The Truth About Textile Recycling: Why Circular Fashion Isn’t There Yet
Renewcell, now Circulose
If you’ve been in or around fashion for even five minutes, you’ve probably heard the word “circularity” tossed around like it’s already happening. Brands love to say they’re “closing the loop,” or that their new collection is made from “recycled materials,” as if that solves the industry’s waste problem. But here’s the thing: it doesn’t. At least, not yet.
The truth is, textile recycling — the kind that actually turns old clothes into new ones — barely exists. Like, we’re talking less than 1% of all textiles globally are recycled into new textiles. And that number has barely budged.
The goal of this post isn’t to dunk on brands or trash the idea of recycling. It’s to actually break down what textile-to-textile recycling means, why it’s a critical part of a sustainable fashion system, and why it’s still so damn hard to scale. We’re going to get into the types of recycling that exist, what the technology looks like, why blended fabrics are a nightmare, and how brands sometimes oversell what they’re really doing.
Because the reality is — circularity isn’t just about intent. It’s about infrastructure. And infrastructure takes time, money, regulation, and a lot of coordination to build. That’s the gap no one wants to talk about.
What Is Textile-to-Textile Recycling?
So i’m just going to get this out of the way: not all recycling is created equal. When a brand says they “recycle clothes,” they might be talking about a donation bin, or turning garments into insulation, or maybe just shipping your old hoodie to a secondhand market on the other side of the world. That’s not circularity — that’s waste management.
Textile-to-textile recycling is different. It’s when a garment — usually worn out, damaged, or otherwise unusable — gets broken down and turned back into raw textile input. And that input can then be used to make something new of the same quality. It’s not insulation, it’s not filler, it’s not carpet padding. It’s a new T-shirt from an old T-shirt. That’s the goal.
But here’s the problem: that almost never happens. Right now, true textile-to-textile recycling barely registers at the industry level. It’s complicated, expensive, and the systems to do it just… don’t really exist yet. We’ve got companies working on it (we’ll talk about them later), but this is still frontier territory.
And meanwhile, the fashion industry keeps producing. Globally, we dump over 92 million tonnes of textiles every year. Most of that ends up in landfills or gets incinerated. And less than 1% gets turned into new clothes. That’s not a typo. Less than 1%.
So when we talk about recycling, we’ve got to be precise. Because the second we let brands blur that line — between realrecycling and just "keeping it out of landfill" — we start confusing effort with impact.
The Two Technology Paths: Mechanical vs Chemical
There are two main ways to recycle textiles back into textiles: mechanical and chemical. Both have their place, but neither is perfect — and neither is operating at the scale we need. Let’s break them down.
Mechanical Recycling: Low-Tech, Low-Return
Mechanical recycling is the older method. Basically, it involves shredding fabric down into fibers, cleaning them up, and re-spinning them into new yarn. It’s usually used for cotton or wool, and only if those materials are 100% pure — so no stretch, no polyester blends, nothing too stained or beat up.
The biggest issue? Every time you shred a fiber, it gets shorter. That means the quality drops. You usually have to blend in virgin cotton just to make the fabric usable again. And after a cycle or two, those fibers are too short to be used at all.
So yeah, it works — but not for long. And most of the “recycled cotton” out there? It’s not from your old jeans. It’s from pre-consumer factory waste — like cutting scraps that were never worn.
There’s nothing wrong with that. But again, we’ve got to be honest about what’s really happening.
Chemical Recycling: The Holy Grail… In Theory
This is where things get more futuristic. Chemical recycling breaks textiles down at the molecular level and rebuilds them from scratch. In theory, it’s the key to actual circularity — especially for tricky materials like polyester or poly-cotton blends, which mechanical recycling can’t handle.
But there’s no one single method. Each company is developing their own “recipe” depending on what kind of fiber they’re targeting. Some work with water (hydrolysis), some use alcohols (glycolysis, methanolysis), some are playing with enzymes or microwaves to make the process cleaner or faster.
