European Union

The leitmotif across panels and presentations at the just-concluded 19th edition of the Textile ETP Annual Conference in the Spanish city of Alcoy was unmistakable: the textile sector is hungry for specifics. Companies—large and small—are calling for clearer guidelines, harmonised standards, and structured pathways to circularity and digital transition.

The European Commission has enforced the much-awaited Product Environmental Footprint Category Rules (PEFCR) for apparel and footwear thus giving this industry segment a standard methodology to calculate product environmental footprints, with specific category requirements.

A press conference for the upcoming Textiles Recycling Expo to be held in Brussels this June discussed how the event could be a catalyst to spotlight real-world solutions and accelerate their adoption across the European market, especially at a time when the political and economic case for transformation is finally aligning—if only precariously—with technological readiness.

As the European Commission aims to simplify REACH – the most complex chemicals legislation in the world — the textile and clothing industry, represented by EURATEX, has called for a more efficient and coherent regulatory framework as a key essential to safeguard the competitiveness and innovation capacity of EU industry.

Seven natural fibre stakeholders have come together to appeal to the European Commission to put systems in place that will properly account for the environmental benefits of natural and organic fibres, and promote cooperation across EU institutions to support sustainable, resilient textile value chains.

Perspectives are varied, and it is not an open-and-shut case against US Prez Donald Trump as his political opponents would have us believe. The tariff calculations could be questionable and the unilateral announcement should be decried, but what’s amply clear is this: trade will never be the same again.

To succeed with the EU’s textiles strategy, a systemic shift in the textiles system is needed, moving towards higher quality, longer use, reuse, repair and recycling. The European Environment Agency’s (EEA) new module of the Circularity Metrics Lab (CML) on textiles analysed 14 metrics and came up with some key findings.

The five-point ‘EU Recyclers’ Manifesto: Increasing textiles circularity by 2030: Threading up circularity’ by EuRIC’s Textiles Branch, highlights the unprecedented crisis facing the region’s textile collection and recycling sector, worsened by rising costs, low demand, and the impact of ultra-fast fashion.

FEAD and EuRIC have come up with a set of recommendations to address the crises facing the post-consumer textile collection, sorting and recycling industries following the introduction of the EU-wide mandatory Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) scheme for textiles.

The T-REX (Textile Recycling Excellence) project, a consortium of 13 industry leaders, committed to developing a blueprint for a harmonised EU framework for textile-to-textile recycling, has emphasised the need for standardised definitions of recyclability, scalable recycling technologies, and policy measures that align with industry realities.