A 10-month project by Greenpeace Israel to track 24 items of used clothing dropped into recycling containers throughout the country has revealed that most of the items ended up in Africa or in Israeli Arab and Palestinian villages, where they most likely became waste.
Not a single garment was resold in Israel or recycled into new clothing.
Activists selected used clothes in good condition and worthy of continued wear or sale in second-hand stores and sewed GPS tags onto them to track their journeys via cell phones.
They dropped them into local authority recycling bins placed by two companies, Rosnir and Infinia, from Safed and Rosh Pina in northern Israel to Beersheba in the south.
From the Rosnir bins, 11 items wound up in Africa — in Togo, Ghana, and Burkina Faso — where they joined the billions of clothes from elsewhere that pollute the continent. One ended in Tuba Zangariya, an Arab town in northern Israel; one went to Nablus in the West Bank, and another to Gaza. One (a green sweater) ended up at a Haifa Chemicals factory near the Dead Sea (the factory had no information), and contact was lost with the remainder after they had reached sorting centers.
All four bins processed by Infinia (whose website refers to recycling paper, cardboard, and plastic, but not textiles) were in Beersheba. Two garments ended up in the West Bank, one at the Hirya waste center near Tel Aviv, and contact was lost with the fourth.
“The investigation reveals how the Ministry of Environmental Protection has for years avoided creating a dedicated treatment for textile waste in Israel, allowing private companies to act supposedly in its name and mislead the public,” the Greenpeace report (in Hebrew) said. “The result – Israeli textile waste continues to pollute the environment, both in Israel and around the world, without any supervision or regulation.”
But the problems are not restricted to Israel alone.
Results of a similar study by the Changing Markets Foundation were published in July 2023. That NGO tracked 21 clothing items deposited in recycling containers of 10 fashion brands in the UK, including H&M, Zara, C&A, Primark, Nike, The North Face, Uniqlo, and Marks and Spencer. That investigation found that over 75 percent of the clothes were destroyed, dumped, or turned into rags, left in warehouses, or exported to Africa, where up to half of the world’s used clothing is discarded, buried, or burned. The remaining quarter of the items were recycled or sent to second-hand clothes stores.
Criticizing the Environmental Protection Ministry for neither regulating nor supervising textile waste, Greenpeace Israel said, “The clothing collection system, which is marketed to the public as promoting reuse and recycling, actually operates in identical patterns to the global network of transporting textile waste to Africa… an arrangement that allows the major international fashion companies to continue to push aggressively and market unimaginable amounts of new clothing into the Israeli market, without being held accountable, and without any application of the ‘polluter pays’ principle, which is applied to other waste streams.”
In response to Greenpeace Israel’s Freedom of Information request, the Environmental Protection Ministry said it had no engagement with Rosnir, which uses its logo on its textile bins. The ministry has since ordered the company to desist from using its logo.
Under 1% of clothes are recycled into new garments
The global fashion industry generates an estimated 10% of global-warming carbon emissions, uses massive quantities of energy and water, and pollutes the environment with wastewater and chemicals.
Nearly 60% of clothing is made from nylon, acrylic, or polyester, plastics derived from the fossil fuel industry. These break down slowly, releasing microplastics into the soil and water that eventually enter the bodies of animals, including humans.
And yet, less than one percent of clothes are recycled into new clothing items worldwide, despite attempts over the past decade to develop improved technologies.
Globally, 87% of the materials and fibers used to make clothes are burned or buried.
Finally, as Greenpeace points out in its report, the industry has a social price. Garment workers are mainly employed in developing countries, working long hours for low wages, often in unsafe conditions, and sometimes without basic rights.
Ghana, one of the leading destinations for the export of used clothing from Israel, is considered the world’s largest importer of second-hand clothing, with approximately 15 million items imported weekly.
Used clothes in huge packages are sold to local traders as a package. An estimated 40% is discarded as worthless on arrival and end up in landfills, rivers, and incinerators, sometimes illegally, negatively impacting locals’ health.
But, according to Greenpeace Israel, the fact that one in five clothing items in the investigation reached Israeli Arab and Palestinian villages indicated a broader picture.
“The global problem of Africa becoming the backyard of the global textile industry takes on an Israeli twist, in which Palestinian villages and their jurisdictions serve as the backyard of the Israeli waste problem,” the report said.
Yair Dvir, Head of Consumer Affairs at Greenpeace Israel, called on the Environmental Protection Ministry to create a staff position to deal with textile recycling by collecting data, supervising activity on the ground, and formulating regulations. He recommended extending to the textile industry legislation that applies to other waste streams, holding producers responsible for products throughout their entire lifecycle.
Dvir added, “The lack of policy allows the major international fashion companies to continue aggressively pushing and marketing unimaginable amounts of new clothes into the Israeli market, without being held accountable, and without any application of the ‘polluter pays’ principle, which is applied to other waste streams within the framework of the law.”
The report advised consumers to prioritize second-hand clothes and locally produced garments.
Rosnir’s CEO, Danny Rosenkrantz, said the decades-old company did its best to prevent textile waste from ending in landfills and that a large percentage of textiles could be recycled for various uses.
Synthetic clothes, sorted for color, were made into fibers for insulation, carpets, upholstery, and even — when combined with new fibers — clothes, he said.
Materials with a high cotton content were cut, crushed, and turned into cleaning cloths, saving on water, chemicals, and virgin raw materials needed to produce new cloths, including paper towels.
Only good-quality clothes were sent to developing countries “for reuse.” He added that if the textiles were not collected, they would be thrown in the general trash and sent to landfills.
A Beersheba Municipality spokesman said that Infinia had been selected in 2022 to collect and recycle the city’s waste, including paper, cardboard, and textiles.
After checking with Infinia, he said the company took all recyclable textile waste to its sorting plant in the central city of Modi’in.
“Until the outbreak of the ongoing war with Gaza [sparked by the Hamas terror group’s murderous invasion of Israel on October 7 last year], the textiles were transferred from the sorting plant to the company Southern Textiles, and from there, they were sold to Gaza,” the spokesman went on. “With the outbreak of the war, the commercial connection was lost.”
The Beersheba spokesman said textiles comprised less than 0.04% of the city’s total recyclable waste, according to 2023 data.
The Environmental Protection Ministry said the main solution to clothing waste “should be upstream – that is, reducing consumption.” It went on, “The solutions that exist today, even if not optimal, still include significant percentages of reuse (transfer to second-hand markets) and recycling and are therefore preferable to landfilling.”
Noting that it lacked the resources to deal separately with textile waste, it nevertheless encouraged companies dealing with such waste to apply for financial aid of up to 40% of the costs toward establishing or expanding waste sorting and recycling plants within the framework of a new plan for a circular economy (in which waste is turned into a resource for reuse) launched recently by the ministry, with the Economy Ministry.
A call to Infinia was not returned by press time.
