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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 availability of resources as well as their effect on living organisms, ecosystems, and components of the environment.

Ecological Impact

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

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

Fashion and Textiles

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

Designing to reduce waste during production and use

Design out waste

Designing to enable multiple uses and lifecycles of a product and its materials

Design for cyclability

Industry peers to industry peer collaboration to create joint value and identify synergies

Industry collaboration

Designing products so they use as little materials, water, energy, etc. as possible during use

Design for resource efficiency

Designing products that can easily breakdown and degrade in the environment

Design for bio-degradability

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

Cross-industry projects, pilots

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

Slow strategies aim to keep materials in use for as long as possible, for example through design for durability and repairability. A more circular economy is also a slower one: materials, components, and products—and even buildings and infrastructure—that we lock in stocks are made to last. This will lower material demand in the long run, in essence also serving to narrow resource flows.

Slow

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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Skip to main contentSkip to search2,371,771 views | Suzanne Lee • TEDSummit 2019What if we could "grow" clothes from microbes, furniture from living organisms and buildings with exteriors like tree bark? TED Fellow Suzanne Lee shares exciting developments from the field of biofabrication and shows how it could help us replace major sources of waste, like plastic and cement, with sustainable and eco-friendly alternatives.Want to hear more great ideas like this one? Sign up for TED Membership to get exclusive access to captivating conversations, engaging events, and more!This talk was presented at an official TED conference. TED's editors chose to feature it for you.What if we could "grow" clothes from microbes, furniture from living organisms and buildings with exteriors like tree bark? TED Fellow Suzanne Lee shares exciting developments from the field of biofabrication and shows how it could help us replace major sources of waste, like plastic and cement, with sustainable and eco-friendly alternatives.This talk was presented at an official TED conference. TED's editors chose to feature it for you.

