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Home Courses Circular Economy Course materials Lectures 5.3.2 World’s second most polluting industry

5.3.2 World’s second most polluting industry

Course subject(s) Module 5. Waste = Food

Gwen Cunningham describes the wasteful nature of the fashion industry. The diagram below helps explain Gwen’s story. While listening to Gwen’s story, try to distinguish between ‘recycling’ and ‘downcycling’. What is the difference between the two?

A more detailed graph can be downloaded here (courtesy Circle Economy).

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Subtitles (captions) in other languages than provided can be viewed at YouTube. Select your language in the CC-button of YouTube.

MAIN TAKEAWAYS

  • The production of textile fibers is land, energy and water intensive.
  • Most of the used textiles are thrown out with household waste, which means these textiles are incinerated or landfilled. Only a tiny amount is recycled.
  • Textiles recycling is actually ‘downcycling’: used textiles are processed into rags or insulation materials
  • Closing the loop for textiles would allow industry to better capture the embodied value of the textile fibers. 
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Circular Economy by TU Delft OpenCourseWare is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at https://ocw.tudelft.nl/courses/circular-economy/.
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