EU Green Week: What opportunities do repair and reuse offer for the textile sector?

The theme of this year’s EU Green Week was “Circular Solutions for a Competitive EU”. The event explored how circularity could become a new economic reality with a circular economy driving sustainable competitiveness, reducing waste and promoting innovation within the EU. 

The aim of the EU Green Week, which took place last week in Brussels, is to create an overall cleaner, more resilient and competitive Europe. The key focus areas of the expert speakers - among them industry leaders, community leaders and other stakeholders - were circularity, sustainability, innovation, resource efficiency and waste reduction.

The session “Maximising resilience through repair/reuse and beyond - Solutions from Textiles and Electronics” was particularly relevant to the textile and garment industry, exploring practical solutions for optimising resource use through reuse and repair.

Experiences and problem areas

“We are a network of repair café groups, so the volunteer groups who repair in Flanders [Belgium’s Flemish region, eds.], but we also try to support the professional repairers by making them easier to access,” explained Rosalie Heens, coordinator at Repair&Share. For her, the current system is the problem: “Repairing can be the same price or be more expensive than buying new, which makes it difficult for repairers to have a functioning business model,” she said, pointing to France where repair bonuses are given to (local) repairers and paid for by the producers. There are also financial incentives.

Hanna Mattila, senior advisor circular economy, shared insights from Helsinki-Uusimaa Regional Council, which represents 26 communities or one third of the Finnish population. The circular hub focuses on textiles and electronics and has built a network with different stakeholders. Though second hand is quite popular in Finland, a problem is that people buy second hand and then throw the items away quite quickly. Though there are second-hand shops in malls, there are no repair shops yet for textiles but some for electronics, especially cell phones. As a first in the world, Helsinki airport even has a second-hand shop.

Herwin, a collective of circular businesses in Flanders, collects around 80.000 tonnes of goods each year, of which 40.000 are sold, with the biggest part being electronics and textiles. “In Belgium, consumers are more and more aware of circular options, in fact, it is engrained in Flemish people to go to second-hand shops but while we get a lot of more donated goods and also sell more donated goods, there is a discrepancy because we do not sell more in the same capacity; the gap between what is collected and what is sold is growing. This is because of low quality, clothes are torn, not good anymore, or people just do not want them. So there is still a huge need to amplify the message to people that they do not need to buy everything new,” said Maarten Landuyt, policy officer circular economy & reuse at Herwin. “We also need to look at the producers, because they are flooding the market with all these kinds of things, they are spending billions of money on advertising for people to buy cheap goods.”

Barbara Deman spoke about her experience as a coordinator of repair and sharing initiatives in the Belgium city of Kortrijk, where a ‘Deelfabriek’ [Dutch for Sharing Factory] has been established, a mall for swapping items like books but also clothes. Like Landyut, she sees a real challenge in her work in terms of fast fashion clothes not being fit for swapping or reselling; “fast fashion clothes really come to the end of their life cycle fast,” she stated. Also, the price of repair is a big deterrent for many: “The price is a very big thing, if it is cheaper to buy new, why would you reuse something? Many people think like that where the price is the main objective.”

Moderator Cillian Lohan of the European Circular Economy Stakeholder Platform (ECESP) agreed: “You cannot blame people for going for the products that they can afford; I would have a very different selection of things in my life if money was not an objective. It is a reality that the cost of things comes into almost every purchase that we make. Repair and reuse is a huge opportunity, to recreate industries, jobs and activities within communities, so it is really important to highlight here what we are seeing that is working and what is not within that.”

Building resilience, value and prices as solutions

In Heens opinion, “the prices for new products need to rise.” Another issue is that repair skills are dying out as the job of a repairer has a low status, fewer people want to do it. “We need to think about that and find incentives here too,” she cautioned.

Another big challenge is that consumers do not know where to get things repaired as repairers do not have the same budget for promotions as retailers for example. That is why Repair&Share offers a Repair Map with professional and volunteer repairers in Belgium, as well as a matchmaking platform. “In our European E6 project, we also try to build physical places in six different cities, where you have repairers and reuse options next to recycling options, so that people go to one point and have all the different options in the same place,” she adds. A major barrier to repairing is also that the price of spare parts (in case of electronics) can be higher than that of a new product. Repair&Share considers this in their Repairability Index.

“To me, resilience means independence; resilience of Europe means making us stronger and less dependent from outside in all the materials that we need, so as far as we can reuse. Of course, we have a less impact from the economical and environmental point of view, but on the other side, being able to recover some elements, some basic raw materials, will probably make us a little stronger,” mentioned Landuyt.

For Francesca Nanni, professor in material science and technology at the University of Rome, real resilience is enjoying the clothes that we already have. “How can we learn to enjoy those clothes?,” she asks, adding that “new clothes are too cheap. We are in the middle of a climate and biodiversity crisis, yet it is not reflected in the prices.” For her, recycling and second hand should become firmly established not only for the sake of the environment but also because it is a necessity.

Recordings of this and other sessions of the EU Green Week can be found on the official website, green-week.event.europa.eu.