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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

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 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 material use such as 3D printing, etc.

Material efficiency

Using <a href="https://echa.europa.eu/information-on-chemicals" target="_blank">materials that are not toxic or hazardous</a>.

Non-toxic materials and inputs

Using materials that can be easily reused or recycled after use

Reusable, recyclable materials and inputs

Enacting measures that optimise water use

Water efficiency

Manufactured goods, such as vehicles, textiles, appliances and equipment and their associated production processes are big employers but:
- production processes often rely on fossil fuels and currently drive one-third of the overshoot on the climate change planetary boundary due to its GHG production, 
- material- and energy-intensive industrial activities are linked to deforestation and drive 15% on both the land use and freshwater planetary boundaries, 
- manufacturing goods results in substantial amounts of hazardous industrial waste and leaks chemicals into the environment.

Here, circular solutions must tackle the full value chain, but material demand must also shrink: this will necessitate a societal shift to favouring sufficiency over excess and reducing consumption to sustainable levels. Our four key solutions for manufactured goods are:
- Mainstream industrial symbiosis and efficiency : Achieve process improvements, scrap diversion and reduction in yield losses through greater industrial symbiosis and efficiency. Foster tighter collaboration within and between industries to deliver powerful material and emissions savings.
- Extend the lifetime of machinery, equipment, and goods: Maximise the lifetime of goods that serve our daily needs to bring a number of environmental benefits. 
- Buy what's needed: Reduce the number of purchases of common electronic goods, appliances, and other equipment to sufficiency levels. 
- Eschew fast fashion in favour of sustainable textiles: Drastically reduce new clothing purchases. All used clothing should go on to be repaired, reused or, if needed, recycled appropriately. Prioritise natural and local textile manufacturing, as well as higher-quality and more durable garments. 




👕📱 Consumer Goods

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

Thematic Areas

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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 material has a leathery look and feel and can be as strong as animal leather. It also offers the possibility to be colored and patterned, and it does not contain any backing or supporting materials,” describes VTT’s Senior Scientist Géza Szilvay.
Fungal mycelium is a bio-based raw material that can be sustainably processed into leather-like materials. Until now, increasing the production volume with current methods has been challenging due to mycelium cultivation taking place in a planar two-dimensional form limited in size. “Our process makes it possible to overcome these size limitations,” says VTT’s Research Scientist Manuel Arias Barrantes.
VTT’s patent-pending technology for producing mycelium leather alternative materials is based on growing mycelium in common bioreactors. The benefits of this approach are that liquid fermentation in bioreactors is easily scalable to commercial scales and similar fermentation technology is already widely used in the food, chemical, and pharma industries. 
The film-making process developed by VTT enables continuous mycelium leather alternative production using VTT’s pilot equipment. The benefits of this manufacturing method are consistent quality, competitive production price, and reduced amounts of offcuts.
At the moment, the VTT team is exploring applications in the accessory, footwear, and garment segments. The researchers are now turning to improve tear strength and abrasion resistance by bio-based approaches. 
The work done at VTT will contribute to an accelerated availability of mycelium leather alternatives in the market.
Business Finland has funded the development work. 

   by Luana SteffenJuly 11, 2021  Share8   Humans have practiced leather making for over 7,000 years. Today, leather remains one of the most durable and versatile materials. However, an increasing number of consumers are beginning to avoid wearing products sourced from animals due to ethical concerns and the fact that it’s environmentally unsustainable.
The environmental consequences of current processing techniques have led manufacturers to create greener alternatives. Among them are scientists at VTT Technical Research Center in Finland, who have produced an alternative leather made from fungi. What’s more, they’ve demonstrated a new way to create continuous sheets of eco-friendly material at commercial scales.
VTT’s sustainable mycelium leather. (Credit: VTT)
Conventional leather production has a substantial environmental burden, with a carbon footprint of approximately 130 million tons annually. In addition, it involves vast amounts of land, water, and energy due to mass livestock farming, and processing the leather also has an impact, requiring significant amounts of toxic chemicals.
While so-called “vegan leather,” made from synthetic materials, avoids the issues around animal products, they require toxic chemicals to process and take a long time to biodegrade. It, therefore, causes the same problems as any synthetic plastic. Samples of VTT’s sustainable mycelium leather. (Credit: VTT)
Thankfully, the leather market has begun looking towards more sustainable, plastic-free, and vegan alternatives that avoid these problems entirely. Last year, two Canadian sisters produced vegan leather items out of apple peel waste collected from the juicing industry. Two Mexican friends made vegan leather from prickly pear cactus; now, mycelium’s latest alternatives are made.
The VTT team’s approach starts with threaded webs of mycelium, an organic material that sprawls out beneath the ground and supports mushrooms as they grow. Using this biomass to produce fabrics and textiles is something that has been done for a long time. However, the VTT scientists have refined these processes to create a skin-like material with similar texture and strength to actual leather.
A sample of the sustainable mycelium leather. (Credit: VTT)
Géza Szilvay, VTT Senior Scientist, said:
The material has a leathery look and feel and can be as strong as animal leather. It also offers the possibility to be colored and patterned, and it does not contain any backing or supporting materials.
In 2019, the scientists first revealed their process, but an issue remained concerning scaling it up for industrial-style production. This was mainly caused by limitations of mycelium cultivation, which could only occur in a two-dimensional form. To remedy the issue, the VTT team developed a new patent-pending technology that relies on liquid fermentation in standard bioreactors to scale the process up to commercial levels.
VTT’s new technology that allows sheets of mycelium leather to be produced at scale. (Credit: VTT)
VTT’s new technology enables the continuous manufacturing of mycelium leather at scale, rolling out sheets of the material at a rate of one meter (3.3 ft) per minute! In addition, the approach can be adapted to industrial roll-to-roll production methods. The team is currently exploring first product applications for the material, such as accessories, footwear, and garments.
Last year, a study examined the history, sustainability, manufacturing process, cost, and material properties of fungus-derived leather alternatives. It found that Fungi-derived leather is an evolving class of ethically and environmentally responsible materials that are increasingly meeting consumer appealing and functional expectations.
   Share8  

Finland

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VTT Technical Research Centre

<p>Fungal mycelium is a bio-based raw material that can be sustainably processed into leather-like materials. Until now, increasing the production volume with current methods has been challenging due to mycelium cultivation taking place in a planar two-dimensional form limited in size. VTT's newly-developed production methods make it possible to overcome these size limitations, enabling the continuous manufacturing of mycelium leather sheets by the meter. The approach is applicable to industrial roll-to-roll production.</p>