Amazon is one of the sponsors of a new set of European textile circularity trials that build on earlier poly and cotton-specific trials.
With the cellulosic programme, Advancing Circularity (ACP) collaborates with more than 80 value chain participants from the EU-27, plus Norway, Switzerland, the UK, Morocco, and Turkey.
Single jersey, Italian fleece, woven lightweight shirts, and heavier-weight twill textiles will all be included in the product trial. 40 per cent recycled content is the desired percentage, of which post-consumer textile waste is to account for half. The target is to have all goods and partners use at least 50 tonnes of post-consumer discarded textile feedstock. This year, the group hopes to start the initial creation of fabrics.
“Our focus is on post-consumer textiles as we believe they are too good to waste,” said Karla Magruder, ACP founder and president. “By diverting post-consumer spent textiles from downcycling, incineration, and landfill, we can lower the textile industry’s environmental impacts.”
ACP was founded in 2020 with funding provided by the Walmart Foundation. Its goal is to study, map, model, and test circular textile-to-textile systems starting with collecting, sorting, preprocessing, and recycling all the way through the traditional supply chain at a typical commercial scale. Cotton-based textile trials in the US are already in progress. ACP began testing polyester textile-to-textile in the middle of 2022.