6.4.1 From Waste to Feedstock

Industrial symbiosis is a collaborative approach in which companies from different industries exchange materials, energy, water, infrastructure or by-products so that the waste generated by one process becomes a valuable resource for another. By creating interconnected industrial ecosystems, organisations reduce waste, decrease their dependence on virgin resources and improve both environmental and economic performance. In the textile and fashion industry, industrial symbiosis complements circular design and recycling strategies by closing material and resource loops during manufacturing through cross-sector collaboration.

Industrial symbiosis can take many forms. Textile manufacturers may recover waste heat to supply neighboring facilities, share wastewater treatment infrastructure, or exchange water and energy between plants. Pre-consumer textile waste can be redirected to upcycling companies or recycled into new fibres, while agricultural and food industry by-products can become feedstocks for innovative textile materials. Emerging textile refinery technologies recover cellulose, polymers and chemicals from textile waste for use in new products across the textile, plastics and chemical industries. Exchanges must still follow the waste hierarchy and comply with waste, chemicals, product-safety and animal-welfare requirements. A by-product is not impact-free: for example, leather uses a slaughter-industry co-product but tanning can create significant chemical, water and effluent burdens. Claims should therefore disclose allocation assumptions, processing impacts, traceability and the feasible higher-value alternative for each stream.

These collaborative systems create more resilient regional value chains, reduce landfill disposal, stabilise material flows and generate new business opportunities through resource sharing.

RESOURCE Insight: Scaling Circularity, Global Fashion Agenda and McKinsey & Company, 2021. Scaling Circularity was published in 2021 by Global Fashion Agenda (GFA) with McKinsey & Company, and it draws lessons from the Circular Fashion Partnership (CFP) in Bangladesh. It is a cross-sector/pre-competitive collaboration involving fashion brands, textile and garment manufacturers, and recyclers, intended to capture and recycle post-industrial textile waste. The initiative used Reverse Resources’ digital platform to register and trace waste materials, including information on collection, quality, description, and delivery to recyclers. The report identifies investor confidence in reliable feedstock supply and demand for recycled outputs as central to scaling recycling capacity. It also discusses the need for systems and infrastructure around collection, sorting, tracing, and recycling. Registration and transparent tracking of waste flows can help create trust in material availability and quality, which is relevant to manufacturers and SMEs participating in such systems. Source: https://globalfashionagenda.org/resource/scaling-circularity-report/

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