Cotton accounts for 19% of global fibre production and is a core part of the material mix. Although alternative recycling pathways exist to utilise cotton-rich textile waste feedstock, they do not produce a cotton output. Therefore, mechanical recycling is a crucial pathway to utilise waste and create recycled cotton yarns and fabrics.

Through the mechanical recycling process, textile waste is shredded and re-opened into loose fibres that can be respun into yarn. However, shredding shortens and weakens the fibres, so only 45 to 50% of the input survives as usable material. The rest is lost as short fibres and processing waste, and because the surviving fibres are shorter than virgin cotton, spinners can only blend a limited share back into new yarn. In practice, that caps most yarns at around 10% recycled content: any higher and the fabric isn't durable enough for commercial use. While recyclers have available capacities, integrating a meaningful percentage of recycled cotton remains complex for brands navigating trade-offs around quality and price.

Testing happens in isolation, with recyclers and brands working from separate data sets, and no shared reference comparison to close the gap between them. Alongside this, brands often evaluate recycled blends against 100% virgin cotton standards, which makes for a challenging comparison for recycled cotton. To help unlock greater market adoption, the industry must shift its focus from virgin parity to fit for purpose, matching the realistic performance profile of recycled fibres to appropriate product applications while utilising targeted quality augmentation pathways where higher performance is required.

Katrin Ley, Managing Director at Fashion for Good, highlights the need for a common evidence base: “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. 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.”

Nikki Player, Senior Director of Raw Materials at Reformation, sees the shared evidence base as an opportunity to increase recycled cotton content: “Recycled cotton isn't new to us: it's a fiber 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.”

The Cotton Reloop Matrix Project is convened with a coalition spanning the cotton value chain: Fashion for Good partners BESTSELLER, C&A, Reformation, Interloop as manufacturing partner, Arvind, and Shahi as advisors to the project; and ecosystem partner Uster, whose spinning and yarn-testing expertise underpins the physical validation phase.

The Cotton Reloop Matrix Project works in two parallel tracks.

First, Fashion for Good maps what recyclers can produce today against what brands need, across knit and woven categories. The result is a Quality Matrix that shows, at a glance, where recycled cotton is ready for commercial use and where targeted innovation can extend its reach.

Second, the project moves from the map to the mill. Selected recyclers, in collaboration with the project partners, will produce 10 demonstrator fabrics and run five quality augmentation trials in real production conditions, generating a Trade-off Analysis that shows how recycled content, price and quality shape one another.

Best practices from these trials will be captured in a universal, open-source spinning Standard Operating Procedure (SOP), designed to support consistent manufacturing across global supply chains. The project closes with the Roadmap for Cotton Circularity, an industry-facing report setting out the data infrastructure needed to scale recycled cotton adoption across product categories and regions.

Sources: Textile Exchange (2025), Materials Market Report 2025, 18 September 2025; Anas, M. S., Faheem, M., & Mikučionienė, D. (2025), “Challenges and limitations in recycling of post-consumer cotton denim waste into new textiles”, Journal of Natural Fibers, 22(1), 2570080.