Europe is a world leader in recycling, but currently only a fraction of its post-consumer textile waste is reused or valorized in some form; the rest piles up in landfills, is incinerated or moves through low-value export routes that obscure where the material ends up and who pays. In 2025, just 1.5 million tons out of 13.3 million tons of post-consumer textile waste were collected and sorted. Textile waste has grown rapidly alongside the rise of fast fashion brands.
Each European consumer buys about 95 pieces of textiles annually, up 12 percent since 2019. The average EU citizen discarded 25 kg of textiles in 2025 — a volume that, without a functioning system, becomes a recurring household and municipal cost rather than a recoverable material stream. Cheap and low-quality fashion is seen as disposable, which has created a major waste issue, and producers are not incentivized to change their ways.
With recent innovations in textile-to-textile recycling, synthetic textile waste has the potential to become the feedstock for a genuinely circular European textile value chain. Capturing and reusing that material would not only preserve natural resources and reduce waste, but also support rebuilding the EU’s industrial base and economic sovereignty. If this is to happen, Europe needs to use the forthcoming Circular Economy Act to recognize textiles as a critical resource and establish a coherent framework across the bloc that supports collection, sorting, reuse and high-quality recycling at scale.
A new season for Europe’s fashion industry Turning fashion from a linear industry into a circular one is an ongoing, complicated process. For the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, a circular economy for fashion is where clothing, shoes and accessories are used more, made to be recycled and created from recycled or renewable inputs. European post-consumer textile waste is currently more likely to be downcycled, landfilled or incinerated rather than recycled in Europe due to a lack of financial incentive and a clear regulatory pathway — meaning the EU is discarding material it could use, while exporting environmental impacts and industrial value elsewhere.
Right now, it is more affordable for producers to use virgin materials rather than recycled ones, but it doesn’t have to be that way. In the Netherlands, the government recently awarded Reju a €135 million grant to build and operate its first industrial-scale textile Regeneration Hub in Chemelot. Reju is a textile-to-textile regeneration company focused on turning European post-consumer polyester textile waste into new high-quality recycled polyester.
Once the Chemelot Regeneration Hub is up and running, the company expects to process approximately 64,000 tons of textile waste, representing 300 million items, to produce close to 40,000 tons of recycled polyester material annually. Textile sorting is still usually done by hand in sorting centers run by non-profits. The centers have to handle more without being able to extract the value, so they’re being overwhelmed,” says Patrik Frisk, CEO of Reju.
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