Next steps have been taken to advance the implementation of California’s highly anticipated Responsible Textile Recovery Act, otherwise known as SB 707.
The Department of Resources Recycling and Recovery (CalRecycle) has selected a Producer Responsibility Organization (PRO) to enact the law, which mandates that producers of textiles and apparel pay into a system to keep waste out of landfills.
Landbell USA Inc. ultimately won CalRecycle’s approval, beating out bids from the Circular Textile Alliance and the Textile Renewal Alliance. All of the contenders submitted applications before Jan. 1, 2026, and CalRecycle was required to choose and disclose a PRO by March 1.
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Landbell USA is a subsidiary of the Landbell Group, which bills itself as a global leader in Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) solutions, including for other EPR programs in the U.S. and Europe. The U.S. offshoot, headquartered in California, is focused on facilitating textile solutions for EPR legislation, though the global parent group has global experience facilitating programs across electronics, batteries and packaging.
The group’s application said its “qualifications anchor the proposal,” with over 30 years of experience and 42 PROs across 18 nations, including a textile PRO in the Netherlands and established entities in Spain and Italy ready to be activated when similar national laws are finalized. The group has an Ecovadis Gold rating, which is given to organizations that are rated among the top 5 percent internationally for sustainability practices.
“This experience matters in California, because SB 707 requires both scale and nuance: the program must serve dense urban areas and rural counties, operate in partnership with retailers and thrift organizations, and maintain auditable data flows across a complex supply chain,” Landbell USA wrote in its application for the California PRO.
The group’s plan for the 35,000 to 40,000 estimated producers that will be covered by SB 707 includes establishing a web of 15,800 municipal collection bins (each serving about 2,500 state residents). Retailers will also take on roles as collection partners in order to provide Californians with convenient and familiar venues for clothing and textile drop-off.
“The program’s messaging is intentionally simple and positive—’Mend it. Wear it. Pass it On.’ This means that residents will understand that repair comes first, reuse follows, and recycling is there when those first two options are not possible,” Landbell USA wrote.
The group further elucidated that the program should chiefly prioritize reuse and repair, with retail and community-based organizations responsible for promoting and providing visibility for repair services. Thrift organizations like Goodwill and Salvation Army will be “integral” to the plan, and they will be financially supported through the program’s implementation.
Notably, the plan includes explicit budgetary support for “transitional export shipping” for unsold goods when “domestic markets are constrained,” touching on the controversial practice of sending bales of used goods overseas to be sold in secondhand markets. “Transboundary shipments follow ISO guidance for secondhand exports and comply fully with OECD and U.S. rules,” the application said.
Meanwhile, “Recycling is the third step in the hierarchy,” it added. Mechanical recycling will be directed to domestic hubs like regenerative cotton spinning facilities, while chemical recycling will be used for material blends, the text said.
There were questions throughout the legislative process for SB 707 about whether “advanced recycling” processes would be covered. The law doesn’t expressly ban advanced recycling, but it puts the onus on recyclers to provide proof of concept to CalRecycle and to work with the agency on getting approval to a be a part of the PRO. Such technologies include depolymerization, methanolysis, hydrothermal recycling and more.
One of Landbell USA’s selling points was its established digital platform, which has helped its PROs manage registration, brand lists, fee modulation calculations, needs assessment mapping, transportation routes, audit logs and annual reporting. The system is compatible with existing audit validation services.
The organization will feature a Board of the PRO, Ex Officio Board, and Advisory Committee, which will work together to advance the PRO’s initiatives. Producer Board members will be composed of mostly California-founded producers, with a premium placed on creating diversity based on company size and product range, as well as covered material categories. Landbell USA said a portion of the seats on the Producer Board will be filled by large international producers, and that it will prioritize finding four such groups.
Board members will establish the PRO’s strategic direction and its budgets, as well as solidifying the fee frameworks for producers and any fee modulation rules. Ex Officio Board members, by contrast, will include members of the collection, sortation, repair, reuse, recycling and hauling supply chain. Technical leaders in textile technology and those schooled in California legislative compliance, like PFAS rules, and areas like natural fiber cultivation and regenerative agriculture, will also be a part of the Ex Officio Board, along with the California Product Stewardship Council (CPSC), the main sponsor of SB 707.
The PRO’s Advisory Committee will feature experts in policy, legislation, municipal outreach, eco-design, digital product passports, footwear deconstruction and more. “Advisory members help translate statute into practical targets, convene sector peers where collaboration is required, and contribute best practices that shorten learning curves during pilot and statewide rollout,” the group wrote.
The program’s timeline, which is aligned with the law, stipulates that covered producers join the PRO by July 1. After that, the next step is a Needs Assessment, which must be submitted by March 1, 2027, and CalRecycle will adopt the rules by July 1, 2028. The PRO will submit its official EPR Plan by July 1, 2029, and statewide implementation begins Jan. 1, 2030.
Landbell USA proposed that a pilot be conducted in five California counties in 2028 and 2029 in advance of the official rollout, including Alameda, Calaveras, Fresno, Monterey, and San Francisco. Together, the counties represent about 10 percent of the state’s population, and the pilot test routes, bin placements, collection frequency, retailer engagement and consumer education efforts could yield valuable insights, the group said.
“It also informs how repair and reuse are best scaled, how thrift organizations can be supported without being disadvantaged by parallel collection streams, and how mechanical and chemical recycling capacity should be contracted and staged.”
Rachel Kibbe, founder and CEO of American Circular Textiles and Circular Services Group, said the designation of a PRO is a “solid step,” but there are plenty of still-unknowns.
“The designation is an important milestone, but it’s really the beginning of the work. For companies, the focus now turns to implementation: timeline, costs, governance, and how the system operates in practice,” she said.
American Circular Textiles worked closely with the bill authors and sponsors throughout the drafting and legislative process for SB 707, and its membership includes those in the reuse and recycling pipeline like SuperCircle, Circ, Evrnu and Trove, along with brands like Reformation and H&M and resale players like The RealReal and Thredup.
“Textile EPR, both globally and in the U.S., is proving to be a complex challenge,” Kibbe said. “The next phase will determine whether California builds a system that is practical, durable, and capable of scaling. Because other states are watching closely, the decisions made here are likely to influence how textile EPR develops nationally.”
