European Circular Economy Stakeholder Platform

Textiles are fundamental to our society and employs millions of people worldwide, making it among the largest in the world and an important part of Europe's manufacturing industry. However, textile production and consumption cause significant environmental, climate and social impacts by using resources, water, land and chemicals and emitting greenhouse gases and pollutants. 

In Europe, the sector employs 1.7 million people and Europeans consume on average 26 kg of textiles per person per year. This briefing by the European Environment Agency provides an EU perspective of the environmental and climate pressures from textile production and consumption, and discusses how circular business models and regulation can help move us towards a circular textiles economy.

This policy paper by the Institute for European Environmental Policy examines the interface between the EU circular economy, trade and sustainable development. It identifies the expected global impacts associated with the EU’s shift to circularity and investigates the role of trade in either incentivising or hindering this process.

Finally, the paper highlights the links between the circular economy, trade and sustainable development, emphasising the need for better policy coherence among these areas in the EU.

The Fibersort project aims at realising the widespread implementation of the automated sorting technology by validating it as a key value adding innovation to enable textile-to-textile recycling.

While the challenges and opportunities of used textiles are increasingly in the spotlight of governments, industry, and civil society, considerable system changes are required to transition towards a circular economy for textiles. Throughout this report, policy recommendations are formulated showing the legislative, economic and soft instruments that regional, national and the European governments have at their disposal to create an enabling environment for textiles collection, sorting and recycling at scale.

Mobile phones, particularly smartphones, have undergone a period of rapid growth to become virtually indispensable to today's lifestyle. Yet their production, use and disposal can entail a significant environmental burden.

This study, commissioned by the European Economic and Social Committee and carried out by the Centre for European Policy Studies, looks at the opportunities and challenges arising from implementing circular economy approaches in the mobile phone value chain. A review of the value chain and different circular approaches is complemented by a scenario analysis that aims to quantify the potential impacts of circular approaches such as recycling, refurbishment and lifetime extension.

The study finds that there is a large untapped potential for recovering materials from both the annual flow of new mobile phones sold in Europe once they reach the end of their life and the accumulated stock of unused, so-called "hibernating" devices in EU households. Achieving high recycling rates for these devices can offer opportunities to reduce EU dependence on imported materials and make secondary raw materials available on the EU market, as shown in the picture below.

Drawing on the empirical findings and the analysis conducted, this study recommends policy action in the following areas:

• Collection rates of old unused mobile phone devices are low, which means there is largely unexploited potential in the EU for recovering valuable materials from these devices.
• Although consumers generally show willingness to engage in circular economy practices for mobile phones, in reality only a few do so.
• Various challenges for reuse and refurbishment businesses stem from EU legislation, including regulatory complexity and "preparation for use" in the WEE directive. 

As such, policy-makers should close the collection gap for mobile phone devices, which could in turn create jobs in the refurbishment sector. Extending the lifetime of mobile phones can also provide CO₂ mitigation benefits, particularly from displacing the production of new devices.