the European Commission said in July.
Precise data on the growth of clothing waste is scarce but collection for recycling and reuse increased gradually in several European countries from around 2010, a 2021 EU report said.
Fast fashion, or making and selling cheap clothes with a short lifespan, is "highly unsustainable", the Commission said in July. The textile industry is a major contributor to climate change and environmental damage, it noted.
Inditex, which in March said it placed 10 percent more items of clothing on the market globally last year than in 2021, aims to use 40% recycled fibers in garments by 2030 as part of sustainability goals announced in July.
"The main problem that we are facing is overconsumption," said Dijana Lind, ESG analyst at Union Investment, Frankfurt-based asset manager that holds shares in Adidas , Hugo Boss, Inditex, and H&M.
Lind said she had been engaging with Adidas, Hugo Boss, and Inditex about the need for those companies to increase their use of recycled textiles, and for the apparel industry as a whole to increase textile recycling.
Hugo Boss said in a statement to Reuters that "overproduction and overconsumption are, in general, an industry-wide problem," adding that it was using data analysis to better adjust production to demand.
Between 6 and 7 billion euros of investment will be needed by 2030 to create the scale of textile waste processing and recycling that the EU is aiming for, consultancy McKinsey estimated in a report last year. Reuters could not establish what level of investments were currently being made in the industry.
Lind said companies had introduced some first steps but "more needs to be done."
Inditex said it would invest 3.5 million euros in Moda Re over three years and had recycling containers in all its Spanish stores. It did not respond to a request for comment on the suggestion it needed to do more.
In a statement to Reuters, H&M said it recognized it was "part of the problem."
"The way fashion is produced and consumed needs to change – this is an undeniable truth," H&M said.
The obstacles to significantly reducing clothing waste are formidable, despite the EU crackdown, industry sustainability commitments and initiatives like the Moda Re expansion.
Hundreds of similar plants, along with investment in technology and market interventions will be needed to meet industry goals to recycle 2.5 million tons of textile waste by 2030, McKinsey said in the report.
Fourteen textile recycling companies in Europe have plans to increase their production capacity, according to Fashion For Good, a recycled fiber start-up investment company that surveyed 57 recyclers in a September 2022 report.
The EU has not set specific targets for recycled content in garments, but by 2030 aims for all textile products sold in the bloc "to a great extent" be made of recycled fibers, as well as being durable, repairable and recyclable.
To create the capacity to meet the goals, ReHubs Europe, an association set up by garment lobby group EURATEX, promotes investments in "fiber-to-fiber" recycling: processes that turn used garments into yarn to make new textiles.
EURATEX did not immediately respond to a Reuters question about the level of investments made in the technology.
Less than 1% of clothes are currently recycled in this manner and the processes are still being developed. Challenges include separating different types of fiber into feedstock suitable for recycling.
With such techniques still in their infancy, the higher cost of recycled fabric compared to new fabric remains a barrier to widespread adoption.
At the Barcelona plant, garments arrive from more than 7,000 donation bins in supermarkets and Zara and Mango stores. Infrared machines donated by Inditex identify the fiber make-up of garments to speed up the largely-manual sorting.
Currently around 40% of the clothes Moda Re receives are sent to other facilities for recycling. Of that, just a fifth is then recycled fiber-to-fiber, a share that Moda Re expects will grow to 70% over the next three to four years.
For now, most of the recycling is instead for lower grade products like dishcloths.
Almost half the clothes donated to Moda Re are shipped for resale in African countries including Cameroon, Ghana, and Senegal. Moda Re says the clothes it exports can be reused.
According to United Nations trade data, the EU exported 1.4 million tons of used textiles in 2022, more than twice as much as in 2000. Not all those clothes get reused, and exports of used clothes from Europe to Africa can lead to pollution when clothes that can't be resold end up in dumps, the EU has said.
Proposed European Commission rules seek to clamp down on unscrupulous operators that export damaged items destined for dumps, and would require countries to demonstrate their ability to manage the material sustainably.
Moda Re said it aims to reduce the volume of clothes it sends to Africa.
Only 8% of the donations are currently resold at Moda Re's second-hand shops, the method widely seen as the more efficient way of reusing old clothes. A similar amount ends up as European landfill.
The company aims to double the amount it resells by expanding to 300 second-hand shops in Spain over the next three years from just over 100 presently, it told Reuters.
