For over a decade, investment and expectations have been funnelled into textile-to-textile recycling, with a groundswell of emerging technologies promising to turn fashion’s trash back into treasure. But the sector has yet to achieve commercial scale, and confidence has been waning after a series of setbacks. In fact, over the last 18 months, it has spiralled into chaos, threatening the circular solution upon which many had pinned their hopes.
We are now at the advent of a second boom in the textile-to-textile recycling industry, says Adam Gardiner, recycling lead at Textile Exchange, which is witnessing a “significant uplift” in demand for its Recycled Claim and Global Recycled standards. “It’s a push and pull of both brands wanting certified materials and recyclers proving their technology,” he explains. “Over a two-year horizon, we will see a number of facilities opening at an industrial level, each with a capacity of tens of thousands of tonnes.”
So far in 2025, textile-to-textile companies Circ, Reju, and Syre have each announced plans to build industrial-scale facilities, and legislative progress is starting to provide a long-awaited backbone for the sector. Under extended producer responsibility (EPR) measures — which require brands to pay a per-item fee to cover the cost of waste mitigation — EU member states now have separate textile waste collections, and producer responsibility organisations (PROs) have formed to manage textile waste flows on a bigger, more collaborative scale.
The finalised Product Environmental Footprint Category Rules (PEFCR), used to measure environmental footprints and underpin ecodesign requirements, will also be a driving factor, says Gardiner. “The calculations will favour textile-to-textile feedstock materials [for recycled content], prompting lower impact scores,” he says, meaning EPR fees for textile-to-textile recycled products will be lower or may even translate into bonus payments.
It all seems promising, but challenges still exist.
Cracks first started to show in February 2024, when former industry darling Renewcell — which turned cotton, among other cellulose-rich textiles, into a new raw material called Circulose — filed for bankruptcy, citing weaker-than-expected sales. Renewcell was later acquired by Swedish investment firm Altor, which renamed the company after its signature material and brought former H&M Group CEO Helena Helmersson in to lead the turnaround. But the industry was rattled.
Six months on from its shock bankruptcy, the Swedish scaleup Circulose (formerly Renewcell) has a new top team.
Fashion brands, it seemed, weren’t ready to adopt recycled materials at the scale necessary to tackle their own waste in a meaningful way. Instead, many still favoured the cheaper option of recycled polyester made from PET bottles (also known as rPET, which takes 98 per cent of the market share of recycled polyester). While this allowed them to tick the ‘recycled content’ box, it left textile-to-textile recycling solutions stuck in the pilot phase, says Gardiner. “We set a challenge in 2020 around transitioning to rPET and it’s important to recognise and champion those that took that step, but also to acknowledge that it was a step on a [longer] path, not the end goal.”
Meanwhile, the infrastructure that provided startups like Renewcell with feedstock was also faltering. Industry associations European Recycling Industries’ Confederation (EuRIC) Textiles and Municipal Waste Europe, each representatives of collecting and sorting companies, warned of widespread bankruptcies after German firm Soex and UK firm Textile Recycling International entered administration in late 2024. Processing costs were outpacing market prices for textile waste, warehouses were overflowing with low-quality fast fashion, and African nations — key export markets for used clothing — began weighing up clothing import bans and reducing import volumes.
Textile recycling trade associations say the industry is on the brink of collapse, but critics say it never existed to begin with. Beyond the noise, is there an opportunity for change?
As the model of pushing the problem onto nations less equipped to deal with the waste became less lucrative and reliable, industry associations like EuRIC penned an open letter, advocating for the industry to stimulate regional demand for recycled textiles through recycled content mandates and to expand textile-to-textile recycling capacity, quickly. The association followed up in 2025 with a recyclers’ manifesto and a further open letter urging policymakers to act, but no interventions have been forthcoming at the EU level. Rather, it’s brands who appear to be making renewed strides in the sector.
Is fashion ready to embrace textile-to-textile recycling’s second coming? We speak to seven textile-to-textile recycling companies — chosen to reflect the broad spectrum of scale and recycling processes in the sector — to find out how they are learning from past stumbling blocks, navigating new technologies and balancing the need for scale with financially sustainable growth.
