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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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Article / Report

Minimise waste through diversion: Instead of sending waste to landfill, it is redirected into other industrial processes for handling, treatment, recycling, recovery, or reuse in various forms. 

Minimise waste through design: At the outset of a process of project, plan and design such that there is zero waste or minimal waste during production, use, and at end of life. 

Minimise Waste (SDG12)

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

Designing to reduce waste during production and use

Design out waste

Using materials that can be easily reused or recycled after use

Reusable, recyclable materials and inputs

Using waste materials that have been processed and recycled to produce new products within the same industry

Using closed loop recycled materials

Designing products so they use as little materials, water, energy, etc. as possible during use

Design for resource efficiency

Advocate for circular change

Develop infrastructure to support resource cycling

VISION:
Raw materials are renewable, recyclable and safe, kept in continual circulation.

DETAIL:
Imagine a time when…the raw materials that are used to make things are sourced from existing products and regenerative agriculture, via carbon negative and climate neutral processes. Biodegradable raw materials are used for products with biodegradable end routes. Toxic chemicals have been washed out of the global materials pool, disposed of safely and replaced with beneficial alternatives. Virgin fibres made from fossil fuels have been banned, while secondary synthetic fibres, derived from what was already in the system, are kept in constant circulation as a resource. Circularity accounting methods, built on science-based metrics, help to manage a balanced system of resources, across all industries, and in line with the planet’s environmental limits.

Raw Materials and Planetary Boundaries

Cycle strategies aim to cycle and reuse materials at their highest value: they maximise the volume of secondary materials re-entering the economy, ultimately minimising the need for virgin material inputs and therefore also narrowing flows. Of course, virgin materials will always be needed to a degree: all materials degrade and can’t be cycled infinitely, use energy, and require blending with virgin materials to maintain strength and functionality.

Cycle

Impacts

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Industries

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A framework of policy instruments that enabled and encourage the transition to the circular economy

Policy Instruments

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A framework of policy instruments that enable and stimulate the transition to the circular economy

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

It is 2050.  Full systems change has taken place. This wouldn’t have been possible without the immediate action and radical steps taken from 2020 onwards. Many targets had to be identified in the early 2020s and achieved by 2030 to ensure that the 2050 goal happened in full. A sense of urgency, turbo stakeholder collaboration, supportive government regulation and clear, data driven targets enabled the mindsets and systems change needed to transform to a fully circular textiles ecosystem.

A circular economics model underpins what we have created. It reflects and supports a living organism made up of makers, users and restorers, interacting across vibrant and interconnected networks. Checks and balances, alongside transparency and accountability, ensure a healthy system. Financial, environmental, and social metrics have the purpose of serving communities and the planet. There is shared ownership of profit and loss – across all three metrics – throughout the value chain.

This is what we’ve achieved over the last 30 years:

WCTD Themes

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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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   100% Infinna - a unique, circular textile fiber that’s produced using Infinited Fiber’s technology Infinited Fiber Company & Fanny Haga  
Infinited Fiber Company is a supercool Finnish fashion and textile technology start-up which literally turns textile waste into up-cycled fibres that are being used by some of the world’s leading fashion brands like Patagonia, H&M and Wrangler. I caught up with CEO Petri Alava to find out more. Afdhel Aziz: Petri, welcome! Please tell us a little bit about what Infinited is as a company - what is its purpose and how do you bring it to life? Petri Alava: Our aim is to bring joy and hope back into people’s closets by making textile circularity an everyday reality. Clothing and how we dress – and home textiles, too – are such an important part of our identity. Unfortunately, the fashion and textile industry in its current state is quite destructive to the planet. Many people are feeling really burdened by this. We see a better way and want to be part of the solution.  Two of the major problems the fashion industry needs to solve are 1) its reliance on resource intense and polluting virgin raw materials, and 2) finding a valuable use for the more than 92 million tons of textile waste that are incinerated or landfilled at great environmental cost around the globe annually.

