Which Countries Are Best at Circularity? New Study Highlights Textile Recycling Leaders
The study also looked at the secondhand clothing market.
本条来自 WWD（intel），聚焦 设计创意。 Singapore leads the list of countries assessed for circularity in a new study by custom packaging company Arka.
The study also looked at the secondhand clothing market
- Which Countries Are Best at Circularity? New Study Highlights Textile Recycling Leaders
- Singapore leads the list of countries assessed for circularity in a new study by custom packaging company Arka
The study also looked at the secondhand clothing market
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Which Countries Are Best at Circularity? New Study Highlights Textile Recycling Leaders
Singapore leads the list of countries assessed for circularity in a new study by custom packaging company Arka.
The research looked at 75 nations across four measures of how they keep things in use, including how efficiently each country uses raw materials to create economic output, the share of municipal waste that is recycled and how much electronic waste is produced each year. The study also looked at the secondhand clothing market, specifically noting whether a country absorbs used textiles or exports them to other nations.
The top 10 nations doing the overall best job of keeping products and materials in use according to Arka’s criteria were Singapore, Austria, Slovenia, Germany, Latvia, Denmark, Netherlands, Ireland, Italy and the Republic of Korea.
Singapore earned a perfect 100 circularity score according to the study’s criteria, recycling more than half of its municipal waste and using just 0.39 kilograms of raw materials for every dollar of economic output. The nation also only exports around 0.58 kilograms of used clothing per person each year.
But while Singapore scored higher overall, other nations had better clothing recycling rates.
Germany, for instance, donates 450 million kilograms of used clothing to charitable organizations each year, the largest volume of textile recycling and reuse among all the countries in the report. The country also has a 47 percent municipal waste recycling rate, the same as Slovenia. Slovenia exports 2.2 million kilograms of used textiles, a sizable amount considering the country’s population is only around 2 million people.
Austria exports around 31.6 million kilograms of used textiles per year, meaning its citizens donate or sell the majority of their discarded clothing. The country also has a 52 percent municipal recycling rate, far ahead of most of its European neighbors.
Latvia, which ranked fifth overall in the report, takes in more used textiles than it exports, importing 16.7 million kilograms of discarded garments each year, indicating a strong secondhand clothing market among its citizens. The nation also recycles 36 percent of its municipal waste.
While landing further down the list due to their overall circularity score, several nations received high marks on the textile reuse/secondhand performance scale, with United Arab Emirates earning a perfect 100, Tunisia 92.99, Benin 91.55 and Malaysia 86.12. The clothing ratings were based on used clothing net exports listed in the United Nations Comtrade commodity report for 2022-2023.
“It may sound hard to believe, but according to the U.N.’s Global Waste Management Outlook, only 19 percent of municipal solid waste gets recycled around the world,” one of Arka’s eco-friendly packaging experts said. “The countries at the top of this report (recycling over half their waste) can be great examples for others. Germany overhauled its entire waste management system in 1990 and built the habits and systems over decades. Singapore made recycling mandatory in commercial buildings in the 1990s. They reflect 30-plus years of consistent policy and public participation.”
Several major countries such as the United States, the United Kingdom and China were not included in the report, owing to the fact that any country missing one of the four metrics used to analyze circularity were excluded. All three of those nations did not have used clothing import/export data available.
Arka also excluded countries with populations under 1 million, as well as non-sovereign territories such as Puerto Rico and Hong Kong.
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“It may sound hard to believe, but according to the U.N.’s Global Waste Management Outlook, only 19 percent of municipal solid waste gets recycled around the world,” one of Arka’s …