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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

Collecting waste from households and businesses by means of refuse bins, wheeled bins, containers, etc., and providing treatment, incineration, materials recovery and reclamation, and disposal of hazardous and non-hazardous waste

Waste Management

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

Fashion and Textiles

Producing machinery for mining, construction, industrial, and agricultural use, such as heavy duty trucks, rolling machinery, earth-moving and construction equipment, farm machinery, commercial printing and presses, machine tools, compressors, pollution control equipment, elevators, escalators, insulators, pumps, etc., including their related parts

Machinery

Enacting measures that optimise material use such as 3D printing, etc.

Material efficiency

Collection programmes that process products and parts for reuse or recycling within other industries

Open loop collection

Working together with stakeholders and parties in other unrelated industries to implement circular economy strategies and opportunities

Cross-industry projects, pilots

Participating in government programmes that support and advance the circular economy

Government programmes

Employing artificial algorithms and robotics to identify, enable and/or implement circular strategies (eg. effective resource use & logistics planning, circular business models & design)

Advanced robotics, artificial intelligence

Installing sensors to gather data from products and services to identify, enable and/or implement circular strategies (eg. effective resource use & logistics planning, circular business models & design)

Sensors, monitoring systems

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

VISION:
Products and services are designed for multiple use and material value retention, with maximum positive impact.

DETAIL: 
Imagine a time when…products flow via optimal collection and distribution streams into reusable and repairable product platforms. Reuse and access models are dominant, and products are designed for multiple recirculation before biodegrading (if designed to do so), or being broken down into reusable raw materials for production. People only consume what they need. Production and consumption wastes have been fully eliminated and multifunctional, season-less and timeless fashions are the norm, yet still fulfil our human need for expression and creativity without constraint. All business models, organisations, governments and citizens play a role in maintaining a healthy, functioning circular ecosystem.

Products and Services

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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Textile and fashion industry have a huge circular potential that has yet to be developed. One of the main issues holding back the application of the circular economy in this sector is sorting through textile waste, which requires a high degree of precision and is still performed manually. Being able to automate the process and launch it on an industrial scale therefore will be the key to a real revolution in the world of textiles.
This is the goal of German company Stadler and Norwegian company Tomra, both specialized in collecting and recycling systems, which have opened the world's first fully automated textile sorting plant in Malmö, Sweden.
Automated sorting for the real circular textile economy
Funded by Vinnova, the Swedish government's research and development agency, and led by IVL, the Swedish institute for environmental research, the facility is part of the SIPTex project (Swedish Innovation Platform for Textile Sorting), which aims to develop a fabric sorting solution suited to the needs of recyclers and the fashion industry. The result is a synergy between Stadler, who designed and built the facility, and Tomra, who supplied the NIR optical separators. The latter are essential to the automated textile waste sorting process, which, as the two companies' engineers explain, never has been attempted before.
"Sorting textiles according to the various types of fibers they contain requires a high degree of precision," explain the Tomra experts. "It is currently done manually, but the result doesn’t meet the requirements of recycling companies and the fashion industry. As a result, only a small quantity of discarded textiles is recycled and the potential for increasing it is enormous. The SIPTex project is exploring how to achieve the required quality through automation."
A project in 3 phases
The Malmö plant is actually the third phase of a journey that began a few years ago. An initial theoretical study phase was followed in 2017 by the startup of a small pilot plant built in Avesta and also designed by Stadler and Tomra, which collected and sorted 700 tonnes of textile waste from recycling centers. This second hands-on phase served to understand the technical and logistical issues that needed to be solved.
"Our main objective was to test our equipment’s capability to sort the textiles and identify any changes or optimizations to the process that may be required," explains Stadler's director of international sales, Urban Kozinc. Among the various "discoveries" in this phase of the study, Stadler and Tomra engineers also learned that "labeling on the textiles is not always 100 percent correct," a point that creates quite a few inefficiencies in the recycling process.
Thanks to precision sensors, textile recycling is possible on an industrial scale
Once the problems were solved, the third phase took off with the start-up of the fully automated sorting plant Sysav Industri AB in Malmö. The plant has a capacity of up to 4.5 metric tons per hour in one line. The incoming material is delivered in bales comprising pre- and post-consumer textile waste — industrial waste such as cuttings, yarns and scrap and used domestic clothing and textiles, all to be sorted and separated by type and quality.
"In the Avesta pilot project we demonstrated that TOMRA's NIR sorting technology is capable of recognizing and differentiating various types of textiles,” explains Matej Fuerst, project manager at Stadler. "In the third phase, our objective was to ascertain that the system we designed could successfully operate on an industrial scale, and that the output fractions can achieve the purity and recovery required for recycling and reutilization. There is no industrial-scale technology for recycling textiles without downcycling them, so we had to develop the complete sorting solution."
"Little research is so far available on the recycling of textile fractions," adds László Székely, vice president at Tomra. "In order to be effective, automated sensor-based sorting is essential. In this project, our technology has proved efficient in separating different textile fractions by material type and color. We are proud to be part of this pioneering work."
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         SIPTex – Swedish Innovation Platform for Textile sorting    SIPTex is a Swedish research project that will test and evaluate automated textile sorting by building and operating a pilot facility for 12 months (in Sweden). The recognition and sorting equipment is based on near-infrared (NIR) technology. The project contributes to resource efficiency and closing textile loops by matching customers’ quality requirements with fast and highly accurate sorting technology.
After an exciting operational phase more than 80 chemical analyses were performed to determine that fibre content of the sorted products. Moreover, chemical tests about the presence of hazardous chemicals and thread and fabric demonstrators were made.
At the end of the project, one can conculde that NIR / VIS technology has shown great potential for sorting textile waste by fiber composition and color, resulting in high quality recycled products suitable for fiber-to-fiber recycling.
For further informations, please contact Maria Elander, IVL Svenska Miljöinstitutet AB (maria.elander@ivl.se).
Boer Group is a partner and we sort and provide test material to the pilot plant and support in the evaluation process.
Period of the project: 01.06.2016 – 31.08.2018
Funded by: Sweden’s innovation agency, Vinnova. Vinnova is a Swedish government agency working under the Ministry of Enterprise and Innovation and acts as the national contact agency for the EU Framework Programme for R&D.  
 Related
  

