Turns out feedstock is where fashion is stuck as it relates to circularity. And the industry can’t recycle its way out of a problem that runs deeper than waste.
It’s not a lack of will or even technology—what fashion has been missing in closing the loop on clothing production, is the real infrastructure to supply material to recycle.
Fashion for Good wants to see the industry out of its holding pattern on scaling circular solutions, and its answer is Project FAE. Launched last month, the Feedstock Activation Europe project is designed to build a system that could finally support textile-to-textile recycling at scale. Adidas, Bestseller and Inditex are already on board to bolster the effort.
The reason this conversation has been ongoing for years and scale remains elusive, says Fashion for Good managing director Katrin Ley, is because the industry still hasn’t scaled everything that happens before recycling: collection systems, sorting infrastructure, pre-processing to remove things like elastane and hardware, and supply chains built to deliver consistent feedstock to recyclers. And while textile waste is certainly ballooning the waste can’t be the only problem fashion focuses on. Europe alone generated 15.2 million tons of textile waste last year, BCG reported in March, and less than 1 percent of textile waste is currently recycled into new textiles.
“It’s an infrastructure and economics problem, too,” Ley said. “Turning post-consumer waste into valuable feedstock requires investment in sorting facilities, automation, pre-processing and regional hubs. Without that, the waste remains too expensive and inconsistent for recyclers to use, even when the technology works perfectly.”
Looking more closely at the cost, BCG said in its recent report, that to scale textile to textile recycling from its current 1 percent to 15 percent by 2035, would require an investment between 8 million and 11 billion euro. Under current market conditions, textile to textile recycling “tends to imply lower profitability,” according to the report, which, of course, impacts interest in investing in it.
But the timing could be right for a fundamental change that could shift the reality for recycled clothing. We’re at a moment, Ley said, where three key things have converged: “recycling capacity is coming online: facilities that were pilots two years ago are now commercial or near-commercial. They need feedstock, and the gap between what they need and what’s available is becoming painfully visible. Second, regulatory pressure is real. EU Extended Producer Responsibility means brands will be financially responsible for end-of-life. Functional recycling pathways are shifting from nice-to-have to commercial necessity. Brands need infrastructure in place before those requirements hit. Third, secondhand export markets are contracting. Declining material quality, trade restrictions, and weak demand in destination countries mean volumes that used to get exported are accumulating with nowhere to go. Without recycling infrastructure, that becomes landfill.
“The window to build an alternative pathway is now,” she added.
Project FAE’s purpose is two-fold: to unlock greater potential in post-consumer waste with advanced pre-processing; and to develop a framework for regional hubs that aggregate the textiles, sort and process them and produce tailored feedstock streams for recyclers nearby.
“The aim of this project is to define how to go from collection for reuse in Europe to collection for reuse and recycling,” said Romain Narcy, founder of Rematters, a textile recycling solutions company and an advisory partner for Project FAE. “Today you have brands that are being pushed by legislation and they know they have to transition to bigger volumes of recycled content.”
Europe’s revised Waste Framework Directive entered into force last October, and introduced Extended Producer Responsibility rules requiring textile producers to finance and manage the collection, recycling and disposal of the waste their products create. Big brands have faced endless backlash in recent years for unethically ridding themselves of excess production, and Europe’s answer to that is the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR), an all-out ban on destroying unsold goods big companies will have to comply with by July. While both EPR and ESPR have put sizable demands in place to reign fashion in on waste, the infrastructure to support their compliance still isn’t there.
If that infrastructure isn’t built in the next three to five years, fashion will miss the window where building makes economic sense, according to Ley.
“Recycling facilities coming online now need feedstock to justify their investment. If that feedstock infrastructure doesn’t materialize, some of those recyclers won’t survive, which sets the industry back years,” she said. “Meanwhile, EPR regulations will still require brands to manage end-of-life. Without recycling infrastructure, that means paying into schemes that fund downcycling, incineration, or export—not actual circularity. Brands pay the cost without getting the circular benefit.”
The economic value of the waste that’s already there, would also be lost if that material gets landfilled or incinerated instead of becoming feedstock for recycling, she added.
For now, part of Project FAE’s effort will be to determine the best positioning for the regional hubs, considering things like whether they should be closer to collection sites or recyclers, as well as how many hubs would make the system run smoothly. In the next five years, Narcy said he’d love to see hubs in France, Spain, the Benelux region of Western Europe, one in Germany and in the U.K.
“If we have these hubs, then the prepared feedstock for recycling can be shipped to different recyclers and reintroduced into the supply chain,” he said. “I’d love to see different ‘loops,’ like a very European centered loop where we can do as much as possible with the feedstock that has been recycled in Europe, and would then be spun and woven in Europe. Then we could have another loop with Euromed, where you include the Mediterranean—Tunisia, Morocco, Egypt, Turkey, Romania and Bulgaria—and another in Asia.”
If fashion succeeds with these goals, post-consumer textiles become a commercially viable feedstock, not just a sustainability pipe dream. It would mean, as Ley explained, “Recyclers can source domestically in Europe rather than relying on post-industrial waste, often imported, with its own sustainability questions. Sorters have buyers for non-rewearable fractions beyond downcycling or disposal, creating revenue streams that make collection economically sustainable. Brands have functioning end-of-life pathways for their products, meeting EPR requirements while actually closing material loops rather than just offsetting. Regional economies capture value from textile waste rather than exporting or landfilling it.
“Essentially, we move from talking about circularity to operating it,” she said.
But to move from chatter to operation will require both a reality check and a mindset shift for brands. The reality check comes down to the cost many haven’t yet been willing to pay.
“The uncomfortable truth is that [brands] want to buy recycled material at the price of virgin material,” Narcy said. “But you have extra cost when you recycle because you have all the reverse logistics, the sorting, the preparation or recycling, and you also have a loss of productivity when you process the material. If you blend virgin cotton and recycled cotton at spinning, you have to spin slower than if you would spin virgin material. So you have the cost inherent to the collections and preparation for recycling, then spinning and weaving, which also it has an impact on the product. So there should be a premium for recycled content.”
Caring more and paying more are both pills fashion has long been hard pressed to swallow, but both increasing consumer demand and impending regulations are forcing the issue. As Narcy said, brands are starting to buy into the realities of recycling, “and if the brands are buying in, the manufacturers will follow.”
Ley calls fashion’s bottleneck on circularity “economic and logistical, with a coordination problem layered on top.” But if the industry can align to build the infrastructure to support the technology that’s largely already there, this could be the period—and perhaps the project—that moves the needle.
“The companies and regions that build this infrastructure first will set the standards everyone else follows,” Ley said. “The window is narrow. If we don’t build now, we’re not just delayed: we’ve potentially missed the moment where collective action was possible.”
