BIR World Recycling Convention & Exhibition : Textile recycling at a crossroads: can policy and the circular economy keep up?

The message came through again and again at the BIR Textiles Division side session in Gothenburg on 2 June: regulators and the recycling sector need to talk to each other. Representatives from across the global reuse and recycling value chain gathered to thrash out how policy, trade and market reality can pull in the same direction — and the gap between them was the recurring theme. “We are facing fundamental shifts driven by policy, market developments and the growing urgency to deliver real circularity,” said division president Martin Böschen, who called it a “critical moment” for the industry.

Several big policy changes are arriving at once. The UN Basel Convention is moving into new work on used textiles that could see them reclassified in ways that add trade barriers. The EU Waste Shipments Directive comes into force in May 2027, with plenty still unclear. And extended producer responsibility (EPR) schemes are spreading across the EU and beyond. Each of these will reshape how textiles are sorted, reused and recycled.

The trouble, speakers argued, is that much of this is being designed with little grasp of how the trade actually works. Jessica Franken of US-based SMART warned that the Basel process is heavily coloured by a “negative media narrative” around used clothing. If the more extreme proposals advance, she cautioned, the threat is essentially breaking a circular system for textiles that has run successfully for well over a century.

The market backdrop only sharpens the tension: falling product quality, ever-growing volumes of fast fashion, and a widening gap between supply and genuine reuse demand. For Nohar Nath of India’s Kishco Group, fast fashion is the root of it — a problem that consumers, governments and brands, not the recycling industry, are best placed to fix.

Data is another sticking point. Estimates of how much unusable material sits in clothing bales range wildly, from under 1% to as high as 60%. Jennifer Wang of Full Cycle Resource Consulting urged everyone to read such studies critically — asking who was interviewed, how, and who funded the work — and warned that the media too often amplifies headline figures without context, with policy then echoing the same misinformation.

Sweden offered a vivid cautionary tale. Mandatory textile separation, introduced last year, sparked headlines along the lines of “you can’t put your old socks in the bin anymore” and triggered a national clear-out. Collection points were swamped with poor-quality items nobody wanted to buy. The industry pushed back, and the government amended the bill to let damaged textiles return to the residual stream.

The lesson, said Karolina Skog of the Nordic Textiles Network, is that regulation has to be built around market realities — and that citizens need clear communication about the difference between “reusable” and “recyclable.” Mixing the two, she noted, wastes both economic and environmental value.

Perhaps the sharpest warning concerned who gets a say. Franken described the current dynamic as “policy colonialism” — the Global North imposing rules on the receiving countries of the Global South without talking to the people and businesses whose livelihoods depend on the trade. Pakistan, the world’s largest importer of second-hand clothing, lacks the data, technology and finance to roll out traceability and EPR systems, said Zainab Naeem of the Sustainable Development Policy Institute, and customs codes still fail to distinguish textile waste from reusable clothing.

There are constructive models. In Ghana, Landfill2Landmarks is working with the national standards authority to set a recognised bale standard, built by asking sellers what actually sells — a way, its co-founder said, to flush out non-conforming exporters rather than penalise good sorters. An ISO standard for the cross-border trade of second-hand goods is also under development.

If one conclusion united the room, it was that good textile recycling policy has to rest on reliable data, shared definitions and genuine dialogue across the supply chain — not on media headlines or top-down assumptions. As Böschen put it as the session closed, the priority is to keep the conversation open with regulators.