The ARC Research Hub of Microrecycling of Battery and Consumer Wastes has signed on Textile Recyclers Australia (TRA) to help develop and commercialise solutions to waste challenges.
The Microrecycling Hub is hosted and directed by the UNSW Sustainable Materials Research and Technology (SMaRT) Centre and its director, Professor Veena Sahajwalla. It is a five-year national program across several Australian universities with a mission to create new scalable manufacturing technologies, based on SMaRT’s MICROfactorie concept.
Sahajwalla said that its new partner TRA - led by co-founders Ben Kaminsky and Maureen Taylor - aims to secure circular solutions for unwanted textiles to keep them out of landfill.
“With TRA joining the hub, the program will broaden and continue developing work on technologies and processes to reform hard to recycle wastes, like textiles, into new materials and products,” Sahajwalla said.
Co-founder Kaminsky said the TRA processes unwanted garments into recycled yarn for ‘new’ apparel.
“But we know through SMaRT and the work of others that waste textiles are a resource that can be reformed into new things and materials for other products,” he said.
“The textile industry is the second largest polluter in the world. This requires multiple solutions for such a huge problem, and the ARC Microrecycling Hub is looking to advance SMaRT’s work in developing new solutions and we are excited to be part of that journey.”
Other collaborating universities in the Hub include the University of Technology, Sydney; University of Sydney; Monash University; University of Wollongong; Queensland University of Technology; and Deakin University.
The new partnership comes as figures from the federal Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water show that Australia is the second highest consumer of textiles per person in the world, after the United States of America.
Each Australian consumes an average of 27 kilograms of new clothing per year and disposes an average 23 kilograms of clothing to landfill each year, or 93 per cent of the textile waste we generate.
The report also shows that second-hand clothing shops help reduce textiles waste to landfill, adding that Australia has 3,000 charity and social enterprise retailers that support 5,000 jobs, 33,000 volunteers, and 10,000 charity collection bins.
But it indicates that more is needed to reduce clothing waste to landfill and the impacts of fast fashion.
In total, approximately 800,000 tonnes of textiles are sent to Australian landfills each year, and more has been historically sent overseas.