Sustainable management of textile solid waste materials: The progress and prospects

Textile industries produce large quantities of liquid and solid waste materials with toxic components that can pollute land and water resources. The treatment of liquid effluents is ongoing while management of solid wastes and sludge is neglected for their incineration and landfilling. The management approaches are not sustainable since they extend the pollution and lead to global warming and climate variation. This minireview explores the types of solid wastes produced during textile processing from manufacture to post-consumption. The study also reviews the dominant approaches of managing such wastes using empirical evidence with the aim of suggesting sustainable approaches to manage the wastes. It was found that landfilling and incineration approaches predominantly used to manage textile solid wastes result to more environmental harm and therefore, reuse, recycling biological and radiological degradation of such wastes was recommended for sustainability. The sustainable methods were found to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, reduce consumption of new fabric and encourage eco-friendly production of new materials from the textile wastes. The success of the methods is however limited due to the refractory nature of some textile waste components, slow activity and efficacy and hence more advances in their research and technology are suggested to validate the sustainability claim in the technologies.