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This collection has been built by a community of passionate researchers, students, and industry professionals as part of <a href="https://worldcirculartextilesday.com/" target="_blank">World Circular Textiles Day</a> (WCTD). 


World Circular Textiles Day takes place every year on 8th October.  Our vision is to galvanise the collective ambitions and goals of people, organisations and businesses to reach a fully circular textiles world by 2050. Our mission is to provide a framework for circularity stakeholders to develop and deliver a collaborative, evolving roadmap and to chart circularity’s momentum annually from the 8th of October until 2050.

What does fully circular by 2050 mean?
- Shared textile resources, in the form of products and raw materials, are kept in **continual circulation**.
- Virgin resources are **replaced with circular materials**.
- Dignity, equity, and equality for the **people** involved in all parts of the circular value chain.

We need to know where we stand today to chart how to get to 100% Circularity by 2050. What circular activity is currently happening in the textiles and apparel industry, and where in the world is it happening? The WCTD Collection aims to answer this question by building the world’s largest digital library of circular textiles case studies. 

World Circular Textiles Day is proud to be supported by our 2022-23 Circular Hero Partners:
[Lenzing](https://www.lenzing.com/), [Texaid](https://retailsolutions.texaid.com/), [Bank & Vogue](https://www.bankvogue.com/), [Usha yarns limited](https://ushayarns.com/), [The Conduit](https://www.theconduit.com/), and [Asia Pacific Rayon](https://www.aprayon.com/en/)

## Want to contribute to the WCTD Collection? Sign up and add your circular textiles activities.





World Circular Textiles Day

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Starter Kit collection

Business case

Producing textile and leather products and processing them into apparel and accessories

Fashion and Textiles

Producing basic and specialty chemicals, inks, agricultural chemical such as fertilisers and pesticides, plastics including packaging, and rubber

Chemical and Plastic

Account for the systems perspective during the design process, to use the right materials, to design for appropriate lifetime and to design for extended future use

Design for the future

Designing to enable multiple uses and lifecycles of a product and its materials

Design for cyclability

Designing products to remove any barriers to recycling and enable easy recyclability

Design for recycling

Make collected and sorted recyclables available for use by citizens, small businesses up to large scale industrial processes. 

Use recyclables

Derive chemicals and fuels from organic waste matter, for example, wasted fats, grease and oils can be used for biodiesel production. Food waste such as corn starch and sugar cane can be used for PLA (Polylactic Acid) to replace plastic packaging, liquid fats and solid meat products can be used as raw materials in the rendering industry (animal food, cosmetics, soap, etc.).


Derive fuel and materials

Slow strategies aim to keep materials in use for as long as possible, for example through design for durability and repairability. A more circular economy is also a slower one: materials, components, and products—and even buildings and infrastructure—that we lock in stocks are made to last. This will lower material demand in the long run, in essence also serving to narrow resource flows.

Slow

Industries

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The principles of a circular economy concern designing out waste, regenerating ecosystems and keeping items in use. Decoupling the economy from material flows—improving the rate of resource productivity faster than the economic growth rate—is also a consistent guide. By evolving with the growing number of applications of circular economy principles, and consolidating these strategies across thematic areas, Circle Economy’s Key Elements Framework (KE) renders the elements of the circular economy salient and serves as a basis to derive contextual strategies and interventions. 


The Framework consists of:
- Core Elements: Activities directly handling product or material flows; and uniquely,
- Enabling Elements: those that remove obstacles for core actors.


Key elements of the circular economy

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Circle Economy's framework of strategies and activities that define the circular economy

Urban Opportunities

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Based on the work of [Bocken et al. (2016)](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/309699661_Product_design_and_business_model_strategies_for_a_circular_economy), the Four Flows Framework serves as a simple framework for managing resource flows in a circular economy by using less (Narrow), using for longer (Slow), using again (Cycle), and using clean, regenerative materials and energy (Regenerate).

