48 million tones of clothing are disposed worldwide every year. 73% are incinerated, 12% is reused, 12% is downcycled, and only less then 1% is turned into new clothes.

Circular.fashion's mission is to promote circularity by overcoming three core challenges:

● Brands need to design fashion for circularity.

● Consumers need to be engaged in reusing and returning clothes for recycling.

● Sorters and recyclers need to have access to material information to identify clothing for resale, reuse, and closed-loop recycling.

In this direction, in addition to consultation, circular.fashion promotes two solutions:

- The circular fashion system is an industry-connecting platform for all stakeholders to collaboratively realize a cradle-to-cradle-inspired circular economy for textiles. At the center of the circular.fashion system is circularity.ID®, which holds material and product data, care instructions, and take-back service offers, along with a product’s entire story. This ensures future reuse, reselling, and recycling at the highest possible level of sustainability. Through this system, data becomes accessible to stakeholders in the fashion ecosystem at any point in time to assess and handle products in a circular economy. The consumer is able to scan the circularity.ID® which can be a QR Code or NFC Tag via smartphone. At a garment’s end of life, the circularity.ID® enables sorters to find the best matching recycler. With this system circular.fashion makes sure that products of today become the resources of tomorrow.

- The Circular Design Software supports fashion brands to design circular and sustainable products in a lean and efficient process. The Circular Design Software, containing the Circular Material Library and Circular Design Guidelines, provides fashion brands with knowledge, tools, and resources to create fully recyclable clothes.

After six years of research, pilots, and collaborative stakeholder dialogue, the company has developed circularity. ID® data standard. This open data initiative allows other companies to share and exchange the same information, also providing interoperability among different software solutions. This data standard is publicly available in a Github repository, presented in the link sections.

An example of the outcomes of this solution is a pilot with Zalando, an online fashion platform, together with Fashion for Good and circular. fashion. In this project, a capsule collection was developed that allows consumers to learn more about the origin of products and how to extend the product’s life.

In addition, circular.fashion also offers workshops and training to help fashion brands incorporate circularity into their business models. According to the website of the startup, it has more than 70 brands, global players, and 500 designers trained and consulted since 2019.

Image source: https://circularity.id/