In the face of rapidly growing sustainability challenges, pressure is mounting on businesses to decouple production from virgin resources, reduce waste and phase-out pollution. The Circular Economy (CE) is important for addressing resource efficiency within the textiles sector. In a CE for textiles, clothes would be used more, made to ...
In the face of rapidly growing sustainability challenges, pressure is mounting on businesses to decouple production from virgin resources, reduce waste and phase-out pollution. The Circular Economy (CE) is important for addressing resource efficiency within the textiles sector. In a CE for textiles, clothes would be used more, made to be recycled, and made from safe and renewable inputs. Textiles-to-textiles (T-T) recycling is a key component of a circular textiles industry yet represents only 1% of global textiles production. This paper sets out to answer how a closed-loop system for recycling post-consumer textiles (PCT) can be scaled. Whilst T-T recycling is a rapidly emerging industry, there is a lack of clarity on the enabling conditions needed to scale significantly throughout the value chain. By means of semi-structured interviews with practitioners participating in textiles CE activities, a holistic analysis of the barriers and enablers at all stages of the value chain has been conducted. The paper concludes with practical recommendations addressing each T-T supply chain actor. It makes an important contribution to understanding how actors in the circular value chain, policymakers and convening bodies can act in concert to successfully scale a system for collecting and recycling PCT.