Textile Exchange puts numbers on textile-to-textile recycling capacity for the first time
Editorial relevance: Very high – establishes a global baseline for available spinnable textile-to-textile recycled fiber and quantifies the gap between waste availability and usable output.
Textile Exchange has published a first global methodology for estimating textile-to-textile recycled fiber availability for apparel and home textiles. Developed with Fashion for Good, Reverse Resources and TEXroad, the framework combines available waste volumes with collection, sorting, processing and technology constraints to estimate how much material can actually become spinnable fiber.
The analysis projects recyclable textile feedstocks to increase from roughly 10 million tonnes in 2025 to around 15 million tonnes by 2030. Yet the quantity of recycled spinnable fiber is estimated at only 1–1.5 million tonnes in 2025, rising to approximately 3–5 million tonnes by 2030.
The scope covers post-industrial and post-consumer textiles and both mechanical and chemical recycling of cotton, polyester, nylon, manmade cellulosics, wool and and blends.
Textile Exchange stresses that the figures are directional: data quality remains uneven, and future editions are intended to incorporate more primary data from recyclers and suppliers.
Textile Exchange textile-to-textile recycling recycled fibers feedstock sorting collection cotton polyester nylon MMCF wool
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