The phoenix from the ashes: Circulose
Despite making a triumphant return from the brink of financial collapse, Swedish company Circulose (formerly Renewcell) isn’t running its factories right now. “We don’t want to make the same mistake and start production without demand,” says new CEO Jonatan Janmark. Right now, there is still Circulose pulp (the product Circulose makes from textile waste that is then made into fibre) in the market. Until those stocks run low enough to warrant production (but not so low that there’s a gap in availability), Circulose will focus on sales instead. Janmark estimates that this point of stock depletion will be some time around the second half of 2026. But the commercial relationships the company seeks are more about vision than volume.
In April 2025, Circulose announced a strategic partnership with Tangshan Sanyou, the Chinese company behind Revisco, a viscose fibre featuring up to 50 per cent recycled content. This is Circulose’s first major agreement since restructuring. There are no commitments to volumes that can fall through later, says Janmark — rather, it’s a public alignment on strategy and pricing to drive demand and scale.
With tech company and producer in step on supply chain integration, Circulose sees itself as a total circularity solution for brands, not just providing the material, but also advising on big questions such as how to adopt at scale, across which assortment, and at what conversion rate. Over the next two to three years, there will be what Janmark calls a “transition premium” on Circulose. However, if there is collaboration on absorbing risk, rather than the costs being amplified further up the supply chain, the company can scale faster, he believes. This could also help Circulose achieve greater cost parity with virgin fibres, which has been another barrier in the past
The rPET veteran: Unifi
To date, US-based Unifi has recycled over 40 billion plastic bottles into its Repreve fibre and resin, becoming clothing for brands and retailers including Nike, Adidas, PVH, Patagonia, The North Face and Under Armour. Now, it’s aiming to reach the same scale with Repreve Takeback, its textile-to-textile recycled offering. Launched as a black filament yarn and staple fibre in late 2022, it has since expanded to include a white, dyeable yarn and an insulation material. The company uses a thermomechanical process where the feedstock is shredded, extruded, melted and pelletised, a method it has tried and tested via bottle recycling. Unifi claims that this has better life cycle analysis (LCA) results than chemical recycling, because it is a single process, whereas chemical recycling is a double process that breaks down the plastic into its basic building blocks (depolymerisation), before reassembling them into a new plastic material (repolymerisation).
As a seasoned recycler, which incorporated recycling into its business model in 2007, Unifi has already had to navigate the price premiums associated with novel technologies, says CEO Eddie Ingle. “Everybody knows that when scale happens, costs will go down, but [for now, brands] are having a hard time internally justifying that cost. Investment is going to take place around promoting and explaining Repreve Takeback in the same way we had to explain the Repreve bottle story. Consumers have to understand it and they have to get excited about it.”
The company currently works largely with post-industrial textile waste such as offcuts, and has already had to engineer solutions for the complexities of the feedstock, such as developing its own IP to remove prints from fabric. But as technology improves for sorting and preparation, Ingle believes Unifi will be able to add more post-consumer waste into the supply chain. “That will considerably expand the availability of material, which will be the medium-term barrier to textile-to-textile recycling,” he says.
Ready-made scale: Reju
While Unifi scaled over time, Paris-based company Reju came with it baked in. Owned and fully financed by French engineering and technology company Technip Energies and with over 13,000 engineers at its disposal, Reju opened its first textile-to-textile pilot plant in Frankfurt just 12 months after the company was incorporated. In May, Reju announced plans to open an industrial-scale facility in the southeast of the Netherlands, chosen for its populous location and the country’s support of the circular economy. The company has ambitions of regenerating the equivalent of 300 million items annually.
Reju will tackle what CEO Patrik Frisk (formerly of Under Armour) refers to as the “societal problem of post-consumer waste”. Derived from 100 per cent textile waste, Reju polyester is made via a chemical process developed by IBM, which the company claims emits half the carbon emissions of virgin polyester, with fewer impurities than mechanical recycling. To live up to its promises, the company needs access to an abundance of feedstock, but there are risks associated with moving so quickly, says Frisk. The biggest challenge is that upstream infrastructure isn’t ready.
