Recycling

California’s attempt to build a large-scale textile recovery system is unfolding with limited precedents and incomplete data. Julie Cerenzia, Director at Cascadia Consulting, explains how the modelling behind the SB 707 debate draws on international comparisons, industry assumptions and evolving market realities to estimate the environmental and economic potential of diverting textile waste.

Textile waste in the United States remains largely invisible within municipal systems, even as millions of tonnes of clothing are discarded every year. Mattias Wallander, CEO of USAgain, argues that the challenge is not technological but structural, rooted in fragmented local regulation, constrained collection networks and the economics of scaling recovery infrastructure.

Each year, Californians discard approximately 1.2 million tonnes of textiles, costing local governments an estimated $99 million in landfill fees. A new state law, SB 707, shifts that cost directly to producers through a mandatory extended producer responsibility framework—the first of its kind for apparel in the United States. Research from USAgain and Cascadia Consulting Group examines what it will take to make the system function.

The economic case for textile recycling in India is no longer speculative. With a market projected to reach $3.5 billion by 2030 and the potential to create nearly one lakh green jobs, discarded fabric is increasingly being treated as recoverable capital. But a new government-commissioned report reveals that the systems required to actually capture that value remain underdeveloped, informal, and unevenly distributed across the country.

Worn Again Technologies has unveiled a Textile to Fibre Accelerator plant in Winterthur, Switzerland, marking a major step toward commercialising its chemical recycling process for polycotton textiles. The facility demonstrates recovery of polyester and cellulose from end-of-life garments and enables industrial-scale testing as the company advances toward planned commercial textile recycling production.

Asia's largest mechanical textile recycling cluster has spent the better part of a decade acquiring the infrastructure of sustainability—treatment plants, cleaner fuels, international certifications. A detailed diagnostic study now offers the most granular environmental assessment of Panipat to date, and its findings complicate the progress narrative: pollution persists, residue management remains opaque, and technology adoption is deeply uneven across the cluster's enterprises.

Recycled cotton has become one of fashion's most prominent sustainability credentials—and one of its least verifiable. No independent method has existed to confirm how much mechanically recycled cotton a garment actually contains, or whether it derives from post-consumer waste. Researchers are now proposing a laboratory-based toolbox that could, for the first time, provide that confirmation from the fibres themselves.

Recycling processes in the garment and footwear sector were found to carry heightened labour, environmental and governance risks, driven by widespread informality, low margins and hazardous working conditions. The analysis highlighted forced labour, child labour, unsafe facilities and criminal waste practices as material exposures within collection, sorting and reprocessing systems.

Finnish researchers and industry partners are developing a deposit-return collection machine that uses digital product passport data and AI-based imaging to sort used garments for resale or recycling. The TexMat system aims to simplify clothing returns for consumers, improve business profitability for reuse operators, and support higher textile collection and resale rates across Europe.

Researchers from the University of the Basque Country have demonstrated that ground mussel shells can function as an effective and more sustainable abrasive for denim sandblasting. The study shows the waste-derived material delivers comparable abrasion to garnet, reduces material consumption through reuse, and avoids environmental and health drawbacks linked to traditional finishing methods.