Waste Management Practices in the Textile Industry: A Review

Several studies have been carried out to highlight the challenges the improper disposal of textile waste poses to the environment and human life. Other studies were done on the effective waste management strategies (WMS) to adopt for sustainable waste management. However, there remains a paucity of knowledge on the eco-friendly and sustainable WMS to adopt for managing waste in the textile industry. This review was therefore carried out to investigate the appropriate WMS to apply in handling textile waste so as to promote the circular economy (CE), since the focus in the world is now shifting from the linear economy to CE. In order to accomplish this, the systematic literature review (SLR) method was used, in which the VOSviewer software was used to assess the co-occurrence of keywords in 35 publications that were retrieved from the Scopus online database. The documents used for the study span a period of 15 years, from 2009 to 2024. The findings reveal that the 3R principle of waste management, smart waste management (SWM), and waste valorization are the best WMS to adopt in a CE. The study recommends that stakeholders in the textile value chain as well as governments all over the world should put practical measures in place (i.e., the drafting of a waste management policy and the provision of financial support to the textile industry) to ensure the full adoption of the preferred WMS by the textile industry. In the long run, this will lessen the negative consequences that textile waste has on both the environment and people.