Here are some real-world examples to give you context:
Circ (Inditex-backed) uses hydrolysis to separate polyester and cotton in blended fabrics. It’s complex but promising.
Reju (by Technip Energies) is going after polyester using glycolysis — and claims they can process “the stuff no one else wants.”
Syre (H&M-backed) is working on recycled polyester at gigascale. Still early days, but they’ve got big money behind them.
Renewcell (now Circulose) was focused on chemically recycling cotton into pulp, but they hit financial walls (we’ll get into that later).
Each method has trade-offs — energy use, purity of output, the chemicals involved. Some are cleaner than others. Some scale better. Some are barely out of the lab. But across the board, they’re more technically advanced than shredding — and way more expensive.
Blended Fabrics = The Boss Fight
The biggest problem? Blends. Your average fast fashion garment isn’t just one fiber — it’s 60% cotton, 40% polyester, or some combo with elastane or nylon or rayon. And those are hard to separate.
Mechanical recycling usually can’t touch them. And chemical recycling can sometimes handle them — but only if the tech is dialed in, the mix is known, and the fabrics aren’t contaminated with coatings, dyes, or weird trims.
This is why sorting and feedstock quality are such huge issues. Even if the tech works, it needs the right inputs. Otherwise, the whole system breaks down.
How a Textile Recycling Plant Actually Works
Okay, so let’s say the tech exists. Let’s say you’ve got a plant up and running, the machines are humming, and there’s actual funding behind it. What happens next?
Here’s what a textile-to-textile recycling facility is actually doing — step by step.
Step 1: Intake — Getting the Clothes
First, you need textiles. Lots of them. Most facilities get their input either from:
Brand take-back programs,
Industrial waste (like factory scraps), or
Post-consumer waste (what people toss or donate).
But here’s the problem: most of it is a mess. You’re dealing with all kinds of materials, weird blends, trims, coatings, and mystery fibers. And for chemical recycling, you need to know exactly what you’re working with — or the whole process can backfire.
Step 2: Sorting — The Hidden Bottleneck
Sorting is brutal. It’s often manual, and expensive. Workers (or scanners, if you're lucky) have to:
Separate by fiber type (cotton, polyester, wool, etc.)
Remove trims, zippers, buttons
Weed out anything with coatings or elastane
Group by color (because re-dyeing is another beast)
This part of the process is so underdeveloped that it bottlenecks the entire recycling system. There are machines being built to automate it — like Fibersort in Europe — but it’s still early days, and most of the world is doing this the slow way.
Step 3: Pre-Processing — Getting It Ready
Once sorted, the textiles are cleaned and prepared. This might involve:
Shredding (for mechanical recycling),
Cutting and dissolving (for chemical),
Removing color or finishing treatments,
Drying or filtering the material.
This is where quality control comes in — if the material is too dirty, too blended, or too processed, it might not make it through.
Step 4: Recycling — The Main Event
Now comes the actual recycling:
Mechanical plants shred the material into fibers and spin it into new yarn.
Chemical plants break the fabric down into monomers (for polyester) or pulp (for cotton), then purify and rebuild it into usable raw material.
The output at this stage might be:
Recycled fiber,
Cellulose pulp (like Circulose™),
Plastic pellets (for polyester),
Or a fiber blend ready to be spun into yarn.
Step 5: Waste Management — Not All Clean
Recycling isn’t clean by default. There are always byproducts: dyes, sludge, wastewater, chemical residues. Facilities have to treat and manage this stuff responsibly — or they risk trading one problem for another.
Step 6: Selling the Output — Back Into the System
This is where it either works or falls apart. The recycled material has to be sold:
To spinners and mills,
To brands looking for recycled content,
Or to manufacturers who can plug it into existing systems.
But if the product is too expensive? Or too inconsistent? Or there’s no buyer lined up? It stalls. This is exactly what happened to Renewcell — they had the tech, the pulp, the plant… but not enough pull-through from the rest of the supply chain.
