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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

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)

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

Fashion and Textiles

Using waste materials that have been processed and recycled to produce new products within the same industry

Using closed loop recycled materials

Using waste materials that have been processed and recycled to produce new products within other industries

Using open loop recycled materials

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

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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 Stacy Flynn is intimately familiar with the ins and outs of fashion’s supply chain. She knows how clothes travel the world as they move through the stages of design, textile production, and garment formation before landing in your local retail store. For years, she managed these supply chains for Dupont and Target, making regular visits to suppliers in China who showed her pristine manufacturing facilities where she examined textile and clothing samples and discussed prices and delivery. Nothing could have prepared her for when she returned in 2010 with a Seattle-based startup to tour smaller textile and dyeing factories, and saw the staggering pollution these second and third tier suppliers generated. Her guides told her that during periods of increased textile production, wastewater emissions turn the rivers deep unnatural hues and factory exhaust smothered the air outdoors and even indoors for the workers. Stacy soon began a mental tally of the millions of yards of fabric she had handled throughout her career and their associated environmental cost. The pride she held for her profession quickly soured. At a crossroads, she asked herself, “Is this how the story ends, is this our state or is there another way for the fashion industry?”The current global fast fashion model encourages the rapid design of inexpensive seasonal clothing. This fast-paced supply chain produces over 92 million tons of waste each year and consumes 79 trillion liters of water. Cheap synthetic fibers that make lightweight and durable fabrics fuel this industry, but the environmental cost is high and long-lasting. In 2015, the annual greenhouse gas emission from polyester production for textiles reached the equivalent impact of 185 coal-fired power plants. Polyester fabrics are particularly harmful because while wearing or washing they can shed plastic microfibers at an alarming rate. Scientists are currently uncovering how these microfibers are accumulating in our seabeds, national parks, seafood, and homes.Evrnu is a collaboration between Stacy Flynn and Christopher Stanev to counter the impact of the fashion industry on natural resources by licensing their supply-side innovations to global producers. Evrnu’s innovative NuCycl technology strips old garments down to their component fibers to produce a stronger end material capable of reuse. They are modernizing the textiles industry by designing waste out of supply chains and leveraging discarded textiles as resources for the future.Evrnu is making leaps and bounds in both innovation and advocacy through its collaborations with Adidas and Stella McCartney and Levi Straus & Co, and appearances in national industry alliances to promote the UN Sustainable Development Goals. We sat down with Stacy to discuss Evrnu’s business model and why her company is uniquely poised to propel our understanding of fashion forward into the future.China Environment Forum: What does it mean to redefine the textile industry supply chain?Stacy Flynn: As a world and where our industry is, we keep repeating the same formula hoping for different results. Focusing on the future really does require us to think creatively and more holistically about what the solutions can be by starting small and scaling them over time.We’ve seen the negative environmental impacts and limits to our growth with the current way of doing business. What if we start designing our products with the intent to recycle them in the future? What if waste byproducts of textile products in the future are used to create the supply chain rather than mining raw materials?CEF: What makes Evrnu’s recycling technology unique?SF: You can take waste and turn it into something else, but if that something else has a fate that ends up in a landfill or incinerator, you’ve only created a delay to the inevitable waste. Our NuCycl technology is unique because it redesigns the product to enable more complete upcycling and reuse in the future. Our research focuses on garment-to-garment recycling and garment-to-downcycle technologies that include patents for turning textile waste into different kinds of paper for cardboard, packaging, and things like that. Our technologies will provide end of life solutions for textile waste that are benign to our environment.Right now businesses are predicated on producing a large amount at a low price. As a result, they have not kept up with the pace of innovation because there is no money to invest in it. Our technologies are designed to redistribute the incentives so there is clear value for the entire supply chain. We are redefining the value proposition by creating products that align with consumer’s values of reducing impact and training consumers to recycle their products so we can convert them back into new materials and provide access to them in different forms.CEF: The garment-to-garment recycling process is integral to Evrnu’s success. How does the closed loop process start?SF: In the United States, we throw away 17 million tons of clothing waste every year. Only 20 percent of this clothing waste is donated to charities like Goodwill and Salvation Army, so by far the majority of textile waste is going into the garbage and ultimately into the landfill. Out of the percentage that is donated, charities try to resell or reuse as much as they possibly can. Whatever cannot be sold gets sent to garment recyclers who manually sort and process it for secondary markets that are usually emerging markets. Things that cannot be re-sold or re-worn have to go directly into the landfill and that is where our technology is designed to intersect.We want to reduce the amount of textiles going to landfill as much as possible by mining or disassembling those polymers and re-polymerizing them back into new materials for a high-value new product. This waste supply chain exists now and as we start donating more and more old textiles to the supply chain for sorting and separating, it will continue to expand around the world.CEF: What does the future hold for NuCycl?SF: That’s the million dollar question. When you own your own factory you can control your own destiny, but the drawback with owning your own factory is that it is very expensive. We’ve opted to go with a licensing model because we don’t have to build facilities, however we are often at the mercy of the supply chain. So we’ve had to work really hard over the last two years to build strong relationships with waste owners, paper pulping mills, and fiber producers to properly intersect the existing waste supply chain. It’s a very long process, like a symphony that requires end-to-end supply chain partnerships to be successful.Our initial technology turns cotton waste into pulp that can be passed through the same solvent system that is currently used for dissolving wood pulp. The current system has been specifically designed for trees, so fitting into the fiber production system [with our Regenerative Cellulosics technology] has taken time and we are now finishing the final phase of development to get the quality dialed in with the fiber producers so they can make commercial fibers out of our pulp. Next year we will stand up the pulp business by integrating the owners of the pulp mills with the fiber producers. We intend to bring between three to six brands to market next year.CEF: Are regulations emerging to facilitate a redesign of the textile industry?SF: We are starting to see the European Union creating strong policies on the environmental impact of the textile industry. For example, Ireland and France have both outlawed garments going to landfill. The environmental damage of the textile industry is a colossal problem that affects humanity but no one is putting money into it because a lot of professional investors think it is a woman’s problem. We have to change the fashion business in a way that makes sense for it, and for this to work we have to find people who believe it is possible.This blog is the first in a new Closed Loop Innovator Series, profiling stories of women around the world innovating in business, civil society, and science to reduce plastic waste pollution. A condensed version will appear in the upcoming China Environment Forum publication, InsightOut: Closing the Loop on Plastic Waste in China and the U.S. Clare Auld-Brokish is a research assistant at the Wilson Center’s China Environment Forum where she is working on urban water issues in China and global plastic waste. She recently returned from a Fulbright fellowship in Yunnan, China where she conducted environmental science research on freshwater lakes and constructed wetlands.Tongxin Zhu is a research assistant at the Wilson Center’s China Environment Forum. Her current focus is ocean plastic waste in China with an emphasis on consumer-facing industries. She recently graduated from Georgetown University, McCourt School of Public Policy with an MPP degree.Sources: Eunomia, Greenpeace, National Parks Conservation Association, Nature Reviews Earth & Environment, Plastic Soup Foundation, The Guardian, UN Development Programme, World Resources InstituteLead Photo Credit: The global fast fashion industry produces over 92 million tons of waste each year, courtesy of Shutterstock.com.  

