It’s easy to dismiss textile-to-textile recycling as an idealistic corner of the fashion industry—still barely measurable in supply chain metrics. But that’s about to change. With sweeping ESG and EPR regulations on the horizon, global supply chains are facing a new mandate: account for your waste, or pay for it. And a new class of recyclers is racing to scale solutions faster than the industry may be ready to feed them.
There’s roughly 92 million metric tons of textile waste generated in the world each year, the UN Environment Programme reiterated in March, and, in tandem with swelling production, the amount of time garments last is shrinking. That means more garments are landing in landfills sooner. Already, estimates peg the percentage of trashed clothes ending up in these waste sites at upwards of 85 percent. What’s more, the Ellen MacArthur Foundation estimated in 2017 that less than 1 percent of textile material is recycled back into new products, and experts don’t think that number has changed much since then.
“Without solutions that scale globally, we will never catch up to growing textile production,” said Peter Majeranowski, co-founder and CEO of Circ, a B Corp driving innovation in textile recycling, “Circularity is not just a cleanup operation, it is a manufacturing revolution.”
But that revolution, however necessary, won’t be swift.
“It’s going to take a generation for us to build ourselves out of this mess that we’ve created,” said Patrik Frisk, chief executive officer of Reju, a Paris-based textile-to-textile regeneration company that launched late last year and has been working feverishly to tackle the problem.
But for those tempted to let their eyes glaze over because they’ll likely retire before a solution is really needed, or because they’re bracing for tariffs while waiting for recycled textiles to become cost neutral, there’s a greater urgency than many are willing to acknowledge.
For starters, there’s immediate risk. With legislation looming, supply chains that fail to feed textile recyclers will face penalties and lost value. There’s also opportunity: capturing even 5 percent to 10 percent more of those 92 million metric tons could supply meaningful volume to recycling systems, turning waste into both revenue and compliance assurance.
What’s more, while brand and retail demand for product made from recycled textiles may still be somewhat muted, it’s expected to balloon in the coming years.
Where demand’s headed
If fiber use continues at its current clip—with polyester still accounting for 57 percent of total fiber production, according to Textile Exchange—fashion will be in even bigger trouble. In its latest Materials Market Report out in September 2024, Textile Exchange said, “The market share of virgin fossil-based synthetics continued to increase in 2023, while that of cotton and recycled fibers slightly declined,” a fact it said threatens to “undermine the industry’s commitments to its climate goals.”
Syre, which launched in 2024 with a mission to “decarbonize and dewaste the textile industry,” commissioned a study with McKinsey & Co. last year and found that demand for circular polyester, in fact, will soon outpace supply, despite current uptake.
“By 2030, the projected demand for circular polyester is expected to reach 14 million metric tons annually. Yet, the supply is projected to cover only 2 to 4 million metric tons,” said Emma Stjernlöf, who handles communications for Syre. The company, along with polyester supplier Selenis, has construction underway for a textile-to-textile recycling plant in North Carolina that will provide 10,000 metric tons of circular polyester each year. The plant was expected to be operational mid-2025, but the company says it will provide production in 2026.
More companies are on the move with efforts toward commercialization.
In May, Circ announced plans to build a $500 million industrial-scale recycling facility in northeastern France, which is expected to process up to 70,000 metric tons of textile waste annually, with operations slated to start in 2028. Circ—which Time Magazine named among the World’s Top GreenTech companies on its 2025 list—says it’s the only company with a patented hydrothermal process that can separate and recover both polyester and cotton from poly cotton blends, “fully” recycling them into “high-quality raw materials.”
“It’s going to take a generation for us to build ourselves out of this mess that we’ve created
—Patrik Frisk, Reju
Also in May, Reju outlined plans for its first industrial scale regeneration center in the Netherlands, which it says will repurpose 300 million polyester articles that would have been waste and transform them into a Reju Polyester that will have 50 percent lower carbon emissions than virgin. The Netherlands hub will have a production capacity of 50,000 metric tons , and the company is expected to announce details for its second regeneration hub this summer.
