Enabling Systemic Circularity and a Collective Push for Industry-Wide Change

What the Partners Contributed and Gained

Participation in ESCF was not token—it demanded deep engagement from all. For Yee Chain, this meant drawing from years of hands-on trials in circular textile manufacturing. “As supply chain partners, we were committed to share our existing knowledge and to advance development/ use of new knowledge and tools to actively contribute to the project,” says Anett Soti, Global Sustainability and Circularity Scaling Manager at Yee Chain. The continuous back-and-forth with peers and facilitation by the Forum team helped surface common goals and unearth actionable insights.

Yee Chain participated in working groups focused on business models and waste reduction & waste management, contributing knowledge from their real-world implementation of regenerative organic cotton and closed-loop textile-to-textile (T2T) recycling. “We launched and soft landed very first regenerative organic cotton product lines with key brand partners on the global retail marketplace and T2T closed loop recycling product lines on the local-to-local retail marketplace with a lot of learnings to share and equip our industry,” outlines Su. They also had an active role in shaping the final report, ensuring it reflected insights from across the supply chain.

Crystal International, meanwhile, brought its operational expertise to the table. “Our role as a project partner was to provide insights from our operational experiences and sustainability initiatives. This included active participation in workshops, and contributing to discussions on prototypes and best practices for circularity,” says the spokesperson. Their team also ensured physical presence at the key in-person workshops in Singapore, which proved crucial to building trust and co-creating strategy.

Importantly, Crystal International also helped in amplifying the project’s reach. “With the social media toolkits and other communication materials prepared by the Forum, we also actively supported the project's outreach efforts.”

Still, both manufacturers acknowledge the challenge looming on the horizon: sustaining the momentum. “A key challenge is what’s next: sustaining momentum of the group, especially in a climate where the industry faces a lot of competing challenges,” Su points out. Crystal International echoes this sentiment. “Indeed, our next challenge is to draw out a feasible roadmap to progressively move forward our shared vision.” 

Learnings, Shifts, and What Comes Next

Beyond deliverables and discussions, the ESCF journey has been a deep learning curve for the partners involved. One of the most profound takeaways for Yee Chain was the ability to zoom out from the day-to-day grind and take a systems-level view of their work. 

“Forum for the Future always empowers us to slow down and to break free from our daily constraints. In our day-to-day work, it can be hard to see the bigger picture, but we sometimes must slow down so that we can go even faster,” says Soti. She praises the project’s focus on “futures tools”—methods that allow participants to imagine and work towards radical alternatives.

She also highlights how the structure of ESCF created space for honest engagement. “As a platform, ESCF is critical for us, as it has truly created a safe space for us to speak with other peers in the same space. It helps us not just think about our work more strategically, but also what the industry needs,” Soti recollects. Looking ahead, she believes deeper participation from brands and recyclers will be essential. “Achieving the goals of circularity is the same as playing a team sport, and we need a more collaborative structure to enable this,” she says. “What we will need for the next phase of ESCF is to involve more brand and recycler players across the supply chain, because a great number of producers together with some brands did the bold start.”

Crystal International drew similar conclusions. “Bringing stakeholders equally together, the voice of manufacturers is strengthening. We hope to continue to be in the course of action enabling the needed shift in circularity,” their spokesperson asserts. The company is particularly committed to proactive engagement and collaboration, which it sees as critical for fair, inclusive progress. “It enables a fair and inclusive involvement of different parties to understand the challenges and complexities in the transition.”

Karen Sim, Principal Sustainability Strategist at Forum for the Future, summarises ESCF’s broader ambition. “ESCF empowers partners to see beyond their daily work to the role they play in the wider system,” she says. “We enable partners to look past what is immediately ahead of them and instead look at the bigger picture as well as deeper beneath the surface to understand the root causes, beliefs and structures that keep the system in place.”

Sim also emphasises the need for new ways of collaborating. “While many are aware of the importance of collaboration, what’s also critical is how we collaborate differently for better outcomes,” she says. ESCF does this by pushing participants to go beyond the technical and into the “values and principles that the sector needs to transition to one that is socially just and ecologically safe.”

Last, she underlines, is the importance of constructive dialogue. “Across multiple fora, there can be limited space and time to build trust and enable constructive dialogue, hindering longer-term progress towards shared goals in the industry. This is something that ESCF will continue to provide.” Looking ahead, the Forum plans to focus on co-developing solutions to pressing systemic barriers and showcasing tangible case studies that demonstrate what bold collaboration can achieve.