In order to strengthen the circular economy for textile waste, a high quality of the waste collected must be ensured. In Herning Municipality, they have a lot of experience in collecting and handling textile waste. Their biggest challenge with textile waste is moisture, which they are trying to solve in three tests.
In order to strengthen the circular economy for textile waste, a high quality of the waste collected must be ensured. In Herning Municipality, they have a lot of experience in collecting and handling textile waste, which has shown that the biggest challenge with textile waste is moisture. Moist textile waste is a major problem as it cannot be recycled and must therefore be sent to incineration.
In the SorTex project, Herning Municipality is conducting three different collection tests and a waste analysis - with a special focus on avoiding moisture.
The three collection tests will run over a year starting before the summer holidays in 2025, so the methods will be thoroughly tested during the four seasons.
At Herning Municipality's recycling centers, they have set up 660 liter containers under a canopy to take the worst of the rainfall and thus avoid moisture. Here, citizens can easily and conveniently dispose of large transparent bags of textile waste.
By collecting textile waste in 660 liter containers, the municipality's site staff can easily remove any mis-sorting.
At the 25 largest apartment buildings in Herning Municipality, a container shed is set up in connection with the building's bulky waste room. A 660 liter container is driven into the container shed, which is collected and exchanged by the municipality's bulky waste truck as needed.
In collaboration with a manufacturer of container sheds, work is underway to improve a solution that ensures that rain is diverted from the 660 liter container inside the shed. The hope is that this will minimize moisture.
The third collection test is a collection scheme at citizens' private addresses in connection with bulky waste collection. In Herning Municipality, citizens can order the bulky waste truck four times a year to collect up to 10 items for the recycling center - and now the focus is on the fact that textile waste can also be collected.
The bulky waste truck runs on a 14-day route, giving citizens ample opportunity to pick up the items they no longer use.
Common to Herning Municipality's three collection tests is that they are responsible for handling and emptying themselves. This provides good flexibility, where they can avoid emptying in bad rain, and for the collection scheme at citizens' homes, they have the opportunity to refuse to include their textile waste if it is not presented for collection according to the municipality's instructions - for example, it must be dry and in a closed bag/sack.
In all three collection tests, Herning Municipality will carry out spot checks during the project period in collaboration with project partner, NewRetex. Partly to ensure that all three collection methods live up to their expectations of reducing the amount of moist textile waste. Partly to follow the three collection tests closely, so they can make changes in practice if necessary.
With the ongoing process of proposed changes to the Waste Framework Directive regarding textiles, Herning Municipality has been attentive to finding collection methods that can handle both reusable textiles and waste textiles if they are required to be collected in a single stream.
After the test period, a waste analysis will be performed on the household waste, which can be compared with a previous waste analysis performed in 2022. The 2022 analysis found a large amount of textiles* in residual waste, and with a new analysis, we hope to show that we have removed textiles from residual waste and the other fractions, and that it has thus been delivered correctly, via one of the three mentioned schemes or for recycling.
*The waste analysis uses the term textiles, as no distinction was made between waste or recycling.
