As its clothing consumption climbs, the UK’s textile collection system begins to fall—leaving the industry’s stakeholders holding the bag as it crumbles. If Britain’s post-consumer waste enthusiasm cannot be curbed (or binned), it’s the textile sector that risks rupturing, Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP) found.
And if the burden falls on local authorities, the global non-government organization (NGO) predicted annual costs could reach 200 million pounds (about $269 million) by 2035. Not to mention the immediate environmental hit: an extra 2.5 million metric tons of CO2e, give or take, annually emitted from increased landfill and incineration.
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“This is an existential threat to the collecting, sorting and grading sector that’s been in the UK for more than a hundred years,” chief executive Catherine David said. “The impact of this sector folding will be catastrophic. Generating and increasing the value of our worn-out clothing must be fast-tracked if the industry is to be salvaged.”
The UK Fashion and Textile Association (UKFT) seems to have heard David loud and clear, given the trade association just dropped a framework designed to guide the country toward a circular textile economy by 2035.
“The UK’s fashion and textile industry stands at a pivotal moment,” said CEO Adam Mansell. “As global attention intensifies around sustainability, resource efficiency and circularity, the need to secure a domestic resource base and drive socio-economic impact through textile recycling has never been more promising.”
The National Textile Recycling Infrastructure Plan represents the culmination of two years of in-depth research, dialogue and collaboration across the entire textile value chain in the UK, Mansell said. UKFT led the project through the Circular Fashion Innovation Network (CFIN) and in partnership with UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), with support from key partners like Veolia and Oxford Economics.
It outlines a set of industry and government recommendations to transition to a “robust, circular textile economy by 2035 in the UK”. It amalgamates intel from players across the post-consumer textile supply chain.
“We have engaged with international initiatives and organizations operating within the textile recycling landscape,” Mansell said. That research spanned local authorities, collectors, sorters, graders, recyclers, manufacturers, innovators, technology providers, brands and retailers. “These diverse voices have helped shape a vision grounded in the industry as it is and focused on practical solutions.”
To promote domestic textile recycling, the synthesized plan is structured around four key pillars—infrastructure, market capacity, skills and workforce and technology; each deemed “essential to building a viable, scalable and future-ready textile recycling system.”
The plan is two-phased: the first (1-5 years) covers short-term actions while the second (5-10 years) prioritizes long-term. Non-reusable textiles (otherwise known as NRTs) are of particular interest, underscored by ACT UK’s report that the region discards 740,000 metric tons of NRT every year.
The first phase (2025-2030) is focused on laying the foundation needed to give the UK’s circular textile economy what it needs, when it needs it—achieved through systemic policy changes and initial infrastructure development.
Key priorities include enacting policy drivers, not unlike a mandatory extended producer responsibility (EPR) scheme, to finance the transition. Additionally, eco-design requirements will improve material recyclability and stimulate demand for recycled content; the lack of such is hindering the sector’s development, the organization said.
“Without mandated responsibility for post-consumer textile waste, brands face little pressure to design for recyclability, recycled content or fund recycling systems,” the plan reads. “This policy gap paralyses both private investment and the development of long-term infrastructure needed for a circular textile economy.”
Conversely, the second phase (2030-2035) prioritizes scaling up that established foundation via systems integration and industrial expansion. The long-term portion further focuses on developing regional post-consumer textile management hubs and, eventually, supporting investment in domestic spinning capacity linked to the circular infrastructure.
Keeping the NRT emphasis in mind, UKFT defined innovations in post-consumer textile collection as being “focused on increasing the amount of post-consumer textiles diverted from residual waste, redirecting NRT flows to domestic textile recycling solutions, as well as making textile waste management collection more efficient and optimized.”
While the first phase focuses on policy and foundational infrastructure, the second phase focuses on systemic integration, concentrated on fully deploying automated sorting systems and expanding domestic fiber-to-fiber recycling infrastructure. Also proposed was a vision for a national textile recycling hub—one with ATSPs included—that could kick off this year.
“The results of the proposed vision study indicate that these combined developments could potentially represent £277 million [$373.3 million] investment, with £58 million [$78.1 million] of this total realized within the UK,” according to the plan.
“This plan is a call to action for government and industry to support the transition to a circular textiles economy in the UK,” Mansell said. “Our commitment remains clear: to support the development of an innovative and commercially viable textile recycling system that supports both environmental and economic goals.”
