Eigen Draads – to valorize valueless textiles
Eigen Draads was established to create awareness amongst local governments, often responsible for waste management, on the recycling solutions for textiles that are emerging. This pilot project received attention and financial support from the City of Rotterdam, whose motto is ‘make it happen’.
Whilst circular textiles are the talk of the town amongst public and private value chain actors, conversations rarely unite actors of both worlds into taking tangible actions. Eigen Draads is aiming to spin the current system around and together with regional value chain players and governments, it is investigating the potential of chemical textile recycling in the port of Rotterdam to realise a textile recycling hub.
Make it happen through chemical fashion recycle
The Rotterdam area is a major transit hub for post-consumer textiles, thus Eigen Draafs – the textile sorters in the region – together with the City of Rotterdam and the Port of Rotterdam, explored, piloted and realised the potential of the region as a feedstock, provider for chemical recyclers of textiles, and potentially become the location for their future industrial facilities.
Ambercycle, guided by Eigen Draads, is one of the front-running initiatives developing a solution to the textile waste for chemical recycling to tackle the growing mountain of textile waste that cities are facing across the globe. To do so, a garment was created from textile waste collected during the marathon of Rotterdam, supplemented with other discarded textiles from Rotterdam citizens.
There is still a huge gap between the fashion industry’s focus on and investment in recycling solutions and the acute textile waste problems the government is facing. Therefore, Eigne Draads should be the start of a new public-private approach to closing the loop on textiles and spinning it around. Textile recycling is not a nice-to-have to realise circularity ambitions but a need-to-have to tackle the growing mountain of valueless textiles the globe is facing.