Textile Exchange 2024
Building Better Logistics for Textile-to-Textile Recycling
Activate your organization to drive textile-to-textile recycling
In our thought leadership session at Textile Exchange 2024, we discussed the challenges faced in our current infrastructures for getting usable textile waste into the hands of recyclers, and how to measure the impact of recycling logistics.
Moving forward in the fashion, apparel, and textile industry requires a collective effort to drive change within our respective organizations. We’ve collected a set of resources from our sessional thought leaders to help kickstart your journey.
Actionable resources for those we are:
Things to consider when building a circular program
Recycling, including fiber-to-fiber, is an important part of a circular textiles system, but it is not a turnkey solution to our current problem. Keep in mind that Prevention and Reuse sit at the top of the Waste Hierarchy and consider holistically what circular intervention might be best for your organization, as well as for the ecosystem overall.
You’re already doing this, so good on you! Things are moving fast in the textile-to-textile recycling ecosystem, and a lot of innovators and projects have paved the way. Make sure your organization invests in the time to understand what’s been done before, what’s happening now, and what emerging technologies and systems are coming up next.
You are entering into this from unique circumstances as a manufacturer, brand, solution provider, consultant, etc. Your positionality, and especially your ability to make the case for change within organizations, will greatly affect what your first steps are.
Whether or not you’re the decision maker in your organization, adopting new circular systems will likely require collaboration and coordination across multiple departments and value chain partners. Make sure that these necessary actors are involved in conversations early on to ensure you have an accurate representation of what this change would look like or require.
Textile Exchange, the Global Fashion Agenda, and Accelerating Circularity are examples of impact-oriented networks to participate in and learn from. Continue to lean on these networks and provide support with data and insights from your operations as much you’re able.
As so much has already been done to trial and test textile-to-textile recycling processes and technologies, we need to move the needle. You have an opportunity to leverage your resources and networks to advance and scale textile-to-textile recycling. Consider a world in which the processed fiber materials we have in our supply chains are all that we will ever have and act accordingly. Imagine the long game of this possibility and what future-proofing your organization might look like from that lens.
Thank you to our collaborating partners