  
What might our clothes look like in 50 years? When textile designer Suzanne Lee was researching her book, Fashioning the Future, she found the most interesting answers to that question when she looked beyond the traditional borders of fashion design. Beyond cut, color and cloth, our style in 50 years will be driven by new materials from the corners of science. With biologists, engineers and materials scientists, she realized, she could create an entirely new strain of fashion.
In 2003, Lee met materials scientist David Hepworth, founder of the Scotland-based firm Cellucomp, which develops materials made from non-hydrocarbon-based feedstock. His advice: “Instead of thinking about fiber production from a source like cotton in a field — an agricultural approach — we could look to living organisms like bacteria to produce fibers for us.”
So that’s what they have done. Hepworth and Lee started growing materials, at first in Hepworth’s garage and Lee’s bathroom. Ten years later, Biocouture was born. Based in London, the company works with scientists to bring living, bio-based materials to fashion.
I caught up with Lee, who is a TED Fellow, over the phone to talk to her about her clothes and collaborations. Below is an edited transcript of our conversation.
Suzanne Lee examines a piece of dyed biomaterial at the Biocouture studio in London. Photograph by House of Radon, © Biocouture.
What’s wrong with the materials traditionally used in fashion?
It’s actually not so much the materials; it’s the whole approach to manufacturing. An incredibly long and complex supply chain is involved in producing a piece of clothing. So there’s the huge toxicity and environmental impact of the production of clothing, and there’s also a massive social one.
As the Biocouture project developed, what became really interesting to me was how to address the pressing environmental issues around garment and fiber production, to think about more efficient ways to manufacture a garment. This wasn’t initially about trying to bring specific extra functionality to fashion, it was trying to re-think a system, and imagine if there was a more efficient and sustainable way.
Is your fashion more efficient than other clothing?
That’s an incredibly complex answer. Yes, it is, but it’s so beyond anything that currently exists that it becomes very challenging. The garments we create are made using fermentation. I’m essentially proposing moving to a model that’s closer to brewing or the food industry than to a textile factory.
That’s a massive conceptual and industrial shift, and there are many challenges associated with that. Things like the cost of the feedstock that you’ll feed your biological organisms to make these materials for you. That gets into a question of geography and where feedstock is abundant.
This might look like a pint of moldy beer, but in fact it’s the raw substance of Biocouture’s biomaterial. It’s grown in a vat filled with a sugary green tea solution using a kombucha culture. Once the layer of microbial cellulose is sufficiently thick, it is harvested, washed and allowed to dry. After the water evaporates it resembles a vegetable leather. © Biocouture.
So … you’re feeding your clothing? What does that even mean?
Yep! Right now you can take an organism — I would use a bacteria — to produce a cellulose fiber. If we actually design the organism itself, we have full, final control over how that fiber is formed and its functionality. Right now we’re thinking about how you might combine something like a yeast cell not only to produce fiber but also to make the fiber hydrophobic.
In my process, the thing that feeds the bacteria is sugar. And sugar comes in lots of forms, but in certain parts of the world there are agricultural waste streams that are sugar-abundant, and they’re much cheaper. So we’re thinking about how we can bring the cost down so we’re not using food-grade sugar. How can we identify a nutrient source from the waste of another industry?
The material in this BioSkirt is grown, dried, laser-cut and sewn. It can be dyed either before drying or after. Photograph by House Of Radon. © Biocouture.
It seems like companies that can produce clothing from sketch to rack in a matter of days would surely have an advantage over this complex process. How can you compete with them — and their incredibly thin margins?
So-called “fast fashion” has got cheaper and cheaper, and people have got used to paying less and less, so the actual value of a garment today is far less than it was ten and 20 years ago. And, of course, the value of the material that goes into that product is incredibly low, so you’re competing with oil-based fibers like polyester, which are super cheap. It becomes very difficult to be economically competitive. The savings in terms of water and environmental impact are mind-blowing, but the underlying issue of how to deliver something that will compete with incredibly cheap synthetics is difficult to answer.
So this isn’t necessarily something that will make it to the mass market in the near future?
No. Biocouture, for me, was the beginning of a journey. The work that I started [with Hepworth] began a wider conversation around how we might harness living organisms to make materials for us. Since then I have been approached by scientists working on materials using different types of organisms. I was initially using yeast and bacteria, but then I became aware of people using mammalian cells, fungi and so on.
I’m really excited to be thinking about not just one material, but this new landscape of living materials. And about what that means for design, for manufacturing, for us all in terms of products. Some really interesting new possibilities could emerge when we start to see a convergence of material with things like well-being or functionality.
For example, in synthetic biology, you can produce anti-malarials that could be used in pharmaceuticals. But could we get bacteria to spin us a thread that also has anti-malarial properties? We can start to build layers of functionality into these materials.
So this is about much more than fashion.
We don’t need fashion. Fashion is not essential to our survival, right? There are things within the fashion-textile arena that we might hope could be produced in a more efficient or environmentally friendly way. But we can think more broadly about how we can design a better world. There are really exciting applications for these kinds of materials. For instance, how can we think about using living materials to create more sustainable architecture or the interior of a car?
How do you find people to collaborate with and borrow from? How do you persuade researchers they should help?
There’s an economic imperative for scientists and academics to find nearer-to-market applications for a lot of their work. Here in the UK, there’s been increasing pressure for people to explain the value of their scientific research to the general public. I find, increasingly, that those people are incredibly welcoming to designers who have been thinking about different aspects of science and how these might be applied.
The BioShoe was grown in approximately four weeks. Says Lee, “we were interested in exploring how you might combine, in one product, materials that have been grown from different types of organism. So you might use one process, or one organism, to give you something very tough and structural but lightweight. And then you might use a different organism as an aesthetic wrapper.” Photograph by Bill Waters. © Biocouture.
“Questions Worth Asking” is a TED editorial series; this week we asked the question, “Can I borrow that?” to dig into themes of cross-disciplinary innovation and idea-sharing. See also Seth Godin’s op ed, “Why I want you to steal my ideas,” and a story about SkyBox Imaging, a company using unexpected technology to build a new type of satellite. 

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'We are driving sustainable biomaterial innovation for the global community of startups, brands, and investors. We do this in three ways. We provide strategic consulting services to help you understand and navigate the emerging fields of biodesign, biomaterials and biofabrication. We produce design-led events in both NYC and London that convene the international community to explore, connect and showcase the latest discoveries. And we’re building a global resource platform to deepen engagement and interactions.'  [BioFabricate/About] 

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BioFabricate

Suzanne Lee, CEO and founder of Biofabricate, coined the term ‘Biocouture™’ in 2004 to describe her pioneering research exploring the use of living cultures of microorganisms (yeast and green tea bacteria) to grow biomaterials like cellulose into sustainable and compostable clothing — a material with similar properties to leather.&nbsp;By bringing knowledge from scientists’ labs into fashion production, Biocouture presented a visionary and creative perspective of the fashion industry with significant resource efficiencies: from reducing the water, energy and chemistry needed in the production of a material, to generating zero waste.The Biocouture™ project which transitioned to a biocreative consultancy, ended in 2013. However, her work has influenced researchers and designers throughout the world.