The group, which represents the textiles reuse industry in the UK, is targeting politicians in a campaign to increase awareness and bring in financial help for the industry.
TRA national liaison manager Alan Wheeler said: “The overall objective is to try and raise textile recycling up the political agenda. The feeling in the industry is that it tends to get overlooked when compared to paper, plastics, cans and so on.”
Elliot Cohen, president of the TRA, and vice president Terry Ralph recently met with Labour MP Joan Ruddock to discuss the industry's needs. One of the main things they pushed for was to include textile recycling in best practice models due to accompany the forthcoming Household Waste Recycling Bill.
Funding
They also discussed the lack of funding available to textiles recycling compared to that for other materials.
Mr Wheeler told letsrecycle.com :”TRA members should be ideal contenders for WRAP funding”. This is particularly true, he added, because much textile recycling counts as re-use – which is higher up the waste hierarchy than recycling.
Mr Wheeler explained: “Textile recycling counts for about 0.5% of local authority recycling rates. It's not the biggest, but it is important. I think there's a lot of textile recycling that goes on that isn't recognised – people have been doing it for so long, and before it became trendy to recycle.” Donations to charity shops and selling clothes through jumble sales, for example, are not included.
Crisis
The TRA is also campaigning for government to take notice of the “crisis” caused by high employers' liability insurance, which they say has recently increased by 400% in some cases.
And it pushed Joan Ruddock for answers on the problem of secondary clothing being categorised as “waste” – which causes difficulties and higher costs when it is exported, as is frequent in the textile industry.
Mr Wheeler said the TRA will take its campaign to other MPs and ministers next. “Joan Ruddock promised to follow up on the WRAP issue, the employers' liability issue and promoting methods of best practice. It's important now that we as a trade association try and start developing what she has said and going to meet other ministers and people higher up in the recycling world,” he said.
“We've got to convince those that hold the purse strings – we have got to keep banging on the door.”
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