Reju has forged partnerships across North America and Europe with the likes of charity retailer Goodwill and an Italian producer responsibility organisation (PRO) called Rematrix. “We’re talking to over 100 waste management companies just in Europe. There’s so much focus on offtake contracts [where a buyer commits to purchase a specific volume of a producer’s future output], and that is important. But, if I can’t secure a waste stream coming in at a steady clip in an organised fashion, my ability to execute isn’t there,” says Frisk.
Despite its already significant scale, Frisk is realistic about the dent Reju can make. “We’re planning to build up to somewhere between 800 kilotonnes to a million tonnes [of Reju polyester] in 10 years. That would be enough to cover three of my customers, and I’m talking to 100 right now,” he says. Though his confidence in Reju’s ability to make textile-to-textile recycling happen at scale is unshakable, he also wants to see upfront EPR taxation to fund infrastructure. According to environmental services company Systemiq, this would need to be charged at €250 per tonne of clothing by 2028 to bridge the 55 per cent cost gap. As was the case with Circulose, Reju would also need brands to get involved and share the risk. “I need everybody to pony up here,” adds Frisk.
From linear to circular: Coleo
Spanish company Coleo started life as a traditional textile business, designing and buying fabrics and selling garments to global retailers. “We wanted to be able to offer recycled raw materials, yarns, and fabrics to our clients, and we couldn’t find them in the market. So in 2020, we set up our first waste management facility in Galicia,” says marketing director Nacho Bueno. Coleo will end 2025 with four waste management facilities across Spain and France, handling pre-consumer, post-industrial and post-consumer waste, taking cotton-rich fibres through to final products and sending polyester to chemical recyclers within its network.
The company’s full-service offering, from waste management and artificial intelligence-powered sorting (which can still require manual intervention for bulky or embellished items) to garment production, is where its appeal lies for the big European retailers it works with. These partners want to valorise their waste and grow their circular output in one fell swoop, says Bueno. However, brands need to drive more demand, and that starts internally. “The dots are not connected. Corporate goals are clear, sustainability [teams] understand and want to activate, but design and product teams are still too far removed. They need to be incentivised to use recycled products,” Bueno says.
The brand whisperer: Re&Up x Puma
German sportswear brand Puma wants to move away from recycled bottles, and it has enlisted Dutch circular tech company Re&Up (an offshoot of Turkish denim manufacturing group Sanko) to achieve it. In a multi-year collaboration, Re&Up will supply Puma’s fabric mills across EMEA (Europe, the Middle East and Africa), America and Asia with its recycled textile waste-based polyester chips, which will then be turned into yarn and fabric. The partnership is designed to support Puma’s goal of using 30 per cent textile-to-textile recycled polyester fabric for all apparel products by 2030. “When plastic bottles are used as a feedstock for recycled polyester, the loop is not closed. Dealing with end-of-life products is one of the major sustainability challenges of our industry and we must act now. That is why we are looking to create a network of partnerships that will help us achieve this goal and establish the ecosystem that is needed to achieve fibre-to-fibre recycling at scale,” says Howard Williams, Puma’s director of global innovation for apparel and accessories.
Having such agreements in place is essential for textile-to-textile recycling to have a financially sustainable future, says Re&Up chief commercial officer Özgür Atsan. “It helps us to adjust and position ourselves as we have an idea of what volumes these brands need. These long-term conversations are the driving force for us to extend into other countries and continents.” The conversion from bottle to textile feedstocks will be gradual, says Atsan, but ultimately the company wants to target commodity volumes rather than capsule offerings. Doing that will require an efficient, global system for accessing used textiles.
“Getting the feedstock is getting better and better with new legislation, and we’ve been collaborating with collectors, sorters and brands in a very positive way for the last three years. Europe is the front runner, but other continents are not so highly developed and sophisticated,” Atsan continues. “EPR is crucial for pushing brands to use more recycled content and to help collect and recycle post-consumer goods in a more efficient way.”
