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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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Business case

Impact on the availability of resources as well as their effect on living organisms, ecosystems, and components of the environment.

Ecological Impact

Reduced green house gas emissions released into the biosphere

Reduce Emissions (SDG13)

Reduced use of virgin materials and/or an increase of the use of secondary and bio-based materials

Reduce Material Consumption (SDG12)

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)

Reduced use and withdrawal of water and rate of recycling and reuse of water

Save Water (SDG6)

Producing and providing business and consumer goods and services

Goods and Services

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

Fashion and Textiles

Ensure renewable, reusable, non-toxic resources are utilised as materials and energy in an efficient way

Prioritise regenerative resources

Utilise waste streams as a source of secondary resources and recover waste for reuse and recycling

Use waste as a resource

Utilise bio-based, reusable, non-toxic and non-critical materials

Regenerative materials

Reuse, repurpose, and recycle waste streams within the same industry

Valorise waste streams - closed loop

Using bio-based materials such as bioplastics, mushroom-based materials, etc.

Alternative bio-based materials and inputs

Transforming waste products, materials for reuse within the same industry

Closed loop upcycling

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

Regenerate strategies phase out hazardous or toxic materials and processes and substitute them with regenerative biomass resources. A circular economy aims to mimic natural cycles—by shifting to more regenerative farming practices, for example—while also maximising the share of circular biomass that enters the economy. Regeneration can happen both at the systems level (by designing regenerative processes) as well as at the product level (by switching synthetic to organic fertilisers, for example).

Regenerate

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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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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The Conservation x Labs Microfiber Innovation Challenge has announced a biotech start-up formed at the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) called Werewool was one of five winners among 19 countries that won the competition.
The challenge was to seek a solution to the pollution caused by microplastics. The biotech company was awarded a share of a 525,000 thousand dollars prize pool. In addition, the group is eligible to receive another 25 thousand dollars in funding. The Challenge was funded by the Flotilla Foundation and The Arthur Vining Davis Foundations.
The company uses the tools of biotechnology to design biodegradable and nontoxic fibers with performance properties like colour and stretch built-in to create long-lasting garments. Seven industry experts selected the winner based on the team’s environmental impact, feasibility, growth potential and the novelty of their approach. With the funding, Werewool aims to bring its fiber to the market and produce enough fiber to use a circular knitting machine within two years.
Werewool was formed at the FIT in 2018 as a student project that entered the Biodesign Challenge, a global undergraduate biotechnology competition. It was co-founded by Chui-Lian Lee, Valentina Gomez and Theanne Schiros.
Schiros, Werewool’s chief science officer, said in a statement: “Nature did a lot of research and development for us. This new fiber innovation space breaks down the barriers between fields.”
Lee, co-founder, and CEO, added: “Werewool envisions biodegradable yoga pants and rain jackets, colour without dyes, and performance without plastics. Support from the Microfiber Innovation Challenge is a game-changing boost that accelerates our realisation of following nature's blueprints for a new class of performance textiles,” according to the Microfiber Innovation Challenge.



We are working on refining the composition of our fibers to minimize their impact on the environment—we are starting to explore composite materials and waste streams to minimize our fiber’s footprint. 
+ So where does the color of your fibers come from?
The color of our fibers can be attributed to protein structure! The way light hits these proteins gives them their natural color and fluorescence!

+ What does structural performance properties mean?
Nature uses structure-function relationships for performance. This means that the physical shape of a protein can give the protein “building block” specific properties. For example, The protein collagen is shaped like a spring/spiral, as a result, this protein is known to have elastic properties! 
This is a great video on explaining how proteins get their shape!
link
+ How does Werewool contribute to make the fashion industry circular and waste-free?
Our fibers will support a circular fashion industry by providing textile manufacturers with a fiber source that can be returned to the earth as nutrients at the end of their useful life. In addition, Werewool fibers will be designed to have features such as color and stretch built into the fiber on the DNA level, minimizing the fashion industry’s environmental footprint by eliminating the water polluting and chemical intensive dyeing and finishing processes that the industry is currently reliant on. 
+ Why the name Werewool?
Our first project together explored the idea that proteins come from DNA—which can come from anywhere, chickpeas, goldfish, your great aunt cathy! Ultimately we were asking our audience to ask themselves—could humans be the new source of wool?  

New York

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Werewool is a biotechnological company, designing a revolutionary fiber development platform to create biodegradable fibers with tailored aesthetic and performance properties

Werewool

<p>To mitigate the fashion industry’s environmental impact, Werewool is designing a revolutionary fiber development platform to create biodegradable fibers with tailored aesthetic and performance properties. Inspired by nature, and utilizing the tools of biotechnology, Werewool is developing a platform to design fibers at the DNA level for sustainable textiles with inherent properties such as color, moisture management, and stretch, that meet the demands of today’s consumers</p>