In California, transformation on how apparel, textile and footwear waste gets handled is afoot.
Governor Gavin Newsom of California signed the state’s extended producer responsibility (EPR) bill, widely known as SB 707, into law in September 2024. But despite its official status as a law, much remains to be sorted out.
Rachel Kibbe, founder and CEO of American Circular Textiles and Circular Services Group, and Chloe Songer, co-founder and CEO of SuperCircle, joined Kate Nishimura, Sourcing Journal’s senior news and features editor, in Los Angeles to discuss the direction of the law and how companies can participate in the legislative process.
Related Stories
What’s happening behind the scenes?
CalRecycle, the state agency that is set to oversee the EPR program, is currently fielding applications from entities that want to be the state’s only producer responsibility organization (PRO). Applications will close in January, and the state is selected to announce a PRO by March.
The PRO will handle the implementation of the EPR rules, companies’ compliance with them and any fees associated with the law. By the middle of 2026, qualifying producers—which includes brands and retailers—will sign up to be part of the PRO, Kibbe said.
“It’s a statewide needs assessment that’s going to study where the infrastructure gaps lie, what needs to be implemented to make the program successful, what exists, what doesn’t, what it’s going to cost,” Kibbe said. “Based on that needs assessment, a plan is going to be written by the PRO [and] submitted to CalRecycle.”
Once the plan is finalized, companies classified as producers will be required to be fully compliant by 2030, when the rules will be fully implemented.
“We’re talking about a series of years which contain various milestones and benchmarks—and an advocacy process which is going to be long but short. 2030 feels like a long time away, but we’re talking about collecting more clothes than we have in the history of the world by 2030 and having a plan to fund it by one PRO,” Kibbe told the audience.
Reuse, resell, recycle?
Because the rules for SB 707’s implementation have yet to be set, it remains unclear how much reliance the PRO and CalRecycle will place on resale and reuse—but based on EPR regulations impacting other industries, like packaging, the experts said they expect the state to lean heavily on those mechanisms.
That could result in nixing some demand for textile recycling, which companies have worked hard to do in a scalable, robust way.
Kibbe said chemical recycling, thought of as a strong way forward for textile recycling, is often excluded from EPR legislation entirely because lawmakers want to “exclude the most pollutive forms of material recovery.” But that would be prohibitive to the efficacy of leveraging recycling as a viable way to handle material recovery, she contended.
“Mechanical recycling for textiles…serves a purpose, but it’s limited. It degrades the quality of fibers. It does not take post-consumer [waste] as well as it does post-industrial [waste]. It’s just not going to cut it for the volume of textiles we need to recycle,” Kibbe said, calling for a “robust and inclusive” definition that would allow future technologies to help float recycling as a way forward.
Songer said SuperCircle, which counts itself as a technology and reverse logistics platform meant to handle waste and enable circularity, and the brands it works with—which include Reformation, Guess and others—count on recycling as a core part of making their waste streams greener.
For her, resale and reuse cannot be the only ways forward for post-consumer waste, in particular.
“We cannot resell our way out of this problem,” Songer told the audience.
Existing systems and circularity sentiment.
Kibbe said today’s infrastructure is not great enough to support the demands that will come with handling mass quantities of textile waste in a way that California officials and companies have not previously been required to do.
“The reuse and resale infrastructure that we have in the U.S. is growing at [a] rapid clip, but it’s not going to be enough. It’s not going to be sufficient—nor could it necessarily be appropriate—to reuse and resell everything that we collect in the state, and the recycled content infrastructure, both nationally and globally, isn’t quite there yet,” Kibbe said. “But maybe more importantly, there isn’t the market demand for recycled materials like there [is] in [other industries].”
Songer said that, across the industry, she has seen growth in how interested brands have become in reconsidering their waste streams, partly onslaught by legislation, but partly organically.
“I’m not all doom and gloom. We’ve seen a huge shift, but we are still in what I would consider the first few innings of the circularity transition,” Songer said. “Some of the bright spots that we’re seeing are, this has now moved from a nice to have or a pilot, to an operational priority for many of our brand partners.”
She said companies have started integrating circular business models that are meant to impact their bottom lines, rather than attempting one-off pilots and delaying future activations. That sentiment has shifted significantly from where the industry was two years ago, she noted.
Both Songer and Kibbe agreed that, to keep up with the sentiment of the market and the requirements of legislation, funding still needs to be directed into the pockets of recyclers, sorters and those involved in the textile-to-textile recycling chain. Songer specifically called out concerns that EPR, if not defined well to include recycling, could harm the work that has already been done or stymie textile recycling’s future growth.
“I am somewhat concerned, based on what we’ve seen in Europe and some of the partners that we work with very closely and some of our analogous businesses…that have previously gone bankrupt or really struggled because of EPR legislation underfunding sort and recycle,” she said, noting that SuperCircle will continue to advocate during the plan-writing process to support such initiatives.
Kibbe encouraged other stakeholders, including brands and retailers, to advocate for rule-making that feels doable and appropriate, just as Songer and SuperCircle have done. She said that, without input from several sides of the industry, the law could have unintended negative consequences.
“Start accounting for your materials, your products, your circularity programs, investing in them sooner rather than later, and then getting a seat at the table in terms of policies, so you’re informed and you can provide meaningful and educated feedback to trade groups…and to lawmakers so they know what to write so it helps your business rather than harms your business,” Kibbe recommended.
