Recycling

Recycled polyester has become a default sustainability claim across activewear, swimwear and outerwear, but its supply chain is less circular than its labelling suggests. Most of the material still comes from PET drink bottles, not discarded textiles, raising difficult questions about whether fashion is solving waste or diverting it from better-functioning recycling systems globally instead.

Textile circularity in Europe is entering a more demanding phase, as policy ambition collides with weak infrastructure and commercial uncertainty. At Antwerp’s SMART gathering, the discussion turns less on whether circular systems are needed than on whether reuse, sorting, recycling and trade can be made to function together under mounting regulatory and market pressure across the continent.

Blended textile waste is no longer being discussed as a marginal recycling problem but as an industrial systems challenge shaped by regulation, cost and infrastructure. In that debate, Peter Mangnus, Business Director Dawn Technology at Avantium, argues that progress will depend less on scientific novelty alone than on aligning feedstock, offtake, finance and policy support.

Textile recycling has long been treated as a waste management problem. A growing body of European regulation is repositioning it as a design problem—one that begins with what a product is made of, not where it ends up. New research examines how mono-material carpet construction interacts with the EU's environmental measurement framework, and finds the system significantly less settled than the policy ambition surrounding it.

The case for scaling textile-to-textile recycling across Europe has been made repeatedly in policy circles and industry forums. What has been done less clearly is the financial case. A new report by BCG and ReHubs models the full cost of reaching a meaningful recycling milestone by 2035 and concludes that even under optimistic assumptions, the actors most critical to the system would operate at a structural loss.

Textile recovery infrastructure in the United States is expanding, but remains uneven in scale and capability. Garment quality has declined, fibre complexity has increased, and industry-wide standardisation remains limited across the value chain—widening the gap between circularity ambition and material reality that recycling technology alone cannot close.

The United States generates roughly 17 million tonnes of textile waste each year. Approximately 85% of it ends in landfill or incineration. Extended Producer Responsibility legislation is now moving through California and several other states, with the EU tightening its own parallel framework simultaneously. The ambition is clear. What remains unclear is whether the collection infrastructure, sorting capacity, and economic incentives required to deliver on it exist in any coherent form.

A redesigned fusion enzyme accelerated PET breakdown under industrial conditions, marking a step forward in polyester textile recycling. The study showed that performance depended on matching enzyme design with plastic preparation, with reduced crystallinity enabling more efficient depolymerisation in otherwise resistant textile materials.

Blended textiles have long resisted viable recycling pathways, limiting circularity ambitions across the apparel sector. Toby Moss Chief Commercial Officer of Worn Again Technologies discusses how an operational accelerator plant marks a transition from controlled experimentation to industrial validation, while exposing the economic, material, and system-level challenges that must be resolved for textile-to-fibre recycling to scale.

The United States generates 17 million tonnes of textile waste annually, and the policy frameworks designed to address it are arriving faster than the infrastructure built to support them. California's SB 707 requires textile stewardship plans to be operational by 2030, yet the recovery network it depends on remains anchored in international reuse trade that the law was not designed to protect—and may inadvertently disrupt.