While the textile community envisions a circular future, achieving that goal has been a bumpy ride with setbacks sometimes overshadowing advances surrounding issues regarding quality, consistency and investment. However, new developments offering increased efficiency, productivity - and perhaps profitability - are accelerating innovation in textile processing and recycling for circularity.

Currently less than one percent of fiber used in clothing is being recycled into new garments and only 0.3% of the fashion industry is truly circular, according to Circle Economy. What look to be circular change makers going forward are high-tech solutions, a modern approach to industry-wide collaboration and legislative action.  

Historically the textile industry has been cautious about adopting emerging new technologies and manual work prevailed. But brands and suppliers are becoming more receptive to novel solutions. “There is a need for accuracy with speed and efficiency in order for circular systems to evolve,” explains Rebecca Geppert, partnership manager, Refiberd, a West Coast-based startup creating a more transparent textile industry through proprietary fiber sorting technology.

“The fastest way to reduce carbon and increase natural resource savings is to use a material that already exists,” shares Liz Alessi, sustainability and circularity senior advisor, Liz Alessi Consulting. She adds, “The fabric still has value even if the garment doesn’t.” Alessi highlights a rapidly evolving category of textile service producers that are giving rise to a new sector of the fashion business that didn’t exist 10 years ago. She notes that these systems are replicating worldwide. For example, the U.S.-based ReCircled is opening facilities in Spain and Japan; European firm ReValorem has moved to the States. Like the textile industry itself, “the waste problem is global, too,” says Alessi.

Another trend: Collaboration is in, going it alone is out. Last month textile-to-textile recycler Circ launched Fiber Club in partnership with Fashion for Good and Canopy. The T2T Alliance also debuted in March. Both groups believe a collective approach is key to circular progress. “The textile industry is disjointed and distributed, which often makes innovation challenging,” Circ CEO Peter Majeranowski explains in a prepared statement. “By combining our purchasing power and aligning on long-term commitments, we’re making it easier and more cost-effective for brands to adopt recycled materials at scale.”  

Eye on AI

Refiberd uses hyperspectral imaging (obtaining detailed spectral information across contiguous bands to provide a “fingerprint” of each pixel) and proprietary AI to accurately identify the material composition of textiles within two percent of actual composition. The technology has applications across the industry; including sortation for textile to textile recycling, feedstock quality assurance, hazardous contaminant detection and automation for apparel resale.

“We know that 40 plus percent of textile goods’ content labels are inaccurate, making sortation of post-consumer goods difficult. Other material identification methods such as chemical analysis of materials is accurate, but it is also slow, costly and destructive. Technologies using NIR spectroscopy are promising, but current options are limited, as they cannot process blended fabrics and darker dyes,” states Geppert. “Textile to textile recyclers will require more advanced technology as they scale, and this technology will need to account for accuracy and automation in order to meet quality standards and cost targets for recycled materials. The sortation sector will need to use methods that allow for highly accurate sorting into feedstock bales with verifiable purity, and recyclers will need to perform quality assurance on their incoming feedstock to validate their suppliers and predict their output yields.”

Geppert believes the textile industry is becoming more receptive to using AI, noting that there are several AI tools in place in the industry when it comes to retail and customer acquisition. “The challenge we typically face at Refiberd is a lack of transparency around the ground truth of material information. Our team knows that the industry needs to understand the true composition of materials, whether that data is used for traceability, sorting, or recycling. However, until these circular applications are at scale, it is difficult to implement this technology, and we first need to bring awareness to the industry about the inaccuracy of material composition data that exists today.”

Point of View  

“In the world of circularity, there has been a great deal of effort put into how to manage finished goods and that’s where today’s service providers come in,” says Alessi, who addressed this topic in her presentation, “The Crisis of Stuff: Immediate Solutions for Circularity,” at Premiere Vision in New York City earlier this year. “Service providers emerged over the years because you can’t go from finished goods to recycler, like you can when recycling from post-industrial, pre-consumer waste, like cutting room scraps, where the material is known, uncontaminated and there’s lots of the same thing going into a production run.”

Providers are needed for reverse logistics, assessment based on value hierarchy, and determining brands’ intentions for the finished goods. She offers as example, service providers doing disassembly to create pure streams of materials that then can go into recyclers systems. “It’s an important role being played in this sector.” ‍

Legislative Actions

California’s Responsible Textile Recovery Act of 2024 (SB 707)
is the first law in the United States to hold clothing producers responsible for the end-of-life management of their products. The law aims to reduce the amount of textile waste that ends up in landfills. Producers must join a Producer Responsibility Organization (PRO) by July 1, 2026; The PRO must create a plan for collecting, reusing, repairing, and recycling textiles; By 2030, each PRO must implement a stewardship program  Noncompliant producers may face penalties of up to $50,000 per day.

The Strategies to Eliminate Waste and Accelerate Recycling Development (STEWARD) Act focuses on monitoring textile waste and recycling. It combines previous legislation aimed at improving recycling infrastructure and accountability measures for packaging, plastics, and organic materials, and takes an important first step for textile recycling through new data collection requirements.

ACT (American Circular Textiles) is a bill to incentivize circular fashion by developing and supporting circular textile policy opportunities to create sustainable manufacturing jobs, maximize resource allocation, educate consumers, and protect supply chains and the environment.