Another Man’s Treasure: Non-Profit Organisations and Reverse Supply Chains for Textile Circularity

This thesis takes you on a journey to learn more about reverse supply chains for consumer textile circularity, precisely about post-use textile collection and sorting. Textile circularity is a way to reduce the textile waste footprint and impact the fast fashion consumption pattern.
Some of you may have already interacted with the reverse logistics systems and even adopted some of the practices at your own household. For example, we sort our household waste (bio, plastic, paper, etc.) and bring it to the waste collection points. This thesis looks into the practical cases of the implementation of collection and sorting of used textiles. In scientific terms, we explore one of the main building blocks of product circularity - reverse supply chain management as the “first mile” of circular economy.
This thesis offers insight into multiple aspects of reverse supply chain management including procurement of used textiles and quality assurance. In reverse supply chains, end consumers are the “suppliers” of post-use textiles. The challenge is to collect the “right” quality textiles that are suitable for the chosen circularity strategy (reuse, recycling, etc). Now, the average rate of separate collection of post-use textiles is only 12%, in the European landscape. Once textiles end up in the mixed household waste, we no longer can use their potential for circularity, for example, for being reused or recycled. It indicates that textiles are mostly incinerated (or landfilled).
This thesis takes a unique niche by focusing on non-profit organisations (NPOs) in textile reuse. Over the past twenty years, NPOs have been the most significant collectors of post-use textiles globally. NPOs operationalise textile circularity by performing the tasks such as textile collection and sorting for which the for-profit actors may lack incentives. What NPOs do in a nutshell is collecting voluntary donations of various textile products to resell them via charity second-hand shops (= facilitating textile reuse). NPOs gain economic benefits from textile reuse what helps to stabilise their funding situation.
In the essays of this thesis, we discover the world of NPOs’ reverse supply chain management practices. NPOs adopt these practices to collect used textiles, sort out second-hand “diamonds” of high value, and find valorisation options for lower quality donations. The thesis also observes the changing role of NPOs in textile circularity and defines drivers and barriers in the development of new partnerships between NPOs and other textile circularity actors.