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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 ease of innovation, and facilitating uptake of innovations

Innovation

Scalability

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

While resources are in-use, maintain, repair and upgrade them to maximise their lifetime and give them a second life through take back strategies when applicable

Stretch the lifetime

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

Use waste as a resource

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

Work together throughout the supply chain, internally within organisations and with the public sector and communities to increase transparency and create joint value

Team up to create joint value

Use digital, online platforms and technologies that provide insights to track and optimise resource use, strengthen connections between supply chain actors, and enable the implementation of circular models



Incorporate digital technology

 Develop research, structure knowledge, encourage innovation networks and disseminate findings with integrity


Strengthen and advance knowledge

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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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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 Researchers working at the US$ 6 million (EUR 4.2 million) department claim to have discovered a closed-loop textile-to-textile recycling solution. This is based on a five-year R&D project in which they were exploring next-generation, eco-friendly and sustainable textiles. The aim of the investment is to study the chemistry of various textiles and determine the optimal processes and techniques required to achieve a circular textile economy. This work is in line with Singapore’s Zero Waste vision and the Singapore Green Plan 2030. The research centre, at Nanyang Technical University’s School of Materials Science & Engineering, was officially launched by Grace Fu, Singapore’s minister for sustainability and the environment, in August. Royal Golden Eagle is one of the biggest producers of viscose, employing more than 60 000 people across Indonesia, China, Brazil, Spain and Canada. The partners will conduct experiments at a pilot textile recycling plant in Singapore which is scheduled to begin operations by 2024. If successful, the producer plans to build a network of recycling plants in other cities. ‘Current textile recycling technologies, which rely primarily on a bleaching and separation process using heavy chemicals, cannot be implemented due to environmental laws,’ says company executive director Perry Lim. ‘At the same time, there is an urgent need to keep textiles out of the brimming landfills.’ He adds: ‘We aim to catalyse closed-loop, textile-to-textile recycling by developing optimal urban-fit solutions that can bring the world closer to a circular textile economy.’
Would you like to share any interesting developments or article ideas with us? Don't hesitate to contact us. 

 Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University (NTU) and the world’s largest viscose manufacturer Royal Golden Eagle (RGE) [3308:HK] jointly launched a textile recycling research center to produce new fabrics and materials from used fabrics such as old clothes, as reported by the Strait Times on August 4. This represents Singapore’s first attempt at recycling used textiles beyond simply reusing them. The center, named RGE-NTU Sustainable Textile Research Centre (RGE-NTU SusTex), will pilot its research at Singapore’s first textile recycling plant, which is expected to open as early as 2024 and recycle 8,760 tons of fabric waste per year at full capacity, equivalent to the weight of 58.4m T-shirts. The research center has received an SGD6m (USD4.36m) investment from RGE. Singapore is in urgent need of recycling textile waste, given that the country produced 189,000 tons of textile waste last year with only 4% of such waste repurposed, according to RGE executive director Perry Lim. Lim added that it is essential to devise new methods to recycle textiles into higher-quality materials to extend the service life of raw materials such as cotton. RGE seeks to build a low-carbon and energy-conserving textile recycling plant without the use of toxic chemicals such as bleach to minimize its environmental impact. The research center has a goal aligned with Singapore’s zero waste vision. Under the Sustainable Singapore Blueprint formulated in 2015, the nation aims to raise the domestic recycling rate to 30% by 2030, from 17%, 13%, and 13% in 2019, 2020, and 2021, respectively. Sources: https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/environment/new-textile-research-centre-launched-to-develop-recycling-techniques-for-new-textile-recycling-plant-here-in-2024 https://technode.global/2022/08/05/ntu-singapore-and-rge-launch-4-4m-joint-research-centre-to-tackle-textile-waste/ptsj https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/environment/recycling-bins-to-be-given-to-each-household-to-raise-domestic-recycling-rate 

Singapore

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Royal Golden Eagle

Nanyang Technological University

<p>Global resources-based manufacturing group, Royal Golden Eagle and Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University (NTU) have jointly launched a textile recycling research centre – RGE-NTU Sustainable Textile Research Centre. The S$6M joint research centre aims to accelerate research and innovation for the pilot of the nation’s first textile recycling plant planned for early 2024. The plant is targeted to recycle 8,760 tonnes of fabric waste per year at full capacity and it is a move under Singapore’s Zero Waste vision.</p>