In Europe, between 4 and 9 per cent of all textile products brought on the market are destroyed before use, amounting to between 264,000 and 594,000 tonnes of textiles per year, according to a new report. The report was prepared by the European Environment Agency’s European Topic Centre on Circular Economy and Resource Use (ETC CE) which found that the climate impact of the destruction of these textiles could be as high as 5.6 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent, a volume slightly lower than Sweden's entire net emissions in 2021. This is an upper estimate of the emissions tied to the production of the fibre. Emissions resulting from additional processing steps such as weaving, sewing, etc are neglected.
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