Štip Residents Collected Several Tonnes of Old Clothes: The Estimate for the Whole Year Was 12 Tonnes, and the Drive Showed How Much Textile Gets Thrown Away

The first drive to collect textile waste from households in Štip ended with several tonnes of laundry and other clothing. The organisers had estimated the town would collect around 12 tonnes a year. After a single drive they are already talking about bigger quantities, and about sound, clean clothes that households throw out.

Behind the project is the Foundation for Local Community Development, backed by the Municipality of Štip and the German government. Clothes in good condition will be donated and the rest recycled at a collection and processing centre eight kilometres from Štip on the road to Radoviš, the first of its kind in Macedonia. It is supposed to turn out dolls, quilts, pillows and similar products. For now, two people do the sorting.

The numbers explain why this started right there. According to research cited by coordinator Boris Šarkovski, textiles make up about 5 percent of all waste nationally, but 35 percent in Štip, a garment-industry town, and more than half of that comes from households rather than factories. The centre won't accept industrial waste.

"Don't throw it away, give it a new round," goes the motto. The foundation promises nothing will be thrown away, and if anything is left at the end, it will be baled and exported to Turkey or burned in specialised facilities. So something will end up outside the circle after all.

There's also an interesting sentence Šarkovski dropped along the way: every municipality with more than 30,000 residents must have a textile waste collection centre. The first centre in Macedonia means all the others don't exist. How many municipalities know about this obligation, and who will ask them, now that one town has started the job with foreign money?