The Nordic countries are big consumers of home textiles and clothing, but the textiles do not stay here for a long time. Although some clothes and home textiles are reused among friends, family, sold on marketplaces or donated to non-profit organizations (NGO), most end up in the residual waste and are incinerated. This is leading to huge material and resource lost since over fifty percent of the textiles could have been reused or recycled. Of the textiles that are separately collected, the majority are exported abroad for sorting and reuse whereas a tiny fraction is fiber-to-fiber recycled. 

Seeing that the textile industry is one of the most resource consuming industries with a high environmental impact it is important that the Nordic countries increase the collection and recycling rates and reuse more locally. It will not be possible to export EOL textiles in the same way as before. Around 40 countries have stopped importing EOL textiles and the EU is setting requirements for separate collection from 2025. This will mean that volumes of EOL textiles will increase in Europe at the same time as it will be increasingly difficult to find outlets for these volumes. As collection rates increase, so will the proportion of textiles that cannot be reused but hopefully be recycled (recyclables). There is no organized collection for recyclables, but several innovative initiatives are happening within this area, not least in the Nordic countries, where many automated sorting and recycling facilities are emerging.

The SATIN project focuses on increasing circularity of EOL textile in the Nordic region and has a strong focus on supply chain management (SCM). SCM relates to balancing the supply and demand of materials to achieve efficiency in the material flow of EOL textiles and related information, and monetary flows as well as collaboration between actors in the EOL textile value chain. The purpose of the SATIN project is to develop and test solutions that can address the EOL textile collection and sorting challenges by taking a SCM perspective. 

In the project we have 1) Mapped and identified challenges and opportunities in the current system by interviewing main actors in the value chain of EOL textiles in Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Finland, 2) Analyzed nine pilot studies of different collection methods. The pilots differ in terms of who organize the collection and sorting, the geographical area in which the collection service is offered, type of collection method, and if collection is carried out in one or two fractions, 3) Estimated volumes of recyclable textiles and their fiber composition and compared this supply with the current and upcoming sorting and recycling capacity (demand) in each country and in the whole Nordic area. 

Our results show there are large similarities between the actors in the Nordic countries when it comes to challenges and opportunities in the value chain of EOL textiles. Main challenges can be connected to lack of scale, low profit, no demand, and lack of data whereas opportunities are seen in collaboration, centralization and understanding/finding a market for EOL textiles. Connected to collection methods it was found that it is difficult to compare different methods because there are so many factors at play. However, it became clear that regardless of the collection method, the role of the consumer is very important in scaling up collection.  Connected to recyclables our results show that the upcoming automatic sorting and recycling capacity in the Nordic region will be sufficient to deal with the total recyclable fraction, except for some of the synthetic fibers. However, there are imbalances within each country raising a need for collaboration among countries. To make local automatic sorting and recycling possible, it is important to find solutions for pre-sorting within the Nordic region.