Next Markets for Unwearable Clothing Textiles
Prepared for Clothing Stewardship Australia (Seamless). Authors: Kat Heinrich, Mark Rawson, Lucas De Garis and Meg Ellis.
Summary published
In 2024, Australia sent 229,000 tonnes of clothing to landfill. That is roughly 916 million individual items buried in a single year.
Around 14% of the clothing too worn out to be resold gets recovered. The rest is landfilled.
Clothing Stewardship Australia, which runs the Seamless scheme, asked us a practical question. If that material were collected at scale, where could it actually go? Not in theory — which end markets exist in Australia today, how much could they absorb, and what would have to change for them to take more.
clothing landfilled in Australia in 2024
of unwearable clothing goes to landfill
total installed processing capacity per year
potential annual turnover in these markets
What we found
A capacity gap, not an interest gap.
Australia has about 86,000 tonnes a year of installed capacity to handle unwearable textiles — 17,000 tonnes of preparation, 22,000 tonnes of recycling, and 64,000 tonnes attributable to energy recovery. Set that against 229,000 tonnes going to landfill and the shortfall is the story.
Most of it still goes to landfill.
By weight, 86% is landfilled. About 5% becomes industrial rags, mostly processed overseas. Roughly 4% goes to energy or industrial fuel, 2% into consumer goods, 2% into environmental applications, and about 1% to recycling offshore that we could not trace.
There is a domestic industry in this.
Building out these markets represents $250 million to $380 million in annual turnover and between 1,200 and 2,300 full-time equivalent jobs. Most of that work would sit in collection, sorting and processing — onshore.
The emissions case is larger than the landfill case
The clothing landfilled in 2024 generated 0.48 million tonnes of CO₂. Had that material been diverted into the end markets we mapped, 2.1 million tonnes of CO₂ could have been avoided — more than four times the emissions of the landfilling itself.
Where the material could go
We mapped end markets across three pathways. Closed-loop keeps fibre in clothing. Open-loop moves it into other products entirely. Energy recovery is the floor, not the goal.
Fibre-to-fibre recycling back into clothing and home textiles.
Thermal insulation for buildings. Acoustic insulation and panels. Mattress layers and soft furnishings. Plastic hardware such as buttons and zips. Carpet and artificial turf underlay. Ceramic tiles. Cellulosic-clay soil additives. Textile-derived biochar. Geotextiles. Industrial rags.
Process engineered fuel and energy-from-waste.
Kat presenting the findings
Kat Heinrich walked through this research at the Textile End Markets webinar. Her segment starts at 22:26.
The full report is published by Clothing Stewardship Australia.
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