Full Circle Textiles Project aims at textile recycling

A systemic change towards circularity will ultimately reduce the environmental impact of textile waste and potentially eliminate the dependence on virgin materials entirely. As much as 73% of clothing produced is sent to landfill or is incinerated and of all new clothing made, less than 1% of material used comes from recycled sources. On September 10, 2020 Fashion for Good initiated "Full Circle Textiles Project: Scaling Innovations in Cellulosic Recycling" – a first-of-its-kind consortium project. Focusing on cellulosic fibers, this project aims to validate and eventually scale promising technologies in chemical recycling from a select group of innovators to tackle these issues. Leading global organizations Laudes Foundation (Zug/Switzerland), Birla Cellulose (Mumbai/India), Kering (Paris/France), PVH Corp. (New York/USA) and Target (Minneapolis/USA) have joined Fashion for Good to explore the disruptive solutions with the goal of creating new fibers and garments from used clothing. The project’s overall aim is to investigate economically viable and scalable solutions for cellulosic chemical recycling to enable a closed loop system converting textile waste from cotton and cotton-blend materials, to produce new man-made cellulosic fibers. Over an 18-month period, project partners will collaborate with innovators, Evrnu (Seattle/USA), Infinited Fiber Company (Espoo/Finnland), Phoenxt (Berlin/Germany), Renewcell (Stockholm/Sweden) and Tyton BioSciences (Danville/USA), to validate the potential of their technologies in this still nascent market. The recycled content produced by 4 of these innovators will be converted at Birla Cellulose’s state-of-the-art pilot plants to produce high quality cellulosic fibers. From there, fibers will move through the project partners supply chains to be manufactured into garments.