Infinited Fiber’s technology offers a solution for both. We use textile waste as our raw material – raggedy t-shirts, worn-out jeans, old bedsheets, all kinds of textiles that are made primarily from cotton and that people have chucked out. In our process, these textiles lose their history. They are cleaned and broken down at the polymer level through responsible chemistry to be born again as unique, new, high-quality textile fibers that have a soft and natural look and feel like cotton. We call this reborn or regenerated textile fiber Infinna. What’s exciting is that many of the world’s top clothing brands have tried and tested this new fiber and found it to work really well in a whole range of textiles from denim to single jersey to French terry to shirting fabric. Neither consumers nor designers want to have to compromise on style or comfort, and we’ve been able to demonstrate that with Infinna, they don’t have to.    Petri Alava, CEO of Infinited Fiber Company Infinited Fiber Company & Fanny Haga   Aziz: What is ‘textile circularity,’ the idea you champion and how does your technology help drive it?
Alava: Good question. Circularity is essentially about getting rid of waste and reducing pressure on natural resources. It’s about keeping what’s already been created in circulation for as long as possible.
This means reusing or repurposing textiles when they’re still in good enough condition for that to happen: pass your jeans on to someone else if you’ve grown out of them, cut them into shorts when they get frayed, use your worn-out t-shirts as cleaning rags.
When textiles reach the end of their useful lives and are beyond reuse or repair, circularity is about finding ways to make sure these textiles don’t end up at dumpsters or in landfills. Sadly, this is what currently happens to most of the clothes we throw away. Think about this: a garbage truck of textile waste is incinerated or landfilled every single second of every day. That’s a lot of waste wasted. At the same time, vast areas of land and huge amounts of water, pesticides and fertilizers are used to grow more cotton, trees are felled for viscose production, and oil is drilled to produce polyester.
It’s time to recognize the planetary boundaries we’re up against and to rethink how we produce the things we wear and use.
This is where innovations like ours come into the picture. Preventing textile waste from ending up as pollution and instead using it as the raw material for new textiles. Closing the loop between waste and raw materials and keeping what’s already out there in circulation.
Aziz: What is Infinna and why is it such an exciting development?
Alava: Infinna is the brand name for the unique, circular textile fiber that’s produced using Infinited Fiber’s technology. There are many reasons to be excited about Infinna. First and foremost, it enables the creation of beautiful, comfortable clothes 100% out of textile waste that’s been born again as Infinna. And Infinna can also be created out of other cellulose-rich waste streams like used cardboard, paper, or even agricultural residues like rice or wheat straw. No matter which of these goes in, what comes out is the same, premium textile fiber. Infinna is biodegradable, it doesn’t contain microplastics to clog up the oceans, and clothing made with it can be recycled together with other textile waste in the same process. So, there are many exciting aspects to it.
From the industry’s perspective, I think the most exciting thing is that this technology is the missing piece that enables circularity and high-quality fiber-to-fiber regeneration for cellulose-based textiles. It offers solutions to some big problems the industry is trying to solve.
   Different stages of the process of creating Infinna out of discarded textiles Infinited Fiber Company & Fanny Haga  
Aziz: What are some of the brands you partner with and what have been some of the results and feedback so far?
Alava: We’re working with an amazing lineup of brands and manufacturing partners, and we’re happy to see that there is huge excitement around our innovation and its potential to help the brands deliver on their commitments to using recycled materials. There have been all kinds of demo garments produced already – dresses, skirts, t-shirts, hoodies, jeans, dress shirts, all kinds of things. And we are now in a situation where demand already exceeds what we’re able to supply from our pilot operation.
Boosting capacity to commercial scale is now our number one priority. We want everyone who wants to use Infinna to be able to do so. Our strategy is to license our technology to fiber producers. We’re currently also preparing to set up our own, flagship factory in Europe to speed up the delivery of the fiber to the market in this initial phase.
Some of the brands we work with are Patagonia, PVH Corp., Wrangler, BESTSELLER, and of course H&M Group, whose Weekday brand recently came out with the world’s first limited-edition jeans made with Infinna. It was wonderful to see the jeans sell out within 24 hours.
Stepping away from fashion, we’re also working with nonwovens manufacturers like Suominen, which is one of the world’s biggest producers of wipes. The nonwovens industry – which produces things like diapers and wet wipes – is dominated by polyester. As a biodegradable, microplastic-free fiber, we see huge potential for Infinna in the single-use items out there.    It’s time to recognize the planetary boundaries we’re up against and to rethink how we produce the ... [+] things we wear and use. Infinited Fiber Company  
Aziz: Finally, what do you hope all of this leads to in terms of the fashion industry embracing change?
Alava: It is clear from the data that the fashion industry cannot continue with business as usual. The environmental and the financial costs are too high. It’s estimated that clothing underutilization and lack of recycling leads to $500 billion in lost value every year.
As we’ve said, we think it’s time for the textile industry to lose its virginity. The industry needs to stop relying on the continued production of new, virgin materials at a heavy environmental cost. At the same time, the systems for collecting and sorting textile waste need to become widespread and robust so that discarded textiles can be kept in the loop and used as raw material for new textiles instead of being burned or landfilled.
I think the awareness is already there, and the recognition that things need to change. My hope is that now the industry really accelerates its action to right the wrongs and starts to give people guilt-free clothing material options. We need to work together to bring joy back into people’s closets.


Finland

Espoo

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Infinited Fiber Company 

<p>Infinited Fiber Company&nbsp;is a Finnish fashion and textile technology start-up that literally turns textile waste into up-cycled fibers that are being used by some of the world’s leading fashion brands like Patagonia, H&amp;M, PVH, Inditex, BESTSELLER, and Wrangler. Their technology enables circularity and high-quality fiber-to-fiber regeneration for cellulose-based textiles.</p>