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This collection has been built by a community of passionate researchers, students and industry professionals, as part of <a href="https://worldcirculartextilesday.com/" target="_blank">World Circular Textiles Day</a> (WCTD). 


World Circular Textiles Day takes place every year on 8th October.  Our vision is to galvanise the collective ambitions and goals of people, organisations and businesses to reach a fully circular textiles world by 2050. Our mission is to provide a framework for circularity stakeholders to develop and deliver a collaborative, evolving roadmap and to chart circularity’s momentum annually on the 8th October, until 2050.

What does fully circular by 2050 mean?
- Shared textile resources, in the form of products and raw materials, are kept in **continual circulation**.
- Virgin resources are **replaced with circular materials**.
- Dignity, equity and equality, for the **people** involved in all parts of the circular value chain.

In order to chart how to get to 100% Circularity by 2050, we need to know where we stand today. What circular activity is currently happening in the textiles and apparel industry and where in the world it is happening? The WCTD Collection aims to answer this question, by building the world’s largest digital library of circular textiles cases studies. 

World Circular Textiles Day is proud to be supported by our 2022-23 Circular Hero Partners:
[Lenzing](https://www.lenzing.com/), [Texaid](https://retailsolutions.texaid.com/), [Bank & Vogue](https://www.bankvogue.com/), [Usha yarns limited](https://ushayarns.com/), [The Conduit](https://www.theconduit.com/), and [Asia Pacific Rayon](https://www.aprayon.com/en/)

WCTD

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Business case

Impact on the health and happiness of human populations

Well-being

Impact on the ease of innovation, and facilitating uptake of innovations

Innovation

Scalability

Reduced green house gas emissions released into the biosphere

Reduce Emissions (SDG13)

Minimise waste through diversion: Instead of sending waste to landfill, it is redirected into other industrial processes for handling, treatment, recycling, recovery, or reuse in various forms. 

Minimise waste through design: At the outset of a process of project, plan and design such that there is zero waste or minimal waste during production, use, and at end of life. 

Minimise Waste (SDG12)

Reduced use and withdrawal of water and rate of recycling and reuse of water

Save Water (SDG6)

Providing water and sewage services, including water collection and distribution, water treatment systems and sewage treatment facilities

Water and Sewage

Collecting waste from households and businesses by means of refuse bins, wheeled bins, containers, etc., and providing treatment, incineration, materials recovery and reclamation, and disposal of hazardous and non-hazardous waste

Waste Management

Producing textile and leather products and processing them into apparel and accessories

Fashion and Textiles

Processing and producing food and beverages for consumption

Food and Beverage

Using bio-based materials such as bioplastics, mushroom-based materials, etc.

Alternative bio-based materials and inputs

Enacting measures that optimise material use such as 3D printing, etc.

Material efficiency

Using <a href="https://echa.europa.eu/information-on-chemicals" target="_blank">materials that are not toxic or hazardous</a>.

Non-toxic materials and inputs

Enacting measures that optimise water use

Water efficiency

Research and facilitate new technological developments to aid the transition to a circular economy.

Research and Development

VISION:
Raw materials are renewable, recyclable and safe, kept in continual circulation.

DETAIL:
Imagine a time when…the raw materials that are used to make things are sourced from existing products and regenerative agriculture, via carbon negative and climate neutral processes. Biodegradable raw materials are used for products with biodegradable end routes. Toxic chemicals have been washed out of the global materials pool, disposed of safely and replaced with beneficial alternatives. Virgin fibres made from fossil fuels have been banned, while secondary synthetic fibres, derived from what was already in the system, are kept in constant circulation as a resource. Circularity accounting methods, built on science-based metrics, help to manage a balanced system of resources, across all industries, and in line with the planet’s environmental limits.

Raw Materials and Planetary Boundaries

Impacts

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Industries

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The principles of a circular economy concern designing out waste, regenerating ecosystems and keeping items in use. Decoupling the economy from material flows—improving the rate of resource productivity faster than the economic growth rate—is also a consistent guide. By evolving with the growing number of applications of circular economy principles, and consolidating these strategies across thematic areas, Circle Economy’s Key Elements Framework (KE) renders the elements of the circular economy salient and serves as a basis to derive contextual strategies and interventions. 


The Framework consists of:
- Core Elements: Activities directly handling product or material flows; and uniquely,
- Enabling Elements: those that remove obstacles for core actors.


Key elements of the circular economy

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Circle Economy's framework of strategies and activities that define the circular economy

It is 2050.  Full systems change has taken place. This wouldn’t have been possible without the immediate action and radical steps taken from 2020 onwards. Many targets had to be identified in the early 2020s and achieved by 2030 to ensure that the 2050 goal happened in full. A sense of urgency, turbo stakeholder collaboration, supportive government regulation and clear, data driven targets enabled the mindsets and systems change needed to transform to a fully circular textiles ecosystem.

