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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

Reduced green house gas emissions released into the biosphere

Reduce Emissions (SDG13)

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)

Reduced use of fossil fuel energy sources and/or increased use of renewable energy

Reduce Energy Consumption

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

Fashion and Textiles

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

Alternative bio-based materials and inputs

Enacting measures that optimise water use

Water efficiency

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

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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Natsai Audrey Chieza is founder and CEO at Faber Futures. She is a leading thinker on the transformative role design can play in the equitable development of consumer biotechnology. With over ten years of experience co-developing multi-sector innovation strategies and shaping policy with global institutions, she leads a dynamic team that translates value and transforms systems across education, design, life science and manufacturing industries. ​ Over a decade of experimentation, Chieza established novel
design-driven processes and for bacteria textile colouration, which have been exhibited internationally, including at Ars Electronica, Design Museum, Pompidou Centre, Vitra Design Museum and the Science Gallery Dublin. Chieza is a member of the current session of the World Economic Forum's Global Futures Council on Synthetic Biology, contributing to the industry's roadmap for a world changed by COVID-19. A TED speaker, Chieza has given talks on transdisciplinary innovation, including at Design Indaba, SxSW, BoF, and Dezeen Day, and has taught on biodesign programmes at Central Saint Martins in London and the Bartlett School of Architecture. She was awarded the INDEX award in 2019 and is named on ICON Design 100 2019, Evening Standard Progress 1000 2019, It's Nice That Ones to Watch 2019, and OkayAfrica's
100 Women 2018.

‘If a microbe produces a pigment, how do we work with it to dye textiles?’
This seemingly simple question, explored over time, reveals a complex web of interdependence between the living and non-living, and across multiple scales.
We began working with a wild strain of the soil-dwelling organism Streptomyces coelicolor to see whether its naturally secreted pigment compound could be used to dye textiles. In collaboration with Professor John Ward and his synthetic biology lab at University College London’s Department of Biochemical Engineering, we discovered that unique interactions between S. coelicolor and protein fibres could yield a colourfast finish without the use of chemicals – and with significantly reduced water usage compared to current industrial dyeing methods.
In the years since, Faber Futures has developed design-driven protocols engineered to achieve specific aesthetic and performance-related material outcomes – delivering products which not only possess embedded value in themselves, but also demonstrate the viability of new methods and technologies on the wider industrial scale.
Our process has drawn upon an interdisciplinary spectrum of knowledge and making practice, incorporating thinking and methodology from design, craft, engineering and science. This new taxonomy of making has been enabled by the global cultural shift towards the blurring of disciplinary boundaries, driven by the possibilities of new technologies, and the increasing cultural, economic and industrial necessity of a sustainable model of production and consumption.
Faber Futures’ journey with bacteria dyes continues to reveal astonishing discoveries – and generate ever more intriguing questions, which we have explored through a series of research experiments for exhibition commissions, and corporate and cultural residency programmes.
Explore Featured Experiments


London

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Faber Futures

While the textile industry is one of the most polluting in the world, most of the ecological harm caused by textile processing occurs at the finishing and the dyeing stage.Coelicolor is an organism, a power house for synthesizing organic chemical compounds. It produces an antibiotic called actinorhodin, which ranges in color from blue to pink and purple, depending on the acidity of its environment.Project Coelicolor by Faber Futures is based in this simple question:If a bacteria produces a pigment, how can we use it to dye textiles?The project achievement answer is the growth of the organism Streptomyces coelicolor directly onto silk, where each colony produces pigment around its own territory.This process generates very little runoff, and produces a colorfast pigment without the use of any chemicals while can also generate an organic pattern, a uniform dye or a graphic print.