   STADLER is a global specialist in the design, production and assembly of automated sorting systems and machines for the recycling industry. With experience of more than 400 implemented plants as well as more than 3,000 manufactured individual components and a team of nearly 450 experienced specialists, we are ideally positioned.
Traditional Values. Sustainable Thinking and Action. Forward-Looking Engineering Expertise. In this way, we make our contribution to counteracting the constantly growing waste mountains all over the world. 
             As a pioneer of the industry, our portfolio comprises a dozen different types of plants. Tailored precisely to the respective material properties as well as the desired processing capacity, our pioneering systems guarantee output fractions with the greatest possible material purity.
More about sorting plants    
    
  
Whether customers, cooperation partners, suppliers or employees – EVERYONE at STADLER receives a high degree of appreciation. As a seventh-generation family business, STADLER is still building on a heritage of trust – true to the motto "keeping our promises".More about STADLER corporate culture           STADLER has supported J&B Recycling in its pursuit of the best quality output material possible when it designed and built its dry mixed recyclables… Read more   
The new STADLER PX acceleration conveyor integrates the best… Read more The construction industry generates paramount quantities of… Read more STADLER and KRONES have collaborated in the design and… Read more        
              Conserving resources in the sense of man and the environment. This has always been firmly anchored at STADLER – in every respect. On the one hand, we provide the infrastructure for the construction of a functioning circular economy for the worldwide reduction of waste. On the other hand, the issue of sustainability is a daily reality in our company.
More about sustainability at STADLER                            In addition to the required specialist competence, a high level of teamworking ability and self-motivation is of central importance to us. We offer our employees special creative freedom as well as professional training and joint out-of-company activities. All this welds us together and makes us strong.
To the open positions                     "STADLER is a dedicated, professional full-service provider  who can offer an end-to-end solution for material flows."           Lars Krejberg Petersen, CEO, Dansk Retursystem             “We were given excellent advice. STADLER sent us excellent experts, who not only consulted us on technology and procedures, but also offered design options and solution proposals specifically tailored to our technical requirements.“           Alexander Rimmer, CEO, RCS Rohstoffverwertung GmbH             "Our decision to invest in STADLER resulted not only from the trust that STADLER's reputation as a reliable German technology provider and market leader conveys, but also from the development of a fully sustainable project that meets national market conditions."           Crisóforo Arroyo, CEO, La Perseverancia             "It convinced us how we were listened to and how they responded to our wishes. The specifications of our material and our requirements were taken into account at all times.”           Pascal Schroll, CEO and Owner, Schroll Group          

Sweden

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Stadler

Tomra

SIPTex

<p>Textile and fashion industries have huge&nbsp;circular potential&nbsp;that has yet to be developed. One of the main issues holding back the application of the circular economy in this sector is sorting through textile waste, which requires a high degree of precision and is still done manually. Being able to automate the process and launch it on an industrial scale will therefore be the key to a real revolution in the world of textiles.</p><p>This is the goal of German company&nbsp;Stadler&nbsp;and Norwegian company&nbsp;Tomra, both specialized in collecting and recycling systems, which have opened the world's first fully automated textile sorting plant in Malmö, Sweden.</p>