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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 increased knowledge and understanding as a result of the case study

Increase Awareness

Impact on the ease of innovation, and facilitating uptake of innovations

Innovation

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

Fashion and Textiles

Providing products through leasing, rental, or pay-per-use models instead of sales

Leasing, rental, pay per use

Developing or utilising online platforms to enable circular economy opportunities through information, product or service offering

Online platforms

Solutions at all stages of the textiles value chain.

Zero Waste Textiles

Data, knowledge & information sharing

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

Impacts

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Industries

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A framework of policy instruments that enabled and encourage the transition to the circular economy

Policy Instruments

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A framework of policy instruments that enable and stimulate the transition to the circular economy

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

Urban Opportunities

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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        Lorenzo Albrighi and Kuo ShihYun, co-founders of circular fashion platform Lablaco (Photo: Szilveszter Makó)        
     Startup Lablaco is digitising the fashion industry, using blockchain to make second-hand luxury clothing traceable and short circuiting the industry’s wasteful production cycles. Founded by Gen.T honouree ShihYun Kuo and her business partner Lorenzo Albrighi, were spurred to create Lablaco after witnessing fast fashion’s excessive waste. Since its beginnings in 2016, Lablaco has partnered with some of the biggest names in the fashion industry, including The Lane Crawford Joyce Group, Alibaba, Unilever, Swarovski and H&M. With the coronavirus wreaking havoc to their plans to host a Circular Fashion Summit, the duo innovated once again by recreating the entire summit in virtual reality—a first of its kind. The VR summit replicated the Grand Palais, a historic Parisian exhibition hall often used by Chanel for its fashion shows. Through avatars, participants were able to watch talks while also networking with other attendees from around the world. Here, we talk to ShihYun and Albrighi about their work, the summit and the future of fashion.
  Lorenzo Albrighi “We create a circular fashion platform for customers to pass from consumption to ownership of their garments. The blockchain is an encrypted technology that enables you to create a timeline history of events that cannot ever be modified. So long story short, as a customer, it's an end-to-end transparency system, where I can see who's the manufacturer, I can see who is the brand, I can see who is the retailer and if I’m the second customer I can also see who the first customer was. Every layer of the product journey is traced in layers of blockchain, making it impossible, for example, to modify what happened before. That's the valuable part—there's no counterfeit. There is no way of saying that this garment was owned by Justin Bieber if it wasn't. Using a QR code or an NFC chip I can just open my camera, scan the product and receive all this information.” See also: Hong Kong Director Ann Hui Talks Winning The Golden Lion Award And Her Filmmaking Journey
  Albrighi “I was a bespoke tailor and designer before starting Lablaco, and after creating my first ready-to-wear collection I became more familiar with the ready-to-wear fashion industry. That’s when I learnt a lot about the issues in [the fashion] industry—it’s one of biggest polluting industries in the world.” ShihYun Kuo “For me, my background is in merchandising and buying management for Giorgio Armani. At the same time, I was also helping some independent designers via consulting, helping them to understand how to go to market and basically sell their collections. So, I had the ability to see it both from a corporate point of view and an independent perspective. It was around 2012 or 2013 that we began to see the role of social media in changing how customers were consuming fashion—it was becoming a lot more digitised. That was when we started to realise that there should be a platform that helps designers and brands to digitise their products and trace the data of the products. Soon after, Lablaco was born.”
  Albrighi “At the start we had no investors, so we put all our money into it. I remember we went onto LinkedIn to find a developer in Indonesia, and when we found someone we’d obviously never met them but we sent them all our money. I didn’t sleep for many months because I was thinking, ‘Oh my gosh, he’s going to run with the money!’ But he actually set up the first office in Indonesia. It was basically in the jungle, there was no running water or anything, but that’s where it all started. “Our background wasn’t in technology, so I’d say it took us about three years to learn about all the technologies and all of those things which are necessary to create a technology product. We were lucky enough to get the co-founder of Net-a-Porter, Arnaud Massenet, as our first investor, and from there we managed to build an incredible team and basically have the product launch in September 2019. We launched it with the Lane Crawford Joyce Group in Hong Kong—that's when everything kind of started for us. Soon after we launched the Circular Fashion Summit, also in 2019, which gives a purpose to our partners to use our technology.” See also: 5 Young Leaders From China On The Gen.T List 2020
        The Circular Fashion Summit in VR. Lablaco    Albrighi “The Circular Fashion Summit is a global collective action summit, which is focused on design, technology and sustainability. But we don't just talk about the issues in the industry, we actually set three goals, one for each panel to achieve in a timeframe of 12 months using our technology. We support our partners by providing circular retail solutions to reach the three goals of the summit. The goals are very specific and related to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.”
      Kuo ShihYun    Albrighi “Goal number one of the summit is to provide 1,000 upcycled sneakers to kids in war zones in Afghanistan and to trace them on blockchain so the company that is donating the sneakers can know the name and face of the kids that receive the sneakers. So we’re using blockchain for good, to reduce inequalities. “The second goal is about connecting 10,000 products in the supply chain using our system—essentially creating a transparent supply chain for customers with IoT products [and] connected items. “The third and final goal is a goal that anyone can join. It's about recirculating 100,000 products collectively. We joined that goal with the Luxarity project of Lane Crawford, with [Luxarity's] Christina Ventura as our first catalyst of this project.”
  Albrighi “Our overall goal is pretty straightforward. We want to accelerate the transition to a digitised circular economy and fashion. And we want to bring online 500 billion clothing items, because that's the number of clothes sitting around stores and warehouses around the world and they're all disconnected. Of course, we can't do everything, but even if we do 1 percent, that's huge.” See more honourees from the Fashion & Beauty category of the Gen.T List 2020.
 

