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Sustainability & Recycling

Fashion Wants Circularity. Just Don’t Ask It to Make Less

• By  Textile Excellence
• October 15, 2026

The fashion industry wants us to believe it is moving towards sustainability. Recycled fibres are entering collections, recycling technologies are being developed, and brands are announcing one circularity initiative after another.

But there is a question the industry seems far less willing to confront: What if the biggest sustainability problem is not just what clothes are made of, but how many clothes are being made?

Consider recycled cotton. Fashion for Good and its brand partners acknowledge the technical challenges themselves. Mechanical recycling can recover only around 45–50% usable fibre from the input material, while the recovered fibres are shorter and weaker. Increase the recycled content, and maintaining yarn strength, fabric quality and garment durability becomes more difficult.

The industry is working to solve these problems. It needs to. But a fundamental contradiction remains.

The European Union wants textiles to last longer, be repairable and recyclable, and contain more recycled material. Yet the industry is struggling to increase recycled content without potentially compromising the very durability that these policies seek to promote.

How does it reconcile these competing demands? Better technology, improved blending and smarter product design may help. But they do not answer the larger question of consumption.

Recycling without restraint

Recycling has an obvious attraction for a business built on selling more products. It allows brands to change the materials they use while largely preserving the way they operate. They can continue launching collections, chasing sales and expanding volumes, while presenting recycled content as evidence of progress.

That does not make recycling pointless. Recovering fibres and putting waste to productive use matter. But recycled content alone does not prove that a garment has a lower overall environmental impact. Nor does it mean the industry is consuming fewer resources or generating less waste overall.

A more fundamental shift would mean making garments that last longer, encouraging customers to use them for longer, expanding repair and reuse, and reducing unnecessary production. Carry forward fashion trends from one season to the next.

Yet producing less rarely features as prominently in corporate sustainability messaging as producing differently. There is a reason: growth in sales and volumes remains central to the commercial model. Asking brands to question how much they produce means questioning a business priority they are built to protect.

Recycling, by contrast, offers a route to demonstrate progress without necessarily challenging that priority.

It may also create new products, partnerships and commercial opportunities. But whether it improves profitability depends on material costs, processing economics, supply availability and market demand. The financial case is not automatic. Its strategic attraction is clearer: it offers a way to pursue circularity while retaining the prospect of growth.

The uncomfortable contradiction

This is not to say that every brand or textile manufacturer is indifferent to sustainability. Many are investing in better materials, cleaner processes and circular technologies. The problem is that individual efforts operate within a system that continues to reward low prices, rapid turnover and high volumes.

And that is where the sustainability conversation needs to become more honest.

If recycling shortens fibres, the industry must find ways to preserve product performance. If garments are supposed to last longer, durability cannot become a casualty of recycled-content targets. And if circularity is the objective, recycling cannot be treated as a substitute for reducing waste and unnecessary production.

The industry cannot keep measuring progress only by what goes into each garment while ignoring how many garments it puts into the market.

If sustainability is the goal, why is so much effort going into changing the fibre in each garment, and so little into questioning how many garments need to be produced in the first place?

The fashion industry wants us to believe it is moving towards sustainability. Recycled fibres are entering collections, recycling technologies are being developed, and brands are announcing one circularity initiative after another.