Fashion for Good has launched its Sorting for Circularity USA Project, an 18-month project focused on the North American textile-to-textile recycling market that promises to provide the most representative snapshot of textile waste composition generated in the United States.
- The results of the project aim to inform decisions to unlock necessary investments and actions to scale collection, sorting and recycling innovations.
- Driven by Fashion for Good, the project is facilitated by brand partners—Adidas, Inditex, Levi Strauss & Co and Target, as well as Eastman, H&M and Nordstrom, as external partners.
The Work: This effort is being seen as crucial to understanding and evaluating the business case for textile-to-textile recycling, ensuring that used textiles move to their best and highest end use.
- Building on the learnings from Sorting for Circularity Europe and India, this project aims to highlight the opportunity to accelerate textile recycling with the most representative snapshot of textile waste composition generated in the United States.
- It aims to achieve this through two objectives—conducting an extensive consumer survey to map the journey a garment takes from closet to end of use, and conducting a comprehensive analysis of post-consumer textiles using innovative, near-infrared spectroscopy (NIR) technology, provided by Matoha, to understand their composition.
- The project co-lead, Resource Recycling Systems, will drive the dissemination and analysis of the consumer survey together with NYS Center for Sustainable Materials Management, and execute the textile composition analysis across the USA with support from advisory organisations Circle Economy and SMART.
- SMART, one of the largest used fibre trade associations, will liaise with its used clothing and fibre industry members to participate in the project.
- Circle Economy, having co-led the European project, will serve to guide implementation of the waste analysis methodology.
The Framework: Sorting for Circularity, a framework created by Fashion for Good and Circle Economy, aims to (re)capture textile waste, expedite the implementation of game changing technologies and drive circularity within the fashion value chain.
- The framework is based on insights from the Fashion for Good and Apparel Impact Institute’s collaborative report “Unlocking the Trillion Dollar Fashion Decarbonisation Opportunity”, which charts a trajectory for the industry to meet its net-zero ambition by 2050.
- The project was first initiated in Europe, and has now expanded to include Sorting for Circularity India and the US.
What They Said:
We are excited to be taking the Sorting for Circularity Project into new territory and entering the North-American market. After successful initiatives across such large regions as Europe and India, the US presents a great opportunity for innovation and circularity considering the volume of the consumer market and post-consumer textiles landscape. This project will lay the foundation to make informed investment and infrastructure decisions, demonstrating the business case for alternative revenue streams from a vast untapped resource.
— Katrin Ley
Managing Director
Fashion for Good
We are advancing design and material innovations to produce more clothes that are used more, made to be made again using safe, recycled and renewable inputs that contribute to a more circular product cycle, where recycling infrastructure is critical in closing the loop. Through our partnership with Fashion for Good and the series of Sorting for Circularity projects, we're hopeful we'll uncover an opportunity to advance the circular economy to unlock scalable solutions that reduce the impact of the current take, make, waste model.
— Jeffrey Hogue
Chief Sustainability Officer
Levi Strauss & Co
We’re excited about this project as an essential piece in better understanding the textiles waste composition in the US. As we band together around this critical issue, the data will enable us to drive the transition of textile waste as a feedstock for our advanced recycling technologies where we break down waste material to its basic building blocks and create new materials without compromise.
— Claudia de Witte
Sustainability Leader
Eastman
