Assessment of Textiles Mills Transformation of Producing Textile Products from Recycling Waste Fishing Nets

Abstract

Waste fishing net is one of the major problems in the ocean environment. It is rarely recycled in Taiwan because there is no strong economic driving force for recycling waste fishing nets. However, recycling waste fishing net to produce textile can reduce the impact of high international oil price, promote textile mills to transform in Taiwan, and meet the global textile mills trend.

The analytical method includes two model, Waste Input-Output Analysis (WIO) and Input-Output Analysis (IO). This study establishes waste fishing net WIO and 54-mills IO. Steven scenarios of textile industrial transformation are consisted of three factors: incineration tax, product innovation and technology innovation. These scenarios are for assessing the economic and environmental impact in Taiwan, which contain inter-industry linkage effect, raw material demand, total cost, value-added of the textile mills and macro-economic effect.

The result of this study is that increasing the incineration tax or product innovation can reduce the total cost and the raw material demand and increase value-added. No significant differences are observed in the scenarios of increasing technology innovation. However, comparing to the textile mills, recycling textile mills is so small that the textile industrial transformation has little effect on itself, macro-economic, as well as the driving force of the recycling waste fishing nets. So, this recycling system may be improved by recycling with other wastes in the future.

Keywords: Waste fishing net, Waste Input-Output Analysis (WIO), Input-Output Analysis (IO), Recycling textile, Recycling chemical material