A circular economics model underpins what we have created. It reflects and supports a living organism made up of makers, users and restorers, interacting across vibrant and interconnected networks. Checks and balances, alongside transparency and accountability, ensure a healthy system. Financial, environmental, and social metrics have the purpose of serving communities and the planet. There is shared ownership of profit and loss – across all three metrics – throughout the value chain.

This is what we’ve achieved over the last 30 years:

WCTD Themes

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                 The dyeing industry is one of the largest water consumers in the world, using over 5 trillion litres per year along with petrochemical dyes and a host of toxic and highly polluting chemicals. According to the World Bank, textile dyeing accounts for around 20% of global industrial water pollution. 5   Trillion                 Textile dyeing pollution is more than simply dye and water.  The industry uses up to 1.2 kilos of chemicals per kilo of fabric, only 50 grams of it being dye. Approximately 70 highly toxic chemicals are routinely used in textile processing, and up to 30 of them are irretrievable. 70   Toxic Chemicals                 Our goal at Colorifix is to minimise the environmental impact of the textile dyeing industry by replacing chemistry with biology.  This completely avoids petrochemicals and allows us to move towards a renewable and sustainable supply chain whilst providing benefits in water and energy. 0   Toxic Additives             
              
           An alternative to synthetic dyes that meets key quality standards      A non-toxic process, using less energy and less water      The products people want without all of the environmental damage        
                            
                         
 

How does your products’ price compare to the current industry standards? It’s all a matter of scale, really. It’s impossible to compete with a 700,000 tonnes-a-year industry—the synthetic pigment industry—when you are making a few kilos a day. Right now, we are in the premium space, probably around 50% more expensive than existing dyes. When we scale, and not very large actually, we will be able to compete, and eventually beat existing industry prices. For manufacturing, we are relying on fairly mature technologies for fermentation. If you look at the beer industry—and how much of that is made every year—we are looking at something very similar to that. Except that instead of the product being alcohol, it is pigment. And it is not very expensive to make beers...The commodity will beat existing synthetic petrochemical prices, eventually. We’are actually doing very well on price given our stage - quite a lot of alternative technologies start with 10x or a greater multiplier. We are not anywhere near that.FUTURE PLANSOur priorities are quite clear. Number one is making sure that our customers are happy, and the technology is delivering to them what we said it would. We want to ensure maintaining the same quality standards we have achieved when we go up in scale, integrating and conforming our solution to the way the industry is working today, without interrupting their workflow and increasing their lead times. We also want to make sure that the adoption and training phases to get the technology out there become smooth and simple. At the moment, we are developing protocols of how to scale, and the training packages on how to train people, making sure information is passing across correctly and our training and implementation is done correctly and painlessly. This is needed to onboard a lot of people and help the industry change its impact. VISION FOR DECADE OF ACTIONOur message is that we really need to learn from nature and apply its own technologies and tricks for how we make things. Making colour is something that nature has always done, yet rivers never run polluted because of the way nature put colour into things. Like for many other products that we make, there are incredible solutions that exist in nature.  Nature is the teacher when it comes to sustainability. There are a lot of processes happening in nature that we can learn from and apply industrially to change the way we make things. The biggest concept that we can learn from nature is that choosing the right energy source and the right type of carbon makes all the difference. That’s why nature works on a sugar economy, basically - you make it from sunlight, it doesn’t pollute and it can fuel everything. That’s the direction that I see the industry starting to go towards, with the use of biotechnology and fermentation technologies, where you are feeding sugar to the process to make an end product. This is for biomaterial, finishing-agent or altering agent like we are making, but also drugs, pharmaceuticals and eventually even engines will have to work based on essentially a different and more sustainable carbon economy. We have to continue with the message that’s been going around in the public and industry for the last 15-20 years: we need to change how we make things, we need to optimise and become efficient and less wasteful. This planet has a finite lifetime, and the way we make things is shortening it very dramatically. Everybody’s coming to the same conclusion. For this, we need concerted effort from consumers, manufacturers and regulators. It’s not enough to say ‘oh, it’s their problem’ - it’s everyone’s problem.January 2021A conversation between Orr Yarkoni & Emanuele Di Francesco

United Kingdom

Norwich

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The first company to use a biological process to produce, deposit and fix pigments onto textiles. Colorifix follows Nature’s own circular model, which makes and applies colour sustainably. Their innovative process sources and replicates true colours from nature, for use in the dyeing process. Using DNA sequencing, they engineer natural solutions (non-toxic renewable chemistry) to solve man-made problems, specifically the heavy dependence on petrochemical dyes and highly polluting chemicals.

Colorifix

<p>The first company to use a biological process to produce, deposit and fix pigments onto textiles, Colorifix follows nature’s own circular model, which makes and applies colour sustainably. Their innovative process sources and replicates true colours from nature, for use in the dyeing process. Using DNA sequencing, Colorifix engineers natural solutions (non-toxic renewable chemistry) to solve man-made problems, specifically the heavy dependence on petrochemical dyes and&nbsp;highly polluting chemicals.</p>