 A Rude Awakening
For half of her life, Stacy Flynn had worked for big textile corporations. However, on a 2010 business trip to China, she discovered that her industry was an environmental disaster. “Making a simple cotton shirt requires 700 gallons of fresh clean water!” she exclaims. Concerned, she returned to school earning an MBA in sustainable systems, which she used to search for a way to combat this waste.
Convinced that this waste had to be fought against, she created a startup based on technology that uses pulp from cotton garment waste to make new fabrics, thus converting consumer waste into a modern-day resource. By 2014, she established a new, sustainable alternative.
An Idea Is Born
Evrnu is Stacy’s textile technology company that specializes in the breakdown of garment waste, converting it into a new, high quality raw material with which to create new textiles. It is one of the first companies to do this with cotton (one of the industry’s most excessive materials, of which 30% of the entire world’s clothes are made from), and the only company that they know of doing this in the US.
While mechanical garment recycling has existed for a very long time, Evrnu is now actually breaking waste down to the molecular level and realigning it into premium new fiber. And they began at Impact Hub.

The Business Begins To Scale
“We joined Impact Hub Seattle as part of the Fledge Accelerator back in 2014,” Stacy explains. An accelerator that helps impactful entrepreneurs scale their ideas, Fledge takes place in Impact Hub Seattle and provides intense programs of guidance, education, and mentorship. “I loved the people convening at Impact Hub; they were like-minded individuals,” Stacy continues. “I could always run things by them, and the team did a great job in bringing people together.”
Inspired by her peers, Stacy continued to push for a sustainable textile industry – and in 2016, her efforts were rewarded when Evrnu partnered with Levi Strauss & Co to create a sustainable prototype of Levi’s 511 Jeans.
Working With The Big Dogs
“To me, it’s so inspiring that a small new startup from Washington can attract a partnership with Levis jeans,” Stacy says. “It shows that even big players in the textile industry are open to change for the good of the environment, as well as willing to seek out and find the new eco-friendly solutions that are emerging.” Through this partnership Evrnu and Levi Strauss & Co released their first pair of eco-friendly jeans back in 2016, with fibre made from five discarded cotton T-shirts.
“This first prototype represents a major advancement in apparel innovation,” said Paul Dillinger, Head of Global Product Innovation at Levi Strauss & Co. ”We have the potential to reduce by 98% the water that would otherwise be needed to grow virgin cotton.” As the textile industry is known for creating huge amounts of waste, a drop in usage such as this would have a huge impact on the future of our clothing industries.

The Impact That Follows
In the textiles industry right now:

Each year in the U.S. alone, 13.1 million tons of textile waste is created
11 million tons of this waste ends up in landfills
68% of the water used to create a pair of jeans goes towards fiber production alone
In the UK, the average piece of clothing lasts for 3.3 years before being discarded
Overall use of organic cotton represents less than 1% of the world’s total annual cotton crop

Evrnu’s new technology really does have the power to change this for the better. And now thanks to fashion world juggernauts such as Levi Strauss & Co taking on the ethical issues of their industries, the time for when this shift is likely to take hold, is a lot closer than you might think. Stacy’s story can be found in the IMPACT REPORT 2018.
To get inspired by other stories like hers, you can view the report in full online. This year Evrnu has been recognised in Fast Company’s World Changing Idea Award. Evrnu’s work in the textiles industry also contributes to the following SDGs:
 
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Seattle

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Evrnu® is a textile innovations company that has invented an entirely new kind of engineered fiber made from discarded clothing.

Evernu

<p>Seattle-based company Evrnu® is a textile innovations company creating a circular ecosystem through their fibre technology that transforms old clothing into new, high-quality raw materials, offering a solution to the escalating problem of blended textile fibres which cannot be widely recycled, and are incinerated or landfilled leading to a loss of valuable resources while causing significant environmental damage. </p>