Textile Recycling in the UK: A Guide for Ethical Fashion Brands

It’s documented that the UK discards over 1 million tonnes of textiles each year, with a significant proportion ending up in landfill or incineration and to be honest I wonder how they even calculate the numbers, I fear it’s a lot worse. Recycling has been a huge focus for many years and not just in textiles but for the materials we use across a vast range of product types and packaging.

I want to explore with you how textile recycling works and if there are options available on a large scale in the UK.

First of all textile recycling isn’t created equal and some methods can often degrade a fibres quality. Textile recycling involves several key stages, from collection, sorting to processing and reintegration.

The process for textile recycling generally follows these steps:

1.Collection – Textiles are collected from clothing banks, charity shops, recycling centres and more recently retailer take-back schemes.

2. Sorting – Recyclers classify fabrics based on type, quality and recyclability, this is often referred to as grading (not to be confused with size/pattern grading.) Fabrics are instead graded into categories, think Good, Better, Best. But "good" in this instance is actually low quality.

3.Processing – Depending on the material, textiles undergo mechanical or chemical recycling - We’ll go through these in more detail below.

4.Reintegration – The recycled fibres are used to manufacture new products, such as clothing, insulation or industrial materials.

It all sounds quite simple when you pop it in a list but the reality is that it requires a large amount of infrastructure, energy and cost. There's also issues with cross contamination, i.e people throwing badly stained garments or used underwear in with their 2nd hand clothing etc.

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Mechanical vs. Chemical Textile Recycling

There are two main methods of textile recycling:

Mechanical Recycling – This process involves shredding textiles into fibres, which are then respun into yarn. This method is commonly used for wool, cotton and polyester but may result in lower-quality fibres. This is the most widely used process but it cannot yet handle blended fibre and well, we have a lot of blended textiles in circulation.

Chemical Recycling – Advanced recycling technologies break fabrics down to their molecular level. This method is particularly effective for polyester and blended fabrics, allowing for the creation of higher-quality new fibres but it's expensive, energy-intensive and still in pilot or early commercial phases for most textile types and isn't available at any kind of accessible scale in the UK.

Here's a list of companies in the UK who are currently operating/trialling different chemical recycling options if you would like to research further: Project Re-claim, Circle-8, DyeRecycle, Act UK and Worn Again Technologies - if you do, you’ll find most of them are focused on recycling 100% polyester or a specific blend as thats how hard it is to recycle.

Another important point to discuss is how Recycling is actually classified as lower on the hierarchal list when it comes to dealing with 2nd hand or waste textiles so I'll address this here. It comes down to two main reasons: the intensive energy required for chemical recycling and the fact recycling can often yield lower quality fibre and need to be miced with virgin fibres. It's especially difficult in an economy like the UK where energy prices and wages are high. Although this is something that could improve and become more viable if the UK does find a way to sort out energy prices.

There is further complexity for recycling when textiles are in still in garment form - it has to be deconstructed first, i.e trims such as zips and buttons removed before the textiles it's made of can be processed.

Mechanical Recycling Chemical Recycling

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At LannyxStudio we've developed systems and offerings to deal with leftover fabrics and textile waste to align with our sustainability goals and values as an ethical producer and in March 2025 introduced The Circular Fabric Store to ensure we can give a continued life to these textiles by curating off-cuts into ready to use bundles and re-circulating leftover fabrics, making these available to purchase by the Metre to our wider community.

How do we sort and curate fabrics in our studio?

During the cutting out of garments we separate fabric wastage into Cut Waste & Off-Cuts.

1.Cut Caste - this is the very small cuttings, almost like shredding that cannot be created into anything but potentially stuffing. All of this cut waste is bagged up and stored until we have enough that justifies a collection from a UK recycling company. This collection can be upto 100kg and it currently takes us 12-14months to get to that point. We just had a very timely collection yesterday, so the studio is feeling a lot lighter!

2. Off-Cuts - this is medium to large cuttings that have the potential to be transformed into small accessories or lining panels etc. We separate and keep every clients off-cuts, giving them an option to turn them into accessories or receive them back for their own use. Our latest initiative has been to turn these off-cuts into curated bundles. Through our Circular fabric store we aim to get these into the hands of crafters, quilters and students to allow for re-use and recycling projects.

Leftover Fabrics

Due to the small batch nature of our production sometimes clients will have left over fabric meterage, this could be down to them having to meet a MOQ from a fabric supplier or maybe a specific design doesn’t sell as well as others. After all this is the great thing about small batch manufacturing, you can trial designs and then capitalise on the ones that people want. Clients have the option to re-sample the fabric in another design or have the fabric sent back to them. But now they have the option to move the fabric into our Circular Fabric Store where we can re-distribute the fabric back into the market.

The concept of the Circular Fabric Store has been built to make sure fabric waste is minimal but it's also a necessity, in the very near future, Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) i.e end of life care for products and the subsequent waste created in the process of making products will become a brands responsibility and we’re ready to help the brands we work with, not just be prepared but ahead of the game on this, I hope you’ll join us on that mission.

Browse The Circular Fabric Store Here