Galicia Launches Textile Recycling Pilot for Camino de Santiago Hostels

The Xunta de Galicia used one of the Camino de Santiago's most symbolic arrival points to make a pointed statement about what happens after the walking stops. At Monte do Gozo, the hilltop hostel where pilgrims catch their first glimpse of Santiago de Compostela's cathedral spires, the Galician regional government announced a pilot project on March 10 to collect and recycle the clothing, footwear and sheets that pilgrims and hostel operations generate and discard along the route.

The pilot, running for at least one year across three hostels in the Public Network of Hostels along the Camino de Santiago, is designed to intercept those textile flows before they reach landfill and feed them into a circular economy chain. Items collected in good condition will be routed to second-hand shops. Those too worn for resale will be sorted by fibre composition, cotton separated from polyester, and sent to sorting plants for recycling into new textiles.

The logistics model being tested is deliberately granular. Collection points will be analysed across multiple formats: dedicated containers on public roads, municipal clean points, and private-sector locations including shopping centres, schools and parishes. The goal is to design collection routes adaptable to different municipal contexts, which matters considerably if the project is to scale beyond a controlled pilot.

Juan Ramón Meléndez, CEO of RE-VISTE, the association working on the project, framed the initiative in terms of both regulatory pressure and public expectation. "This pilot project is an important step in bringing together all the key players and working together to create an efficient and sustainable system to establish a correct collection of textiles and footwear, in line with regulatory challenges and societal demand," he said. Meléndez also positioned the pilot as a direct extension of RE-VISTE's founding purpose: "Since the foundation of the association in 2023, our goal has always been to enable the transition to a more efficient model of waste management, and this pilot will help us move in that direction."

The scale of the opportunity is visible in regional data. Arroupa, a textile recovery organisation operating in Galicia, recovered 113 tonnes of textile waste in Vilagarcía alone, a figure that underscores how much material is already moving through the region's recovery infrastructure.

At the end of the pilot period, the Xunta de Galicia intends to publish a guide of recommendations consolidating the good practices identified, giving local authorities a practical toolkit for implementing selective textile collection in their own territories. If the model performs as expected, the Galician government has indicated it could be extended across the entire public hostel network and potentially serve as a reference point for tourist destinations elsewhere in Spain and across Europe.

The Camino de Santiago receives hundreds of thousands of pilgrims annually, making its hostel network a concentrated, geographically coherent test bed for sustainable tourism infrastructure that most urban recycling pilots cannot replicate. Embedding circular textile recovery into that network positions the route not just as a spiritual landmark but as a working model for what conscientious tourism management can look like at scale.