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Sustainability & Recycling

Fashion For Good’s Cotton Reloop Matrix Project Will Try To Scale Cotton Recycling

• By  Textile Excellence
• October 15, 2026

The Cotton Reloop Matrix Project will test recycled cotton yarns against real-world brand requirements, helping the industry understand the trade-offs between quality, price and recycled content.

Recycled cotton has a scale problem. Mechanical recycling can turn textile waste into new fibres, but the process shortens and weakens the fibres, limiting how much recycled cotton can be blended into new yarn without affecting fabric performance.

Fashion for Good’s new Cotton Reloop Matrix Project aims to tackle this challenge with data, mill trials and shared quality standards. The initiative will map the capabilities of commercially available recycled cotton yarns against brand specifications and physically validate their performance, giving the industry a clearer picture of where recycled cotton is commercially viable today and what it will take to use more of it.

The project brings together Fashion for Good partners Arvind, BESTSELLER, C&A, Interloop, Reformation and Shahi, with ecosystem partner Uster contributing its yarn-testing expertise.

Why recycled cotton remains a challenge

Cotton accounts for 19% of global fibre production, making its recovery an important part of textile circularity. Mechanical recycling offers a way to turn cotton-rich textile waste into new yarns and fabrics. The process shreds waste into loose fibres that can be respun, but only around 45%–50% of the input survives as usable material. The rest is lost as short fibres and processing waste.

The recovered fibres are also shorter than virgin cotton, limiting the proportion that can be blended into new yarn. As a result, many recycled cotton yarns are restricted to around 10% recycled content if the fabric is to meet commercial performance requirements.

Recyclers may have capacity available, but brands still face difficult choices over quality, price and recycled content. Testing is often fragmented, with brands and recyclers working from separate datasets and lacking a common basis for comparison. Recycled blends are also frequently measured against 100% virgin cotton benchmarks, which may not reflect what recycled fibres can realistically deliver.

The project aims to shift the focus from matching virgin cotton in every respect to finding the right recycled blend for each application, with targeted quality improvements where higher performance is needed.

“Recycled cotton has been talked about as a scale-ready solution for years, but the industry has been working from fragmented data and siloed testing,” said Katrin Ley, Managing Director at Fashion for Good. “This project is about closing that gap with hard evidence. By plotting real recycler capabilities against real brand quality targets, and by co-developing the operational standards to support them, we can move recycled cotton from a case-by-case experiment to a category the industry can actually plan around.”

From data to mill trials

The project will run on two parallel tracks.

First, Fashion for Good will map what recyclers can currently produce against brand requirements for knitted and woven fabrics. The resulting Quality Matrix will identify where recycled cotton is ready for commercial use and where further innovation is needed.

Second, selected recyclers and project partners will produce 10 demonstrator fabrics and conduct five quality-augmentation trials under real production conditions. These trials will generate a Trade-off Analysis showing how recycled content, price and quality affect one another.

The findings will feed into an open-source spinning Standard Operating Procedure (SOP), aimed at helping manufacturers achieve more consistent results across supply chains. The project will culminate in a Roadmap for Cotton Circularity, outlining the data infrastructure needed to scale recycled cotton across product categories and regions.

“Recycled cotton isn't new to us: it's a fibre we've worked with for years. What's been limiting is the ability to scale to higher blend percentages without compromising fabric quality or hand-feel. What this project offers is a shared reference point where brands and recyclers work from the same evidence. We hope this opens the door to greater scalability and uptake over time,” said Nikki Player, Senior Director of Raw Materials at Reformation.

By bringing brands, manufacturers and recyclers onto a common testing platform, the project aims to replace isolated trials with a more practical, evidence-based route to commercial adoption.

“Recycled cotton isn't new to us: it's a fibre we've worked with for years. What's been limiting is the ability to scale to higher blend percentages without compromising fabric quality or hand-feel. What this project offers is a shared reference point where brands and recyclers work from the same evidence. We hope this opens the door to greater scalability and uptake over time,” said Nikki Player, Senior Director of Raw Materials at Reformation.