Digital Platforms for Textile Waste Recovery : An exploratory study about how Digital Platforms strenghten the Waste Recovery Stream in the Textile, Apparel and Clothing industry

Abstract: Background: In recent years, the amount of textile waste increased rapidly due to the fast-fashion phenomena with an increasing clothing production and a declining customer usage. Not only that one truck of clothing getting landfilled or burned every second, but also the textile production impacts the environment due to the vast amount of water, material, chemical, and energy usage. This so-called linear “take-make-waste” approach contributes significantly to the current climate crisis. One possible solution represents the circular economy to encounter the linear approach by providing concepts for recovering materials. However, to our state of knowledge, the implementation of such Circular Economy (CE) approaches is far away from their urgent necessity. Literature papers from the last years conclude with a collaboration call between all industry actors for enhancing the waste recovery stream (WRS). Since digital platforms tackled the collaboration challenge of Circular Economy in other industries, we contemplated it as an adequate digital technology tool for overcoming Textile, Apparel and Clothing (TAC) industry collaboration challenge to further strengthening the WRS. Purpose: The study aims to investigate if and how digital platforms strengthen the TAC industry's WRS. For this purpose, we shed light on different challenges within the industry-wide network, analyzed current platform functionalities, and matched challenges and functionalities to answer the research question.  Method: The study adopts an inductive qualitative approach to explore the phenomenon of digital platforms and their potential as an enabler for the textile WRS. Thereby, we took a relativism view regarding our ontological position and followed a social constructionist's epistemology. For the data collection, we used semi-structured interviews and identified potential participants with criterion and snowball sampling. In total, we conducted 14-semistructured interviews with industry actors, platform providers, and experts. For our data analysis, we oriented ourselves on the Gioia Method, an articulated grounded theory approach. Conclusion: Resulting from our findings, we identified (1) four major challenge groups that go beyond the collaboration challenge and encompass the challenge of lack of knowledge, organization of WRS, and value chain structure. Further, we outlined (2) five platform functionalities, i.e., connecting, informing, visualizing, monitoring, and consulting. By matching challenges and functionalities, we analyzed (3) the extent to which DP can strengthen WR. We concluded that many industry challenges are tackled or partly tackled by the DP functionalities. However, within some of the sub-challenges as well as the overall challenge of the value chain structure, DPs reach their limitation in strengthening the WRS. In addition, we offer (4) an overall framework of DP for the WR stream, summarized how the DP tackles the industry-wide challenges by displaying the functionalities and associated value drivers. Lastly, we provide (5) the baseline for future platform functionalities by outlining actors’ expectations and platform providers’ planned functionalities arisen by our finding.