Morocco and Tunisia have established themselves as strategically important nearshore manufacturing destinations for European fashion brands seeking to reduce lead times and improve supply chain responsiveness. Their geographic proximity to European markets, combined with strong garment manufacturing capabilities and improving compliance standards, has made both countries increasingly attractive as sourcing alternatives to more distant Asian suppliers.
With this growing manufacturing role comes growing waste generation. Our field mapping programmes, launched simultaneously in Casablanca and Tunis, are designed to characterise the volume, composition, and current disposal pathways of post-production textile waste across both countries' garment manufacturing sectors.
Initial findings from the first phase of mapping are encouraging in terms of material quality. Moroccan and Tunisian factories serving European brands typically produce for mid-to-premium market segments, with higher-quality fabric inputs and more consistent fibre compositions than comparable factories in lower-cost sourcing destinations. This translates directly into higher-value cutting waste — material that is potentially well-suited to premium recycled content applications.
The informal waste collection networks operating across both countries' garment clusters have evolved largely outside formal regulatory frameworks. Collectors purchase factory waste by weight, with minimal documentation and no fibre-composition sorting. The collected material is then bulked and exported, primarily to Italian and Portuguese rag-grade traders, where it enters European downcycling channels at significantly below its potential value.
The mapping programme aims to establish baseline data on waste volumes and compositions across 80 factories in each country over its initial phase. This data will be used to design targeted interventions — sorting protocol training, digital documentation tools, and direct connections to premium recycler buyers — that can begin capturing the latent value in North Africa's post-production waste streams.