A REVIEW OF KEY TRENDS AND UPDATES,
FROM ACROSS OUR GLOBAL INNOVATION COMMUNITY

Textiles Recycling
Textile recycling remains in its earliest innings commercially, with fiber-to-fiber recycling rates stuck below 1% and only four textile-to-textile facilities operating at meaningful capacity globally. The market is being jolted by regulatory pressure — the EU's Extended Producer Responsibility laws banning landfill and incineration are taking effect this summer, and California is advancing the first US textile EPR — but policy momentum is running ahead of infrastructure, with no innovator yet at commercial scale and cost premiums still largely undetermined. The central bottleneck isn't feedstock volume but feedstock purity: complex blended fabrics and mislabeled tags undermine every recycling pathway downstream, making sorting automation the most consequential near-term unlock across the whole value chain.

This publication is part of our CTG Monitor Service.