Last month the Textile Exchange released its Materials Markets Report 2025, its annual health checkup on global material production. Each year, this report focuses on what materials are made, where they come from, and their environmental impact.
According to this report, fiber production increased 5.6 percent in 2024 to 132 million tonnes. Unfortunately for the environment, almost all of this growth came from increased production of virgin polyester.
The table below shows fiber source splits for the four most-widely produced fibers in 2024. Sustainably-sourced fibers accounted for approximately 18 percent of production in 2024. These include recycled and bio-based polyester and nylon, recycled and regenerative cotton, and recycled and FSC-certified cellulose. The obvious concern here is the 68.4 million tonnes of virgin polyester—88 percent of all polyester produced last year.
Based on Worldly’s Higg MSI estimates, replacing virgin polyester with recycled polyesters like Ground to Good™ or Repreve® can reduce CO2 emissions between 30 and 90 percent.
What’s preventing the switch?
The culprit here is a lack of textile-to-textile circularity. BCG reports that less than one percent of discarded clothing is recycled, with 80 percent ending up in landfills. Let’s make this number more personal: Earth.org estimates that the average American sends 81.5 pounds in used clothing to landfills each year. I guess we’re too lazy to donate to Goodwill.
To combat textile waste, the EU and many US states have passed Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) laws holding manufacturers responsible for costs associated with a product's entire life cycle, including disposal and management. The hope is that these laws will provide the infrastructure needed to collect a meaningful amount of textile waste.
Once there is sufficient feedstock of post-consumer textile waste, the challenge shifts to scaling up and improving the processing of it. In particular, better and more cost-effective technology to:
- Sort and separate textiles made from blends of fibers, such as 50-50 cotton polyester t-shirts.
- Strip out dyes, chemicals, and finishes
- Maintain the quality of the fibers during reprocessing.
What do retailers and brands need to do?
Retailers and brands should expect increasing regulatory pressure on both ends of the product lifecycle. EPR laws and some parts of AGEC in France focus on end-of-life. AGEC has specific provisions around circularity reporting: is there a take-back program for the product? How can it be recycled? What percentage of the product is taken-back or recycled annually?
On the front end of the product lifecycle, AGEC and impending EU DPP legislation focus on what goes into the product and where it comes from. The goal here is to get manufacturers to transition to more sustainably-sourced materials. Many retailers and brands have aligned their ESG goals with this, publicly-stating their intent to use 100 percent sustainably-sourced polyester by 2030.
Many of the retailers and brands I work with have prioritized consolidating and validating the data required to satisfy current and anticipated regulations in PLM. At a macro-level, this allows them to answer questions about missing or unreliable data, such as:
- Do we have all our transaction certificates to prove our polyester is recycled?
- Which products have inadequate repair guidelines or take-back programs?
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