From January onwards, all textiles, whether in good or bad condition, have to be collected, under a European directive on the selective collection of textiles.
In concrete terms, all textile waste - clothing, household linen, leather goods, plush fabric scraps - regardless of quality or condition, is eligible for collection.
Until now, only textiles in good condition were collected by regular operators, such as ASBL Terre and Les Petits Rien. The rest were thrown into the white bags dedicated to residual waste.
The new measure should make it possible to reduce the proportion of waste incinerated, and to recover the value of the collected waste by encouraging re-use, particularly through second-hand shops, and then recycling.
However, those involved in recycling have already sounded the alarm, noting that they are already in a bad way, faced with "growing volumes of very poor-quality clothing and household linen that are flooding the entire planet."
Last October, the Ressources Federation, which represents 75 social and circular enterprises in Belgium, warned that "without support measures from the authorities, these operators are quite simply at risk of disappearing because the economic model will not hold."
"There is a great risk that these recovery operators will be collecting waste rather than reusable clothing," the federation stressed.
With over 110 million tonnes of fabric produced annually, the textile industry is considered one of the biggest sources of pollution in the world.