Still, as Frisk—who believes demand for recycled polyester may be closer to 20 million metric tons by 2030—says, it’s going to be difficult to meet demand. “When we take our efforts and those of everybody else that’s doing something in this space…if everybody was going to be able to build everything that they’ve claimed they’re going to build, on time, we would get to about 4 to 5 million metric tons [of annual demand met].
“The waste problem is real and it’s going to get more expensive,” Frisk continued. “You either prepare yourself smartly in terms of derisking yourself and the cost this will incur in the future [or you don’t], but you’re going to pay for this one way or the other because the waste that’s being created does not go away.” Even burning it is unrealistic because of the scale of waste we’ve amassed, he said, adding that there aren’t enough landfills to fill and countries, like Ghana, that have long been forced to accept foreign waste are fighting to end those realities. “I think that realization will drive demand more than anything,” Frisk said.
Look out for legislation
When it comes to legislation, time is running out for companies to decide to tackle their waste simply out of the goodness of their hearts; soon, there’ll be little choice.
As part of its Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR), the European Union’s 2023 Waste Framework Directive says, “preventing waste is the preferred option, and sending waste to landfill should be the last resort.” In between that, EU companies—and companies outside the EU selling to EU consumers—will soon need to have 55 percent of their municipal waste (including textiles) prepared for re-use and recycling, and that percentage will climb to 60 percent by 2030. The directive is expected to be formally adopted this year and then member countries will have until roughly mid-2026 to roll out the laws, and final implementation is expected in 2027.
The EU’s producer responsibility laws will require fashion companies to fund textile collection and recycling programs, which means supply chain stakeholders will be forced to trace and manage textile waste in new ways.
In California, the Responsible Textile Recovery Act, signed into law in September, requires apparel and textile producers to join or form a Producer Responsibility Organization (PRO) with a complete plan for collection, transportation, repair, sorting, and recycling of textile waste. Companies will have to join or form the PROs by July 1 next year, and by July 1, 2030, non-compliance will start seeing fees incurred.
A new kind of supply chain
“We’re on the cusp here of [some big] changes,” said Karla Magruder, founder and president of Accelerating Circularity. The organization has been on a mission over the last four years to bring experts and solutions providers together to tackle circularity, and she says the moves companies are making now will lead to some real advancements.
To get there, though, it’s going to mean changes to a supply chain that wasn’t built to facilitate textile waste as feedstock. And one where Frisk describes the waste as being “everywhere and nowhere” without systems in place for aggregating it.
Right now, collecting post-industrial textile waste is a somewhat simpler task provided manufacturers facilitate it and collaborate with the right partners. With post-consumer textile waste, it’s a matter of collecting it (which means first convincing consumers not to throw it away), transporting it to sorting facilities (much of that work is still manual and there’s too much waste for humans to manage efficiently and accurately), aggregation to have it baled by fiber type (though there’s been insufficient investment in incentivizing sorters to isolate fiber types), and then preprocessing to remove things like buttons and zippers, and shred it in preparation for becoming something new.
In short, it’s a lot.
“There are some people who feel that you’ve got to rebuild the supply chain,” Magruder said. “But I’m a believer of you’ve got to use what you’ve got and then build off of that. There are people who do collecting and sorting today and we’ve got to use them now. They’re collecting and sorting for reuse rather than textile to textile, but if they had more demand [for the latter], they would lean more into it.”
We’re in an emerging new textile economy, one that has to be bent from its current linear form into a circular model, as Frisk explains it. Up to now, many have entered the industry with a recycling technology and focused almost entirely on the performance of that technology when the industry’s need really demands more than that.