So yeah — it’s a process. And every step has its own risks, costs, and failure points. The tech might be solid, but if even one part of the chain breaks — if the feedstock is off, or the sorting system’s not ready, or there’s no buyer on the other side — the whole thing collapses.
And that’s what makes scaling this stuff so hard. It’s not just a factory problem. It’s a full system problem.
Barriers to Scale: Why It’s Not Happening Yet
So now you’re probably thinking — okay, the tech exists, the plants exist (or at least are being built), and brands keep talking about circularity. So what’s the holdup?
This is the part no one wants to really spell out: the roadblocks aren’t just technical — they’re systemic. The problem isn’t that recycling can’t work. It’s that everything around it needs to change in order for it to work.
Feedstock Is a Disaster
The recycling process is only as good as what you feed into it. And right now, what’s coming in is a mess. Most clothes are made from blended fabrics — like 60% cotton, 40% polyester — which are notoriously hard to process. Even if they’re not blended, they’re full of zippers, buttons, coatings, spandex, embroidery, weird finishes — all of which can jam up the system.
Sorting facilities aren’t widespread, and where they do exist, they’re mostly manual, slow, and expensive. And let’s be honest — most brands don’t design their clothes with recyclability in mind. They’re not labeling materials clearly or thinking about what happens to a garment when it’s no longer wearable. So even when brands launch take-back programs, the quality of what gets returned often isn’t usable.
This isn’t just a feedstock issue. It’s a design problem, a labeling problem, a logistics problem — all upstream.
Economics Still Don’t Work
Let’s say you can recycle the material. Can you sell it?
In most cases, recycled fiber is more expensive than virgin. And fashion is a volume game — margins matter. Even though raw material cost is a small fraction of a garment’s price, that premium compounds as it moves through the supply chain. And many brands — especially in fast fashion — still aren’t willing to eat that cost unless regulation forces them to.
There’s also no global price benchmark for recycled fiber. No futures market. No standard. So buyers hesitate. And when virgin polyester is dirt cheap, recycled alternatives can’t compete without support.
The Tech Isn’t Plug-and-Play
Even when the technology works, that doesn’t mean it scales.
Chemical recycling is still expensive, energy-intensive, and usually proprietary. Most of the promising technologies out there are still stuck in pilot phase, or producing at a few thousand tonnes per year — when we need systems that can handle millions. And building the ecosystem around them — the contracts, the feedstock pipelines, the logistics infrastructure — takes years.
If anything goes wrong (and something always does), you’re burning cash while waiting to fix it.
Policy Isn’t Moving Fast Enough
There’s no global requirement that says fashion brands have to use recycled textiles. No mandated minimum recycled content. No extended producer responsibility laws in most countries. No standardized labeling system that makes it easy to sort clothes by fiber.
And most governments aren’t treating textile recycling as critical infrastructure. They’re focused on EVs, batteries, and renewables — not the pile of clothes going to landfill.
France is ahead of the curve with some brand accountability laws and textile waste fees. The EU is pushing circularity under its Green Deal. But it hasn’t translated into real pressure on most brands yet. And elsewhere? It’s still the wild west.
Brands Still Want the PR, Not the Systems
A lot of circularity talk is still marketing, not manufacturing.
It’s easier to say you support recycling than to sign multi-year purchase agreements. Collection programs look great in a press release — but most of those clothes end up in thrift shops or incinerated. And when a brand says “100% recycled polyester,” they’re usually talking about bottles, not garments. That’s bottle-to-textile — not textile-to-textile.
This is why textile recycling hasn’t scaled yet. It’s not one issue holding things back — it’s all of them, all at once. And until we start treating this like infrastructure — not just innovation — nothing’s really going to shift.
The Renewcell Lesson: When Tech Isn’t Enough
For a minute, it looked like they had cracked it. They were the first to build a commercial-scale facility recycling cotton-rich garments into a new fiber input — a branded pulp called Circulose™. It could be used to make viscose, lyocell, and other regenerated fibers. Big brands like Levi’s and H&M signed on. The press was glowing. The promise was real.