The local innovator: Brightfiber Textiles
Brightfiber Textiles opened its factory doors in Amsterdam in April 2025. Though there was a crowd of fashion insiders there for the celebration, the real stars of the show were the machines, capable of processing 2.5 million kilograms of regional textile waste into recycled fibre annually. To create a local and efficient recycling ecosystem, founder Ellen Mensink has brought together three machines in one recycling line for the first time. There’s a near-infrared spectroscopy (NIR) — that taps into the near-infrared region of the electromagnetic spectrum — technology-based sorter, which can classify textiles by colour and material; a system that removes buttons, zippers and labels using metal detection and cameras; as well as a mechanical recycling system that retains the colours of the original garments, eliminating the need for dyes. Having been involved in the development of the machines from the start, and acquiring sorting and innovation partner Wieland Textiles, Mensink is now focusing on fine-tuning them, building mechanical “recipes” to create highly specific, high-quality fibres that can adapt to the industry’s wide-ranging demands.
This test-and-adapt approach is central to scaling the use of mechanically recycled fibres, says Mensink — any concerns around properties such as quality or durability can be overcome by experimenting with different yarn compositions, patterns, weaves and knits. “Sometimes people say, ‘That’s a really poor yarn,’ but if they use it in a different way it looks like a [premium] sweater. We’ve been spoiled [by choice] and making everything quickly. There’s such a big, fascinating industry that knows so much. If we focus a little more on what we make and how we make it, we have the knowledge to produce great things,” she says.
In working regionally, Mensink believes Brightfiber can stimulate the necessary innovation, drawing in interested parties to collaborate closely and get invested on a granular level. Currently working on collaborations with brands including Patagonia and Martan, Brightfiber plans to replicate its unique model across other regions worldwide in the future, creating local solutions that can adapt to local supply and demand.
Next-generation technology: Reo Eco
Textile-to-textile recycling is broadly divided into two camps: mechanical and chemical. Mechanical recycling needs little to no water, chemicals or dyes, but critics argue that the shredding lowers the quality of the final product. Chemical recycling produces an end product structurally similar to that of virgin fibres, but it comes at a higher cost, uses more chemicals and can create more pollution, alongside the higher energy consumption). Now, a third option has emerged: enzymatic recycling.
China-based textile technology company Reo Eco is working to turn polyester garments into rPET chips. It uses a specially developed enzyme to break down the polyester into its two original monomers over the course of nine to 10 hours, at temperatures of between 60°C and 65°C. Around 98 per cent of the material is broken down (the remaining 2 per cent is reintroduced in the next cycle) and any non-polyester components (such as dyes or blended fibres) are naturally separated and sent to other recyclers. “There is no destruction of quality compared to virgin polyester, this is an endless recycling method,” says business development director Stefan Edkvist.
Having launched its pilot factory only this year, Reo Eco is currently producing around 30 to 60 kilograms per day, according to Edkvist. By the end of 2025, it will have a capacity of 10,000 tonnes per year, with plans of that number hitting 100,000 tonnes by 2027.
Though other companies have sung Europe’s praises for its collection infrastructure, Edkvist believes China is the real haven for infrastructure. “We [Reo Eco] already have a feedstock of around 200,000 tonnes and we’re also working with the government, schools and universities for uniforms and workwear,” he says. “The infrastructure is well organised, whereas in Europe there’s no real collaboration between countries. You have to match industry with infrastructure otherwise this will be all talking and no walking.”
With plans for accessing feedstocks in place, the next big challenge is scaling demand. Once again, it’s here that the cost issue rears its head — especially for such a nascent technology. “In the beginning, this will be small scale, and it will be more costly than to buy the virgin polyester or regular bottle-to-textile recycling,” says Edkvist. “So, this is about who’s going to pay for this and who is going to invest in this. That is a big, big challenge. There must be some profit. We can’t use virgin polyester forever.”
