Fashion for Good, Textile Exchange Tag-Team on Key Textile-Waste ‘Unlock’

When Fashion for Good completed its Sorting for Circularity project in Europe in 2022, one finding stood out.

While increasing the use of recycled textiles is a carbon-slashing move that fashion companies with ambitious climate ambitions are clamoring to make, figuring out where clothing waste comes from—and, equally important, where it’s headed—isn’t always easy.

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Tracing textile waste, particularly when it comes from post-consumer sources, is a heavily manual, not to mention fragmented, process, which creates blind spots where visibility is needed to determine provenance, said Katrin Ley, managing director at the Amsterdam-based innovation platform. Data, too, is often unclassified and insufficiently harmonized to be useful for exchange, making identifying potential business opportunities or complying with incoming legislation such as the European Union’s waste framework directive or ecodesign for sustainable products regulation a harder lift.

Traceability, in short, is the “unlock” the industry needs but has currently been lacking to allow brands and retailers to not only report more accurately on the recycled content in their products but also meet the strict feedstock specifications that many textile-to-textile recyclers require—say, 100 percent polyester with no elastane—to scale their still mostly fledgling operations, Ley said.

“While there exists a large amount of textile waste, only a small fraction of it can be used as feedstock for existing chemical recycling solutions,” she added.

But the solution, Fashion for Good decided, wasn’t to add new processes. Two already loom large in the form of Textile Exchange’s Global Recycled Standard (GRS) and Recycled Claim Standard (RCS). The sustainability trade group also had similar ambitions, based on burgeoning policy interest, to trace textile waste “back to the source,” as Evonne Tan, Textile Exchange’s senior director of data and technology, put it. Combining their efforts, Tan said, simply seemed like a “natural fit.”

For the next two years, Fashion for Good and Textile Exchange will be launching several pilots in various still-to-be-determined geographies across Asia, Europe and the United States. The goal, they said, is to establish a standardized system for classifying and collecting textile waste data, including the creation of a glossary that nails down the definitions of waste-related terms that have been open to interpretation, complicating the transnational push for extended producer responsibility.

The organizations will also develop a so-called Minimum Viable Product (MVP) measure for the standards’ Reclaimed Material Declaration Forms, or RMDF, running it through the paces of real-world stress testing with the help of Reverse Resources, a platform that digitizes and connections textile waste with recyclers, as well as an alumnus of Fashion for Good’s 2018 Innovation Programme.

The RMDF, a template for textile sorters and other sellers of recycled materials to disclose product details, currently lacks data standardization and interoperability because it relies heavily on free text, requiring time-intensive manual verification, Ley said. And while its information is consolidated and shared with certification bodies to facilitate the issuance of transaction certificates, its visibility is largely limited to the sellers, creating a traceability dead end.

“Ultimately, the goal of this work is to develop an industry framework that can be scaled for potential implementation into the GRS and RCS chain of custody requirements, as well as other non-certified recycled supply chains,” Ley said. “To facilitate this, the MVP that will be developed and validated during the pilots will be released for public use next year.”

Tan said that any learnings will also be used to inform future iterations of Textile Exchange’s standards. Right now, it’s easy enough to trace textile waste “one step back,” she said. It’s going beyond that—while navigating the more opaque nodes of the supply chain, such as traders that blend clothes from multiple origins—that’s the challenge. The involvement of different stakeholders, including brands and retailers like Adidas, Target and Levi Strauss & Co., which have signed on to play supporting roles, will be crucial.

“Being able to understand how we can trace back to the source, particularly for post-consumer, is quite critical for us,” Tan said. “But it will take some time for all that to happen.”