And then it all fell apart.
Five months after launching their flagship plant in Sweden, Renewcell filed for bankruptcy. The demand just wasn’t there — or more accurately, the demand wasn’t fast enough or strong enough to support the economics. They struggled with everything: coordinating the supply chain, locking in long-term brand commitments, managing production costs, and moving enough volume. All while trying to compete on price with virgin pulp made from trees.
It wasn’t a tech failure. The technology worked. But the system around it wasn’t ready. And that’s the part people miss. You can have the cleanest, smartest, most scalable solution — but if the feedstock pipeline is fragile, the policy isn’t there, and brands are still hedging? You’re running uphill with bricks on your back.
After the collapse, a private equity firm bought Renewcell’s assets and rebranded the company as Circulose. The pulp still exists. The idea still has legs. But the lesson is clear: technology alone doesn’t build a circular system. It’s not enough to invent the solution — you have to design everything around it.
Misconceptions & Greenwashing
This is where things get messy — not because the tech doesn’t exist, but because the language around it has been completely hijacked.
There’s a gap between what brands say and what’s actually happening behind the scenes. And unless you really know the difference, it’s easy to assume “recycled” means sustainable, or that circularity is already in motion. But most of the time? It’s marketing with a sustainability costume.
Let’s break a few things down.
When a brand says “we recycle clothes,” they could mean anything from sending them to donation centers, to downcycling them into insulation, to literally incinerating them for energy. None of that is textile-to-textile. It's just offloading. It doesn’t mean those clothes are getting turned into new garments. It just means they’re not your problem anymore.
“Recycled cotton” usually doesn’t come from your old clothes. It’s almost always pre-consumer waste — clean, unused fabric scraps from cutting floors. That’s not circularity. That’s just efficient manufacturing.
When you see “100% recycled polyester,” it’s usually made from plastic bottles, not clothes. It’s called bottle-to-textile, and while it technically counts as recycling, it’s a one-way street. You can’t take that garment and recycle it again. It’s not a loop — it’s a dead end dressed up as a halo.
Takeback programs sound great, but if you can’t sort the materials, clean them, and recycle them back into new clothing, then they’re not closing the loop. They’re just collecting — and maybe shipping the problem somewhere else.
And the language is designed to blur these lines. Brands will say things like “circular collection,” “made with recycled materials,” or “committed to a closed loop future,” without explaining what they’re actually doing — or not doing. Sometimes they’re just buying a small batch of recycled cotton and using it in a capsule collection for the headline. Sometimes the “recycling partner” they’ve listed doesn’t even have a facility capable of doing textile-to-textile work at scale.
This isn’t about blaming consumers for not knowing. It’s about the fact that brands are counting on that confusion to make themselves look better.
And the problem with that? It slows down the urgency to fix the system. Because if everyone thinks recycling is already happening, then who’s going to invest in actually making it happen?
Final Thought: It’s Not Just About Innovation — It’s About Infrastructure
If there’s one thing I want you to take from all this, it’s that textile-to-textile recycling isn’t a myth. It’s real. It exists. And it matters. But it’s not happening at scale — and it’s not going to happen just because a few startups figure out the tech.
This is about infrastructure. About regulation. About redesigning supply chains and rewriting business incentives. Until brands are designing clothes with recyclability in mind, until governments put pressure on material standards, and until buyers commit to recycled content before the plant is even built — this whole thing stays stuck in pilot mode.
And in the meantime, we’ll keep seeing brands throw around words like “circular,” “regenerative,” and “recycled” like they’re already living in the future. But we’re not there yet.
If we want real circularity — not just vibes and marketing decks — we’ve got to build the backend. And right now, the backend barely exists.
This post was the foundation. The next one’s about who’s actually trying to build that future, where they’re at, and what it’ll take to make it real.