Except for a few dedicated people, organizations, and municipalities, textiles have been low on the Estonian national agenda since 2021 when we launched the TEXroad experiment in Accelerate Estonia. However, this year’s Opinion Festival indicates change.
The Opinion Festival (Arvamusfestival) in Estonia is one of the highlights of the summer and covers a good cross-section of the hot topics for citizens, business, and the public sector. The festival’s mission is to enhance debate culture and civic education in the country, and discussions take place over two days. Topics range from defense to mental health and talent development to sustainability.
This year, ten textile, circular economy, and public sector experts sat on a panel discussing the separate textile collection mandate in 2025, which will oblige EU member states to collect household textile waste separately.
Mari-Helene Kaber from Humana Estonia discussed what will happen to clothes from 2025, how to collect used textiles separately, what happens next to collected textiles, and the potential role of reuse organisations and local authorities. Other contributions came from the Climate Ministry, reuse organzations, waste managers, a fashion NGO, and several circular economy experts working in Estonia and internationally.
Some steps forward are clear, with EPR underway. Other issues are still open-ended, e.g. should citizens separate their reusable from non-reusable textiles, where to recycle textiles, how to shift producer and consumer behaviors, and many more. To conclude, the moderator asked the audience whether they would be willing to take clothes to two different containers – one for reuse and another for textile waste. The vast majority voted YES, which is a hopeful sign of consumers' readiness to adopt more circular behaviors. Naturally, we’re interested in the data to measure how well this works!
Over the last few years we have seen some circular textile issues that are area specific and others that are universal to EU member states big and small, and 2025 will bring extra pressure to deliver solutions. This is good, because it provides the focus on shared issues and the concrete opportunity for public-private partnerships to solve them.
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