Fast fashion firms prepare for EU crackdown on waste mountain
By Corina Pons and Helen Reid
BARCELONA/LONDON (Reuters) — 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 centre run by garment re-use and recycling charity Moda Re plans to double the volume it handles to 40,000 metric tonnes 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 (BME:ITX), 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 (ST:HMb), 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 tonnes of clothing waste is recycled and millions of tonnes 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
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