This article appeared in the Spring 2025 issue of Plastics Recycling Update. Subscribe today for access to all print content.
In the past decade, we’ve seen a wave of textile recyclers emerge, such as Reju, Syre, Eastman, Evrnu, Ambercycle, Ravel, Protein Evolution, Teraform, SixOne, and others. These companies seek to fill a gap in textile recycling to meet rising demand for recycled fibers, which among other sustainable materials, is projected to soar five-fold to 163 million tons by 2030, according to the Textile Exchange. This demand is driven by a combination of corporate sustainability goals and impending policy.
Despite strong forecasted demand, recycled content in textiles is still very low, with the majority coming from recycled PET bottles. And because recycled bottle volumes are inelastic (since consumers are not very good at recycling), RPET is in limited supply and faces heavy competition from the packaging industry, which is striving to comply with recycled content mandates.
The shortage of RPET has sparked interest in finding alternative sources. Polyester textiles could offer a solution. After all, textile waste is growing quickly, and polyester is the dominant fiber in the market. To capture these polymers and recycle them in new fibers for textile production, chemical recycling techniques have shown promise at lab and pilot scale. While mechanical recycling is still preferable from a cost and energy perspective, its applications in textile-to-textile recycling are limited.
How much textile waste is available?
RRS and Fashion for Good conducted a fiber composition analysis of U.S. postconsumer textiles and found that over half are suitable for fiber-to-fiber recycling, meaning they are single-layer items with at least 80% purity of a given target fiber (cotton, polyester, nylon, or polycotton).
With Americans generating 80-100 lbs per capita per year and growing, that makes 6 million to 10 million tons per year of textiles suitable for chemical recycling. That said, we want to make sure textiles go to the best destination: Anything reusable is sent to reuse first, anything repairable is sent to repair, anything suitable for the reclaimed wiping cloth industry is sent for wiper conversion, and anything suitable for mechanical textile-to-textile recycling is mechanically recycled. These applications all fall higher on the waste hierarchy. The percentage that all of the above represents is unknown, so ultimately, the volumes available for chemical textile recycling are unknown.
Nevertheless, without a recycling end market for textiles, we cannot achieve circularity.
Scaling textile-to-textile recycling
This emerging market is rife with challenges. First, scaling these technologies requires significant investment. In 2024, Syre closed a Series A funding round of $100 million. Circ raised over $55 million in the past couple of years, and Ambercycle has received over $55 million in funding since its start in 2015. The technology R&D, industry buy-in and construction of pilot plants and commercial scale facilities are expensive. The high capex and yet-to-be-achieved economies of scale mean that pricing cannot compete against virgin raw materials.
Second, recycling facilities are most cost-effective at scale, which means they rely upon highly functional feedstock supply channels that can provide on-spec feedstock. In a landscape where textiles are primarily exported for sorting and grading, the requisite sorting and pre-processing infrastructure in the U.S. is lacking and therefore must either be developed, or the business case for an international textile-to-textile recycling market must be made. If sited domestically, textile recycling facilities ideally would draw textiles from local suppliers, which translates to the need to build automated fiber-sorting facilities. If sited abroad, textiles collected here must be shipped, and the shipment of so-called waste is being increasingly regulated, posing a potential risk to the ability to export it.
Third, as a first-of-a-kind solution, chemical recycling relies on the carefully timed curation of a new ecosystem. Chemical recyclers must prove their business models, demonstrate ability to move from lab scale to production scale, show that they can produce quality outputs capable of being integrated into existing textile manufacturing supply chains, and convince the public, regulators and nongovernmental organizations that their processes yield net positive environmental impact.
Finally, product sales in particular remain a puzzle. Integration of new fibers into the supply chain is difficult because it requires testing and iteration to ensure compatibility with existing manufacturing practices, and yarn spinners are often unable to accommodate the interruption of operations to test unproven sources of supply. Getting the brand involved can help ease this process, as brands may have the ability to influence the choice of Tier 4 suppliers down through the supply chain.
Policy as a market driver
The textile-to-textile recycling industry is in its infancy, and we need to be cognizant of the very real challenges it faces while also pushing for adoption. It can be compared to the plastics recycling industry three decades ago. In fact, chemical recycling technologies are not new. They’ve been around for years and in some cases decades. Until now, they have not had a viable business case in the plastics or textile recycling industries — and whether that changes with the onslaught of new circular economy policies, legislation and corporate mandates remains to be seen.
California’s Responsible Textile Recovery Act of 2024 (S.B. 707) is expected to shift market dynamics of used clothing and textiles in the U.S. by increasing collection rates, funding the development of sorting and processing infrastructure and incentivizing sustainable attributes like recycled content through eco-modulated fees. New York and Washington are both considering similar bills. Extended producer responsibility laws are also spreading across Europe. While EPR is a long game — the soonest we’ll see commercial impacts of EPR on the availability of textile-based recycled content is circa 2030 — it has significant potential to change incentives and unlock new business models.
Also relevant in the policy realm is how chemical recycling is being regulated. About half of the states in the U.S. regulate chemical recycling facilities as manufacturing facilities, which can ease the permitting process and hold the facilities accountable to the same environmental standards as other industrial facilities. In other states, there is contentious debate over the legal definition of recycling, whether it includes chemical recycling and, if so, which forms of chemical recycling it includes. This definition may affect whether textiles recycled this way count toward the state’s diversion rates, and whether the fibers produced by those recyclers can be counted as recycled content.
The road ahead
Despite the many challenges, timing seems to be right for textile-to-textile recycling. We’re just now thinking in a coordinated way about textile collection systems, just now starting to build the infrastructure and just now bringing all the right people to the table. Success requires coordinated efforts. Brands that prioritize design for end of life and uptake of recycled content will likely emerge as market leaders. Policymakers that work alongside the industry in developing smart and effective policy can create an enabling environment through legislation and funding. And supply chains that open their doors to recycled content can mitigate the risks of volatile raw commodity markets.
The topic is even attracting federal attention. In 2024, Congresswoman Chellie Pingree of Maine alongside Reps. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez from Washington and Sydney Kamlager-Dove of California launched the Slow Fashion Caucus, the first congressional group dedicated to implementing climate-smart policies to reduce, repair, reuse and recycle textiles. At the end of last year, the U.S. Government Accountability Office released a landmark report on textile waste in the country. It recommended the establishment of an interagency mechanism to drive textile circularity and called on Congress to allocate resources and authority to tackle this growing issue effectively.
There are also efforts led by the National Institute of Standards and Technology to develop standards to support textile circularity, demonstrated by their recently debuted NIR-SORT database, a tool that uses near-infrared spectroscopy to identify the molecular fingerprints of various fabrics, including blends.
Textile-to-textile recycling presents us with a unique opportunity to redefine the lifecycle of textiles and reduce the environmental impact of the fashion industry. We have a lot to look forward to as this new sector develops and evolves.
Marisa Adler is a senior consultant at Resource Recycling Systems and a leader in textile circularity consulting, advising public and private sector clients on sustainable textile management, policy and circular economy strategies.
