Circle Economy’s Textiles Programme aims to collectively reimagine and redesign our systems to ensure a fair and regenerative textile industry by reducing the textiles waste mountain and enabling the data, technology and infrastructure needed to valorise textile waste at end-of-life at scale.
The current system to design, produce, distribute, use and dispose of textiles, clothing, leather and footwear goods operates in an almost completely linear way, exhausting both natural and human capital. Large amounts of finite resources are extracted to produce billions of new items each year, which are used for an increasingly short period of time—often ending up landfilled or incinerated. A circular textiles industry is a system where products are consistently made, used, collected and reintroduced into the supply chain as raw materials.
The Circle Textiles Programme (CTP) was launched in 2014 as the first sector programme within Circle Economy. Since 2014, CTP has completed many projects with focus areas of textile-to-textile recycling, circular business models, design for cyclability, technology assessments and circular infrastructure developments and expanded every year due to the powerful projects it develops and executes. Its community of supporters, members and strategic partners also continue to grow; with foundation support from the Laudes Foundation and in close collaboration with partners such as Gap, Oxfam, the Amsterdam Fashion Institute, VF Corporation and Fashion for Good. The majority of our work are multi-year and multi-stakeholder practical projects, a selection of which can be found below.