 Kuo ShihYun is a pioneer in the fashion digitalisation and blockchain technology space. A data and digital innovation entrepreneur with over eight years of experience in luxury retail buying and merchandising management, data systems and digital media, she now lives between the fashion capitals of Paris and Milan, but works in the realm of the digital. 
Yun began her career in fashion in the luxury industry, and was even, at one point, appointed directly by the General Manager of Giorgio Armani HQ to create new technology ventures for the Maison. During her time in the traditional fashion space, she brought to life a few startups, with a clientele base of names you’ve definitely heard of, including Vogue, Officiel, Dolce&Gabbana, and Vionnet, throughout Europe and Asia.
In 2016, Yun co-founded lablaco: the first Circular Fashion Network, with a mission to speed up the digitalisation and transformation of the fashion industry towards a circular economy. Now we all know that the traditional fashion industry is incredibly unsustainable: from the massive resource and energy use from the start to the end of a garment life-cycle, to the overconsumption and monumental waste. With lablaco, Yun is bringing together technology, and sustainability to make a difference. lablaco is redesigning a new ecosystem for the fashion industry by implementing new sustainable business models and redefining relationships among retailers, brands, designers, influencers, content creators, and consumers in a single framework by leveraging blockchain within an open-source platform. 
lablaco’s current projects include SPIN (through which users can list and tokenise pre-owned items with traceable digital ownership across circular models: swapping, sharing, borrowing and trading), LPLUS (which enables data traceability of product origin, authenticity, environmental impact, and customer ownership over the whole product journey) and the Circular Fashion Summit. The Summit is a Global Collective Action Summit that supports the UN SDGs, through gathering changemakers and leaders in the spaces of design, technology and sustainability, towards accelerating circular fashion. 
lablaco   Be a part of the conscious movement that's making waves across Asia. Drop your email down below and you'll be the first to know what's new. We don't spam, ever.   It seems like you enjoyed our content and are on your way to better understanding how to be more conscious. As you’ll know, we’re on a mission to make sustainability accessible, mainstream and sexy. And we would not be able to do it with you. We would love you to support us even further in our GITNB movement by helping us create even more content to keep inspiring you and the rest of the world. Aside from being able to enjoy even better reads, you’ll also receive a GITNB t-shirt consciously made from upcycled fabrics in partnership with a Cambodian social enterprise supporting women. For a small donation you will make a huge difference.  SUPPORT US HERE  

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lablaco is a universal platform connecting all stakeholders to accelerate digitization and transition towards a multi-dimensional circular economy

Lablaco

<p>Lablaco is a digital platform that uses blockchain to provide traceability of second-hand clothes. Through a web platform and mobile app, it allows brands to tokenise their products at different levels of the supply chain. From this approach, consumers can identify what actions retailers are taking to be more sustainable. One of the startup's apps is SPIN, which allows consumers to tokenise products, identifying, for example, that the clothes purchased once belonged to a favourite influencer. In this context, from this app it is possible to apply the circular model of sharing, lending, swapping and trade, which allows consumers to become active buyers in the supply chain, following the destination given to a garment, until it reaches the end of life, communicating the retailers so that some sustainable attitude is taken about it, such as recycling.</p>