• When we talk about circular fashion, we are talking about a closed system in which resources are not discarded once their use is over, but are put back into circulation.
• We speak of circularity in fashion when the life of garments is extended by repairing, reselling or reworking them through upcycling processes.
• Recycling the fibres that make up garments is also a good practice from a circular perspective but, for it to be truly efficient, this possibility must be considered at the product design stage.

The concept of circular fashion may not be immediately easy to grasp, but let's start with a visual reference: a circle as opposed to a straight line. Circularity is a system that operates in a closed cycle, as opposed to a unidirectional, or linear, system. In the latter, the one we are most accustomed to, we take the earth's resources, transform them into products, use them and then throw them away. This kind of approach treats resources as infinite; once they are discarded or scrapped, their value is lost. The circular economy — and fashion is no different — provides that, instead of throwing something away when we have finished using it, it is put back into the system, either whole or in such a way that the materials it is made of are reused in some manner. A system of this kind is regenerative and restorative: by applying the principles of circular systems across all industrial sectors, it would be possible not only to pollute less, but also to generate value. But what does all this mean for the fashion industry?

The benefits of circular fashion

With more than 100 billion garments produced every year and consumption set to increase by 63 per cent by 2030, maintaining the current growth rate of the fashion world would lead to a tripling of the already over-exploited planet's current resource consumption: suffice it to recall that Overshoot Day — the day on which we have exhausted this year's resources — fell on 15 May for Italy and on 2 August 2023 for the world. Returning to fashion, only 13 per cent of textile products are recycled once garments are discarded. Most of these enter the secondhand market, but less than one per cent is recycled into new clothing; the rest becomes textile waste, representing a loss of more than 100 billion dollars worth of materials every year.

Today there are essentially two ways of approaching circularity: on the one hand, keeping garments and textile products in use for as long as possible; on the other, recycling garments to obtain new fibres. The first option includes activities aimed at extending the life of products as they are — such as resale or repairs — as well as those that create something new from existing products, namely upcycling. The second encompasses all those processes capable of obtaining new fibres from pre-existing ones through recycling.

Regenerate, reuse, repair and resell

For a process to be truly circular and thereby reduce its environmental impact, it is important that garments pass from hand to hand with no further waste of resources — or with minimal waste, such as that associated with shipping in resale. Repairing garments is certainly one of the greenest methods imaginable for extending the life of products, but it is not always straightforward. There is, of course, the care of clothing that we can all adopt — looking after our garments when washing them at home and attending to products when they become worn or damaged — but all too often the repairs needed go beyond what one is able to do alone. It is in this context that the initiatives of numerous brands around repair sit, particularly in the outdoor sector, a world in which product performance is directly linked to condition and a sector in which brands have been active on this front for some time. The North Face has had a department dedicated specifically to repairs since 1971 and recently launched the TNF Renewed program, an initiative that involves restoring customers' garments, with those who return items they no longer use receiving a discount. Patagonia took repairs around the world with the Worn Wear Tour, visiting mountain resorts and offering repairs for outdoor garments, while since last November the Californian brand has also opened permanent repair stations in its own stores.

One of the reflections of the consumer society in which we are immersed is that we inevitably end up buying more than we need: it happens with everything, and it happens with clothes too, which often end up being worn very little. This is where the importance of a practice such as resell comes in — the resale of garments that are no longer worn. A practice that is today exponentially easier than it was in the past and, above all, far more widespread across the territory thanks to the proliferation of secondhand apps. By 2026, the secondhand market is set to reach a turnover of 82 billion dollars, enjoying growth of 275 per cent compared to pre-pandemic volumes. This vertiginous increase is justified in part by technology, which has made buying and selling secondhand clothes and accessories more immediate, but also by a shift in perspective among consumers who, driven partly by economic factors and partly by a growing awareness of environmental issues, buy and above all sell through online marketplaces.

Another way of putting used clothes and accessories back into circulation, giving them a new life, is to transform them — perhaps by assembling some parts with others from different garments or accessories, for example. Upcycling is the name for this process which, through creativity, sees the creation of value from something that would otherwise be perceived as waste. Obtaining a jacket by cutting scraps of fabric from a pair of trousers or from another jacket is an example of what can be defined as an upcycling process. The new product may be similar to the original, as in the case of a pair of jeans made from other jeans, or it may undergo a functional transformation and become something entirely unrelated to what it once was. It is in every sense reuse, experienced in a decidedly more creative way.

Textile fibre recycling

The challenges the industry faces in achieving true fibre-to-fibre recycling are numerous: first and foremost because recycling is in itself an energy-intensive process, and today one of the enormous problems the textile sector faces in this area is the composition of garments, as not all of them are recyclable. The more a garment is made up of different fibres, the more complex the process required to recycle them becomes. The ideal, from a circular economy perspective, would be to have mono-material products. To date, research into recycling has certainly made progress, but large-scale investment and infrastructure are needed to bring it up to speed, including fibre-sorting capabilities. Osomtex, for example, is an Oregon-based brand that mechanically recycles post-consumer and post-industrial textile waste into new yarns through a technology capable of recycling single fibres, such as cotton, or multiple fibres, which are shredded and blended with virgin fibres to create new yarns. Evrnu, on the other hand, is a company that, thanks to the ucycl® patent, converts waste textile materials into "new" engineered fibres, which can be recycled multiple times through a chemical process.

Beyond materials: circular economy perspectives

Circularity can and must be applied to raw materials, certainly, but it is also an opportunity from the perspective of the processes themselves, which can generate additional energy — and therefore value — or produce waste products that are not usable by the textile industry but may be attractive to another sector. By optimising the use of resources, it is possible, for example, to capture the steam generated by certain processes and use it to produce energy for a new process; and not only that: wastewater and certain chemicals can also be reused. As for the textile industry's waste products, it is possible to extract economic value and avoid waste by identifying other sectors that could benefit from them. This is what Reda 1865 does, for instance: a wool yarn manufacturer in the Biella area that collects lanolin — the protective fat found in fleece, which emerges as a by-product of raw wool washing processes — and supplies it to the pharmaceutical industry.

Circularity in textiles is not a utopia, but it is important that it be integrated from the design process onwards: thinking about garments and collections with circularity in mind — both in terms of materials and use — is the starting point for meeting European requirements too. The EU Strategy for Sustainable and Circular Textiles calls for precisely this: that the sector should anticipate, from the outset, the question of what will happen to end-of-life products. Implementing what this policy document for sustainable fashion demands, between now and 2030, will require collaboration between industry and government, significant investment, large-scale innovation, transparency and traceability.