In March 2020, the European Commission adopted the Circular Economy Action Plan and with this set the agenda for the transition to a circular economy on a regulatory level. For the textiles industry, the requirement to become more circular became a reality last year in March 2022 with the announcement of the EU Strategy for Sustainable and Circular Textiles, which aims to implement circularity measures along the entire value chain to create a more sustainable, competitive, and modern industry. In particular, this involves the definition of circularity standards and the introduction of regulations at both EU and national levels.
These affect the entire value chain, therefore all stakeholders in the sector — and, thanks to today’s value chain complexity, not only within EU borders. At the same time, the Regulation on Ecodesign for Sustainable Products, known as the ’ESPR’, which was also adopted in March 2022, sets a range of far-reaching performance and information-related requirements – known as “ecodesign requirements” – for specific product groups among others textiles, to improve product circularity, energy performance and other environmental sustainability aspects. These requirements encompass:
- product durability, reusability, upgradeability and repairability,
- the presence of substances that hinder circularity, energy and resource efficiency,
- recycled content,
- re-manufacturing and recycling,
- carbon and environmental footprints,
- and information requirements, including the Digital Product Passport.
To comply with these requirements, it will, of course, be necessary to somehow assess the performance along these aspects which will be done by collecting data points on KPIs, which relate to the overall circularity along the entire product lifecycle.
So, what are these KPIs that determine circularity in particular?
In general, these are metrics that measure and track the progress of a company or organisation towards a circular economy. Examples are:
- Recycling Rates, i.e. the percentage of materials that are recycled and reused.
- Closed Material Loops, i.e. the percentage of waste that is reused or recovered and not sent to landfill.
- Resource Efficiency, i.e. the ratio of resource inputs to outputs, indicating how much of each resource is used to produce a unit of product or service and how much becomes waste.
- Material Footprint, i.e. the total amount of material used to produce a product, including raw materials, packaging, and transportation.
Similar to the environmental impact assessment via LCA methods, one has to take a holistic perspective and identify circularity indicators for each single part of the entire service or product value chain. What does that mean in particular?
Let’s consider the lifecycle of a shirt. First, one has to look at the raw material supply and whether the involved resources come from circular input streams such as recycled materials or renewable resources. Regarding the manufacturing process, parameters such as closed-loop energy and water cycles or waste generation constitute important metrics for circularity. Furthermore, circular strategies in the design phase not only enable second life business opportunities but also impact what happens with the product at the end of life and therefore need to be considered for measuring circularity, as well.
However, effective circular product design only works if all these aspects are considered holistically and coherently. You have to make several decisions at the same time and be able to evaluate them correctly: For example, does it make more sense to use biodegradable instead of recycled materials? Are these available at the production site and can my supplier process them? Or should you rather change the product design to improve repairability, or maybe even build a take-back logistics model? In order to be able to make the right decision, interdisciplinary expertise and systems thinking are required, which in most cases is not yet part of the everyday product development process.
