Textile waste is growing rapidly in Europe, explained primarily by post-consumer volumes. In 2025, Europe generated around 15.2 Mt of textile waste, of which 13.3 Mt is post-consumer (i.e., 9 out of 10 tons). Each part of the value chain faces constraints of its own:
- Once generated, collection and sorting are constrained, limiting the playing field for T2T recycling. Europe generates 13.3 Mt of post-consumer textile waste in 2025, but only 1.5 Mt is collected and sorted - roughly one ton in nine. With collection around 33% and sorting around 36%, the addressable base for T2T remains small and concentrated. Polyester & cotton (including polycotton) represent 79% of molecules within post-consumer collected and sorted textile waste.
- Generation is accelerating with the rise of fast fashion: more purchases, fewer wears, and shorter lifetimes. Structural demand growth (4% p.a. since 2020) is amplified by a fast fashion market projected to expand at 11% p.a. between 2025 and 2035, enabled by low-cost production and global e-commerce. The result is a steady compression of product lifetimes: EU consumers buy around 95 textile pieces per year (up 12% versus 2019).
Policymakers have acknowledged the challenge and are taking action across the value chain, as the policy framework continues to take shape. From 2025, mandatory separate collection of textiles and the roll-out of textile EPR will set a baseline for collection performance and funding, while export restrictions on unsorted textile waste and bans on destroying unsold textiles will reduce the system’s escape valves. The next step is to translate this policy momentum into operational reality: expand collection capabilities, upgrade sorting depth into recycling-grade streams, introduce recyclability and recycled-content criteria in textile production, and align definitions and data to provide more confidence for investors.
Scaling T2T will require the establishment of robust economic conditions that make collecting, sorting and recycling financially viable at scale.
To help contain the projected growth in post-consumer textile waste, Textile-to-Textile (T2T) recycling will need to scale rapidly in Europe. The key question is whether the ecosystem can be industrialized quickly enough - and under which economic conditions - to move beyond pilots and absorb a meaningful share of incremental waste volumes.
The second section of the report therefore assesses what a system build-out would entail to scale T2T recycling from below 1% today to around 15% by 2035. Reaching this level by 2035 implies early action: industrial investment cycles typically span 5+ years, especially for first-of-a-kind assets, with a whole value chain to be set in motion and supporting mechanisms to be put in place upfront (e.g., technology validation, offtake agreements, demo-plant readiness).
In practice, scaling T2T circularity towards c. 15% by 2035 translates into step-changes across the value chain. Collection through dedicated channels would need to increase materially from c. 33% in 2025 to c. 50% by 2035. Sorting would need to scale from c. 36% in 2025 to c. 63% by 2035, alongside the deployment of associated pre-processing capabilities to prepare recycling-ready feedstock. At the back-end, recycling into new textiles would need to expand sharply and reach 2.7 Mt of textiles recycled into new textile fibers.
Achieving this scale-up is estimated to require an incremental €8-11B in CAPEX “one-off investment” and €5-6.5B in OPEX “cost recurring every year”. Under the baseline assumptions used in this economic model, T2T circularity tends to imply lower profitability for several links in the chain, compared to incumbent textile waste-management streams. This translates into compressed or negative EBIT margins in some cases (e.g., -75% to -25% for polyester recyclers).
As a result, enabling mechanisms are required for T2T circularity to become investable—and hence scalable—over the transition period. These could take the form of public policies (e.g., education programs to raise collection), targeted CAPEX grants (e.g., to pre-processors or recyclers), eco-modulated fees (designed to cover the true net end-cost across collection, sorting, pre-processing and recycling) and regulatory measures (e.g., mandating a minimum share of recycled fibers in textile production). Additional sensitivities could also be explored (e.g., alternative operating models such as sorting in lower-income economies).
Beyond the gross CAPEX and OPEX requirements, a complete business case should also account for the avoided costs currently borne by the general waste system to manage textiles that end up in residual streams (e.g., collection and treatment of mixed waste, bulky waste handling and local clean-up), which could be reduced through segregated textile collection—an area that will need to be sized to assess the net system economics of T2T.