Development Trends of a Circular Economy in Textile Industry
In March 2020, the European Union passed the New Circular Economy Action Plan-For a cleaner and more competitive Europe as part of the EU's Green New Deal and industrial strategy. The key measures of the plan include:
- Propose a sustainable product policy bill to ensure that the product design in the EU market is easy to reuse, repair, and recycle, and uses more renewable raw materials.
- Ensure that consumers receive sufficient product information to be able to make environmentally sustainable choices.
- Focus on industries that consume the most resources and have high recycling potential.
- Reduce waste and convert waste into high-quality secondary raw materials. Among them, the high-polluting and high-energy-consuming textile garment industries have been named by the European Union. It is necessary to re-examine the design, manufacturing, and consumption patterns of the industrial chain to find ways to use resources more effectively and make the environment sustainable. The future of the industry will be to maintain a policy of sustainable development.
In addition, after being severely hit by the Covid-19 epidemic in 2020, some clothing, textile, and shoemaking organizations have determined that environmental sustainability will be the method and development focus of the textile industry's recovery. That is to say, the brand's human rights, safety, environmental sustainability, and other aspects of the supplier will be enlarged and reviewed. In addition to protecting labor rights, environmentally sustainable technologies, including easy-to-decompose, easy-to-reuse, and bio-materials, all need to be continued. The technology invested, combined with brand operation strategies while creating sustainable issues, will make these suppliers stand out.
Therefore, the major trend of a circular economy, it is not only to protect the environment and achieve social corporate responsibility but also to allow supply chains and the brands create a win-win business model. Taiwan’s textile industry has been deeply involved in the global functional textile market for a long time. It not only has a complete industrial supply chain but also has strong integrated R&D and innovation capabilities. In the face of the textile industry's circular economy, it should take the initiative to deploy early to grasp market opportunities.
The circular economy has become the consensus of international economic development. Although Taiwan's textile industry has long played the role of a professional supplier of international functional textiles, under the wave of a global circular economy, functional textile has become more necessary to grasp the development trend of a circular economy in the textile industry. The Taiwan textile industry should formulate countermeasures as soon as possible to strive for more international market opportunities.