These different principles of circular economy can be applied to our socioeconomic metabolism: we can design stocks like buildings, infrastructure, machinery, and vehicles to be rich resource mines for the future, and design manufactured goods and consumables to be cycled and made regenerative. Furthermore, the focus must also centre on getting more value out of fewer materials. Achieving the aims of a circular economy—minimising material use, regenerating the Earth, and preventing material losses—can be done through these four key strategies mentioned above.

Source: Circle Economy. (2023). *[The circularity gap report 2023](https://www.circularity-gap.world/2023)* (p.22). Amsterdam: Circle Economy. 

Four Flows Framework

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 From garbage to garment in three steps: divert—convert—revert.
Our technology turns complex “end-of-life” textiles into new yarns that can be used again and again and again. 

     Working with designer and sustainability advocate, Madeleine Lyon, textile upcycler Ambercycle recently released the Cycora x MsLyon collection dropped on May 18 with its Cycora by Ambercycle a system that produces yarns to create new clothing from textile waste. Photo: Ambercycle   The Los Angeles-based brand Ambercycle is giving customers a new look into the lifecycle of their clothing. The new collection of Cycora by Ambercycle is designed to be an earth-friendly alternative to polyester, as less than one percent of this material is recycled every year. Cycora’s goal is to turn unwanted garments into something useful. “Our raw materials are end-of-life textile clothing that we regenerate into new Cycora yarns and fabrics,” Ambercycle CEO Shay Sethi said. “A key concern in this process is the upfront identification and sorting the different types of fabrics to inform the best end-of-life solutions. A digital-care label is essential to embracing the broader vision for circularity, as it enables a more streamlined and scalable way for us to regenerate material.” Ambercycle partnered with label-and-tag manufacturer Avery Dennison to launch the collection with each piece containing a unique, scannable QR code to tell the story of the garment. The QR code allows customers to find out how their garment was produced. Avery Dennison’s digital-care label solution, which is linked to an app and data platform, tells the customer how the clothing was manufactured and reveals the materials it contains. It also allows brands to enhance their connections with customers. “When the consumer no longer needs the item, they can scan the QR code to see what needs to happen to properly dispose of the garment,” Sarah Swenson, global senior sustainability manager, Avery Dennison RBIS said. “In this case, if they send the garment back to Ambercycle it will be recycled back into a new textile. Brands can benefit from access to a deeper level of data both in terms of shopper engagement and also understanding just how many items remain in the circular economy.” The Cycora x MsLyon collection dropped on May 18 and was done with designer and sustainability advocate, Madeleine Lyon. Her goal was to “capture the natural elements around us and push them into a more simplistic, optimistic aesthetic to inspire consumers to have a peek into how interconnected our world is,” according to a press release. “As we built the physical infrastructure to take in and reprocess material, we knew we had to think about the digital infrastructure to enable full circularity,” Sethi explained. “The digital care labels in collection one will help us track Cycora garments so that their path to be Ambercycled again at their end of life is seamless. Together with Avery Dennison, we believe this will be a transformative step forward into the inevitable circular future.” The limited preorder of Cycora x MsLyon is now closed, but additional collections are planned for the future with a Cycora x Knarli coming soon. 

North Carolina

Los Angeles

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Ambercycle is pioneering a regeneration processes for landfill-destined textile ‘waste’ that enables true circularity for garments, creating virgin like materials that overcome the limitations of the mechanical recycling processes.

We have the ability to separate fibers within textiles on a molecular level and reprocess them the way virgin materials are processed.

Ambercycle 

<p>Cycora is a closed-loop circular yarn created by regenerating textile waste using Ambercyle systems, which eliminates the use of virgin polyester and prevents valuable materials from ending up in a landfill or being incinerated. Cycora is designed with real end-of-life solutions meaning 100% of the yarn can be fully recycled without loss of quality.</p><p>The Ambercycle system uses a biological recycling process that separates fibres within garments at a molecular level and reprocesses the materials in the same way as virgin materials allowing for limitless recycling.</p>