Despite the challenges, employees at Moda Re said they felt their work was positive.
"We take the clothes that have been thrown away to make new clothes," said Aissatou Boukoum, a young Senegalese worker, feeding garments through a machine that slices them into ribbons to be sent for recycling. "For me, it is good."
As well as the efforts by Inditex, Puma has partnerships with garment collecting and sorting companies I:CO in Germany, Texaid in Switzerland and Vestisolidale in Italy.
Adidas, Bestseller, and H&M have invested in Finnish start-up Infinited Fiber Company, which manufactures fibre out of textile waste, cardboard and paper.
The Commission's legislative push includes rules to make retailers contribute to the cost of collecting used clothes for reuse and recycling.
Under the proposed rules, retailers would pay a fee of roughly 12 euro cents per item for each garment sold in the bloc, with higher rates for garments that are harder to recycle, the Commission estimated in July.
As in Spain, textile waste associations would be set up in each country. In France this system has already been in place since 2008 under an organization called Refashion.
Reuters asked ten leading fashion companies including Adidas, H&M, and Primark how the fees would hit their profitability. None provided an estimate. All said they hoped the fees would be the same across the EU.
"It's a tsunami of legislation," said Mauro Scalia, director of sustainable businesses at EURATEX.

Albanian jeweler Pirro Ruco labored day and night for five years to capture the essence of his country in a spectacular luxury watch.
Now the timepiece, worth roughly $1.4 million, is set to face off against the best watches from across the world at the Geneva Watchmaking Grand Prix in November, AFP said.
Set under a sapphire dome, the hours are marked by 12 golden folk dancers -- each in different regional dress -- set on Murano glass, the minute and hour hands adorned with eagle talons in homage to Albania's national symbol.
Ruco's rollercoaster rise mirrors that of Albania, from poverty and isolation as the most closed communist regime in Europe, to rollicking capitalism.
Along the way the jeweler overcame jealousy, the secret police and being sent into internal exile to rise to the pinnacle of his profession.
It all began for Pirro -- as he is known in his homeland -- in 1985 when he was asked to make a medal in red and gold bearing the head of Enver Hoxha, the paranoid dictator who ruled the small Balkan nation with an iron fist for more than four decades.
"That saved me," he told AFP from his workshop tucked away in an alley in the capital Tirana.
The medals were awarded to the regime's most loyal supporters and later caught the eye of Hoxha's wife.
The turn of fortune saw thousands more produced and worn by communist cadres across Albania.
"All the congressional delegates had to wear it. I made a name for myself with it," he said. It also saved him from the textile mills where he had been sent because his family had been deemed "rebellious".
'Priceless'
All this, however, was nearly derailed by an anonymous letter sent to authorities accusing Pirro of working with foreign agents.
He was questioned by intelligence agents and his workshop raided.
Down but not out, he was able to bounce back after crafting a ring bearing the image of the late husband of a member of the communist politburo and in July 1990 won a prize for a piece featuring Albania's 15th-century national hero Skanderberg.
But the very next day history intervened. The regime began to crumble and the collapse of Albania's communist rule in 1991 was followed by years of violent tumult as the country transitioned to a free-market economy.
Amid the ups and downs, Pirro stayed busy designing pieces for officials and celebrities.
During a trip to Basel in Switzerland in 2016, something new caught his eye.
"I wanted to make a watch. It was my new dream," he told AFP.
For the next five years, Pirro said he focused on "doing something special, Albanian, and at the same time completely new and never before seen in the watch industry."
The new timepiece which he calls Primordial Passion was designed in collaboration with the Swiss watchmaker Agenhor.
"I never wanted to make jewelry, but art," the jeweler said.
"Sculptures, images of the country, pieces of culture... This watch is the culmination of all that, of this love for Albania," he added.
"It is more than just a watch. It combines the rich heritage of ancient Albanian culture with the notion of chronometry."
Pirro refuses to divulge the methods used to craft the watch, but remains hopeful the painstaking details will be recognized by the judges at the Grand Prix in Geneva.
Several collectors have already contacted him about buying the timepiece, he said, though it would be difficult to part with his creation.
"I set a price because I had to. But for me, it is priceless."

Fast Fashion Firms Prepare for EU Crackdown on Waste Mountain