Participants in a panel on the circular economy at the ongoing Ecomondo 2022 have praised the contribution of the textile industry to the European economy.
The fashion industry, in addition to being one of the pillars of the European economy, is one of the sectors with the highest environmental impact.
According to Eleonora Rizzuto, director of sustainable development at the Italian subsidiary of the LVMH brand, the “textile supply chain (in Europe) is made up of 400,000 companies and generates 55 billion euros in turnover.”
Rizzuto said “this represents 31 percent of the total turnover in Europe”.
She was taking part in a panel on “Textiles as an opportunity: challenges and involvement of sector players,” organised on the second day of Ecomondo (8-11 November 2022), an event dedicated to the circular economy.
This year’s edition is being held in Rimini, a city on the Adriatic coast of the Italian region of Emilia Romagna.
For their part, Roberta De Carolis, researcher and Paola Migliorini, deputy head of unit at the European Commission, drew a portrait of the European textile sector and praised its efforts to preserve the environment.
In their view, the textile industry “has in many cases anticipated the interventions that the European community is implementing to reduce the environmental and social impact of the fashion industry.”
“The key words for the greening of fashion are recyclability of clothing (today only 1 percent of textile waste is reused, and 85 percent of production ends up in landfill), eco-design (and a shared regulation to trace its parameters), transparency and control of production,” they said.
PR/APA