“They’re focused on taking something and making it into a material that’s supposed to go into the supply chain of the textile industry, not really addressing the systemic aspect of this,” Frisk said. “That’s the big difference with Reju.” The company, which is owned by engineering company Technip Energies and has the dual benefit of being “specialists in polyester,” is partnering with what it says are all the key players, like Waste Management in the U.S. and the Goodwill, who they’re working with in tandem to build new flows between aggregating waste at Waste Management, then sorting for wearability at Goodwill, then back to Waste Management to sort for fiber.
The partners are there, the collaboration is happening, but the biggest blindspot in the industry’s current approach to textile recycling is the acknowledgement of the infrastructure and capital necessary to make a global impact, according to Majeranowski.
“This is not a technical challenge anymore; solutions like Circ already exist,” he said. “The real challenge is putting steel in the ground fast enough to meet the urgency and scale of the problem. The industry may not realize the quantum of capital needed, or the coordination and long-term commitment it takes to build circular infrastructure at scale.”
As Frisk added, “You need to really understand that this is a holistic effort that’s needed across the whole system, and the unlock sits in that.”
OK, so what about the cost?
Recycled fiber from textiles isn’t going to cost the same as virgin. Syre’s Stjernlöf says the company is “confident in the competitiveness and, overall, in the value the brands are expressing in terms of a fully circular option.” Frisk at Reju says brands and businesses should expand their view of value.
Even if circular fiber is double or triple the cost of virgin, he said, (though he did not commit to a comparative cost for Reju Polyester), the price as a component of costs across the value chain would be insignificant, maybe a 4 percent to 5 percent increase to the end consumer were the brand to pass the cost on. But because regenerating in the way Reju does it—essentially taking the polyester out of its old textile and breaking it down to its monomers—allows it to take out all the “bad stuff” (read: PFAs, chemicals, impurities), the end result is a higher quality fiber.
“Let’s make sure we make things that are more durable, maybe softer to the hand, it sheds less microplastics, handles water better,” Frisk said. “The idea here is: don’t give the consumer just a green reason to do this, even if it’s only a 5 percent surcharge. Rather, the reason to buy should be better performance, better feel, more comfort.
“All of these things are possible to do in the yarn,” he said.
Looking ahead
The next couple years will be meaningful in terms of seeing legislation take real effect and seeing the plants underway begin to produce real textile-to-textile materials at an impactful scale.
“In the next three to five years, we’re going to have actual plants and facilities up and running,” Magruder said. “We’ll also have mechanical preprocessing and sorting commercialized, and aggregation facilities.”
Syre has plans to build multiple recycling plants around the world in the next decade, including one in Vietnam that will see a production capacity of 100,000 to 250,000 metric tons in 2029. By that time, the company says it will produce “up to 3 million metric tons of circular polyester.” It will go from innovations and small capsule collections to volume, Stjernlöf said. “H&M has already secured an off take agreement with Syre worth a total of $600 million over seven years, which is the biggest (binding) off take agreement in the textile industry to date.”
It requires aligned investment, brand buy in and a global shared urgency to turn breakthrough technology into real world manufacturing capacity.
—Peter Majeranowski, Circ
Circ haș a similar setup with Acegreen Eco-Material Technology Co, which has agreed to purchase the company’s recycled pulp for five years. Majeranowski said the company’s next step is to “open multiple full-scale plants in key manufacturing regions around the world.”
As to whether there are too many cooks in the kitchen when it comes to textile recycling, competition fails to factor much as everyone is working toward the same goal—sometimes together.
Put simply, Magruder said, “If the world is making something like 57 million tons of polyester, how big are these [incoming] plants? 50,000 tons? It doesn’t scratch the surface, right? We need all of these people out there doing as much of this stuff as they possibly can.”
If things go according to plan, it will mean recycled inputs become status quo in fabric sourcing, with designers creating with recycling in mind because the infrastructure is there to support it, Majeranowski said.
“Solving textile waste means thinking like systems builders, not just innovators,” he added. “It requires aligned investment, brand buy in and a global shared urgency to turn breakthrough technology into real world manufacturing capacity. Speed and long-term thinking is paramount. Now we need to get the entire industry to come along with us.”
