Textiles in Municipal Solid Waste
The re-use of textiles in the recycled apparel industry is a main factor in the types of apparel produced. Municipal Solid Waste or MSW for short is rejected clothing and other sources which include footwear, furniture, tires, carpets, and more. The Environmental Protection Agency, starting from the sixties and seventies, has measured the generation, recycling, composting, combustion with energy recovery and landfilling of textile material in MSW. The array below displays the MSW by weight in thousands. Meaning that the textiles MSW that have been generated has exponentially increased from nearly one million seven hundred sixty thousand tons to over seventeen million tons.
The array below also highlights the amount of these textiles which have been recycled and the ratio to the amount of textiles generated to the ones that are recycled is a shocking amount. Only about three percent of the texties generated are actully recycled. The rest of these textiles are combusted (a very small amount) and the rest are then sent to a landfill. However, this three percent ratio was in the nineteen sixties. Since, we as humans have taken a better initiative and mindset towards the health of our planet, our ratio has risen to an astounding fifteen percent with nineteen percent of this MSW going to combustion with energy recovery.
The array of textiles in MSW: 5
- 1970, Generation: 2,040, Recycled: 60, Combustion w/Energy Recovery: 10, Landfilled: 1,970
- 1980, Generation: 2,530, Recycled: 160, Combustion w/Energy Recovery: 50, Landfilled: 2,320
- 1990, Generation: 5,810, Recycled: 660, Combustion w/Energy Recovery: 880, Landfilled: 4,270
- 2000, Generation: 9,480, Recycled: 1,320, Combustion w/Energy Recovery: 1,880, Landfilled: 6,280
- 2010, Generation: 13,220, Recycled: 2,050, Combustion w/Energy Recovery: 2,270, Landfilled: 8,900
- Source: Textiles in MSW