This July, it becomes illegal for large fashion brands to destroy unsold clothing in the EU, and much of the industry still has nowhere for that stock to go. Yet, In London alone, residents discard around 157,300 tonnes of clothing each year, equivalent to roughly 44 items per person.
As textile waste mounts, most brands know circularity matters. Few know how to implement it at scale.
During London Climate Action Week, we convened a private gathering of senior sustainability leaders and fashion brands to test a different question: is nature, rather than incremental fixes to existing systems, the missing piece of the waste crisis? And, more pointedly, what would it actually take for brands to move past pilot-stage thinking and toward genuine systems change?
What follows are the key findings from that conversation.
We’re at a critical inflection point for textile waste as brands face a regulatory reckoning
Participants agreed that the fashion industry is approaching a structural inflection point, driven not by consumer pressure but by regulation. The July 2026 destruction ban is the clearest example as large companies will no longer be able to dispose of unsold clothing, footwear, and accessories.
Luxury brands will be especially exposed, as significant volumes of stock sit in stores in markets where no recycling infrastructure or secure supply chain partners yet exist. But this exposure, participants argued, is precisely what could make circularity commercially viable. Recyclers and supply chain partners have been building this infrastructure for years without sufficient demand to sustain it. Regulation, not market pull, may finally provide that demand.
But while legislation can create demand, it can’t dismantle the structural barriers standing in the way of a genuinely circular textiles economy.
The economics still reward disposal
The most stubborn of those barriers is storage. It is simply cheaper to dispose of or give away unsold stock than to hold onto it. Even evergreen items, such as cashmere jumpers, end up discarded because storage costs outweigh their value. That puts recycling and reuse schemes in direct competition with far cheaper disposal routes.
Participants broadly supported recycling as essential circular infrastructure, but questioned whether the industry’s commitment to closed-loop, textile-to-textile recycling matches operational reality. Labelling complexity, performance standards, regulatory requirements, testing timelines, and a shortage of viable off-takers are widening the gap between aspiration and operational reality.
A less comfortable possibility was floated too: that the emphasis on textile-to-textile recycling isn’t purely environmental. It can also offer cover for maintaining current production volumes, on the comforting assumption that material can simply be cycled back into the system forever. Seen that way, recycling becomes less a solution than a permission slip letting brands feel absolved of the harder task of producing less.
Regulation remains ineffective and unevenly spread
Beyond implementation issues, participants noted that the regulatory landscape is shifting unevenly, causing confusion across markets and stalling genuine change in the industry. Most significantly, this uncertainty is hampering manufacturers’ ability to prepare for compliance.
One participant noted high willingness among manufacturers in Bangladesh, but years of hearing that regulation is imminent, only to see continual revisions and delayed decisions, have bred frustration. Policy may be moving quickly by Brussels standards, but from the factory floor the destination remains frustratingly out of reach.
As regulation moves slowly and grows more complex, a significant understanding gap has also opened among manufacturers. Outside Europe’s sustainability bubble, regional officers handling stock globally often do not know EU reporting requirements, let alone how to generate the data needed to meet them.
Industry lobbying compounds the problem further, having already diluted emerging regulation, from EPR schemes to proposals like the New York Fashion Act. Policy ambition rarely progresses in a straight line; it’s reshaped through negotiation and pressure, often landing weaker than intended.
Participants were careful to note this isn’t unique to fashion. The same pattern plays out across plastics, logging, and fossil fuels, where well-resourced incumbents deploy familiar strategies to slow reform. Fashion’s waste problem, understood this way, isn’t an isolated case. It’s one example of a much broader pattern of institutional resistance to systemic change across the climate movement.
Nature offers a different philosophy
If those obstacles share a common thread, it’s that circularity continues to be treated as a technical problem, something to be solved with incremental improvements to an unchanged model. Participants argued fashion needs to go further and rethink its relationship with waste itself, taking its cue from how nature designs for renewal rather than permanence.
One participant noted that engineering teaches people how to make things, but rarely how to unmake them. Nature works the other way. Leaves fall, organisms decompose, materials return safely to the environment. Fashion, by contrast, treats disposal as failure. But a seasonal garment designed to biodegrade safely is not inherently less sustainable than one built to last decades. Rather than asking how long a product survives, the more important question is what happens when its life ends.
Turning that philosophy into practice is the hard part. Advances in bio-based materials and biodegradable design are genuinely promising, but participants stressed that innovation is held back less by science than by the systems around it.
Indeed, one participant argued that the single biggest barrier to innovation reaching the market isn’t invention but financing. Many proven technologies struggle to secure the funding needed to reach commercial scale, as funding timelines don’t provide immediate retunes
Innovators are also often disconnected from the brands and supply chains they hope to serve, while wider challenges, from feedstock availability to competition from other industries, continue to slow progress.
Fashion needs to redefine what success looks like
Nature-inspired design alone cannot solve fashion’s waste problem without confronting the industry’s wider business model. Recycling, resale, repair, and bio-based materials all matter, but participants questioned whether any of them can keep pace with ever-growing production volumes.
Lasting change, they argue, requires a broader redefinition of success itself, which values environmental outcomes alongside financial returns. In this framing, circularity is not the destination, but one part of a wider transition towards a fashion system that operates within the limits of the natural world.
