Circular Economy Supply Chain Collaboration & Co-Creation

Fashion Giants Join Forces to Scale Circular Apparel, Footwear

Two new initiatives from Fashion for Good are enlisting industry heavyweights to ‘create a blueprint for systemic change,’ by scaling circular solutions and infrastructure for footwear and textiles.

Published 2 months ago | About a 6 minute read

Image: Mara Hoffman

14 brands working to ‘close the footwear loop’

Image credit: Rawpixel

On Wednesday, Fashion for Good announced Closing the Footwear Loop — a collaboration between 14 leading fashion and footwear brands and their existing circularity programs to tackle the industry's complex circularity challenges. The project partners — Fashion for Good members adidas, Inditex, ON, Otto Group, Reformation, Target and Zalando; along with German footwear giant DEICHMANN, Dr. Martens, the Footwear Innovation Foundation, lululemon, Puma, Tommy Hilfiger and Vivobarefoot — aim to drive innovation across the footwear value chain to transform the industry’s current, linear "take-make-dispose" model into a circular one.

The global footwear industry churns out an astonishing 23.8 billion pairs of shoes annually and roughly 90 percent of those end up in landfills. Each shoe is composed on average of more than 60 different components — from fabrics and plastics to rubber and adhesives — intricately assembled to meet performance, aesthetic and cost demands. This complexity makes recycling and reintegrating used shoes into the supply chain a formidable task. In 2023, Nike unveiled its first fully circular shoe, designed for disassembly and recyclability; but industrywide efforts to change the wasteful ways shoes are made remain piecemeal — leaving the sector lagging behind in circular innovation, compared to other areas of fashion.

This challenge is exacerbated by a lack of reverse logistics infrastructure and the absence of design principles that prioritize circularity. Despite these hurdles, some footwear brands are already exploring solutions including material-science advancements and take-back programs to help pave the way for more circular footwear — efforts that complement the collaborative work within Closing the Footwear Loop, creating a synergistic approach to driving industry-wide change.

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Closing the Footwear Loop builds on Fashion for Good’s Pioneering the Future of Footwear initiative and ensuing pilot with FastFeetGrinded, and addresses multiple key intervention points: lack of end-of-life infrastructure, complex multi-material designs, and a need for unified circularity approaches. The project’s time-bound deliverables include:

Detailed mapping of European footwear waste streams (in collaboration with Circle Economy) — providing crucial data on volumes, materials, rewearability and recyclability. (Report & business case assessment due 2025)
A roadmap towards circular footwear design — developed with Fashion for Good alumnus circular.fashion — outlining principles for material selection, durability, recyclability, repairability and responsible chemical management. (Guidelines due 2025)
Validation of end-of-use innovations — including trials and impact assessments — to overcome current bottlenecks and drive industry-wide adoption. (Recycled material outputs due 2026)

“The footwear industry stands at a critical turning point. With billions of shoes produced annually and 90 percent ending up in landfills, Closing the Footwear Loop represents our most ambitious effort yet to reimagine how we design, use and dispose of shoes,” says Fashion for Good Managing Director Katrin Ley. “By bringing together 14 leading brands, we're not just addressing a challenge — we're creating a blueprint for systemic change.”

Fashion giants, textile suppliers form circular ‘Fiber Club’

Zara has featured Circ lyocell in two recent collections | Image credit: Circ

Fashion for Good is also a key partner in Fiber Club — another recently launched pre-competitive, collaborative initiative designed to enable seamless adoption of recycled textiles into apparel supply chains.

Launched by US-based textile-to-textile recycling innovator Circ — also in partnership with forest conservation non-profit Canopy — Fiber Club brings producers and brands together to simplify supply chain integration, establish bulk pricing frameworks, and facilitate brands' access to circular materials to make large-scale adoption more accessible and affordable.

“Fiber Club represents the future of textile recycling and circularity,” said Circ CEO Peter Majeranowski. “By collaborating with brands and streaming supply chain integration, we're making it easier than ever to adopt recycled and next-gen materials at scale.”

Introducing new fibers into existing supply chains often requires minimum volumes and investment, and it can be costly and complex. Designed to drive seamless integration of circular materials into commercial-scale production and foster lasting partnerships, Fiber Club includes textile producers Arvind, Birla Cellulose and Foshan Chicley; and brand partners Bestseller, Eileen Fisher, Everlane and Zalando.

Fiber Club’s first project centers on Circ's staple lyocell fiber — which has been featured in collections from Christian Siriano, Mara Hoffman and Zara — with plans to incorporate more Circ materials in the future. With Fiber Club, Circ aims to add Circ lyocell to the growing list of plug-and-play, circular materials innovations poised to help the fashion industry end its polluting, wasteful ways.

Of the three supply chain partners doing pilot development for these brands, Birla Cellulose will produce lyocell staple fiber from Circ's pulp made from polycotton textile waste, and Arvind and Foshan Chicley will produce textile fabrications. The brands will collaborate with these value chain partners on pilot quantities to scale production, then appoint a garment manufacturer to bring products to market.

“As a long-standing partner of Fashion for Good and an investor in Circ, Zalando is proud to join this transformative initiative,” says Pascal Brun, VP of Sustainability and D&I at Zalando. “We view the Fiber Club not only as vital to scale up next generation materials for our own brands, but also to tackle the systemic challenges that we face at an industry level, that are key to unlocking scale and enabling a more circular future for fashion.”

Committed to long-term, industry-wide impact, the Fiber Club partners encourage replication of the concept by other next-gen material producers to help scale the availability of sustainable textile solutions.