More than many realise. The fibres shorten, the quality trade-offs stack up, and the industry has been working without a shared reference point. BESTSELLER has joined the Cotton Reloop Matrix Project - a cross-industry initiative to map and physically test where recycled cotton stands today.
Scaling recycled cotton is technically complex. When cotton is mechanically recycled, textile waste is shredded and re-opened into loose fibres that can be respun into yarn. But shredding shortens and weakens the fibres, and only a portion of the input survives as usable material. Because the surviving fibres are shorter than virgin cotton, spinners can only blend a limited share back into new yarn. Blend too much, and the fabric often doesn't meet the performance requirements for commercial use.
"Recycled cotton is already part of our material portfolio at BESTSELLER, but the challenge is taking the next step and scaling its use into more product categories. In particular, finer yarn counts can be difficult because the shorter recycled cotton fibres can affect both fabric performance and appearance. Through this project, we can work across the industry to better understand these technical limitations and identify where and how we can increase recycled cotton content without compromising quality."
- Alexander Granberg, Materials Manager at BESTSELLER
The project works in two ways. First, Fashion for Good maps what recyclers can produce today against what brands actually need, creating a clear overview of where recycled cotton already works commercially and where more development could open up new possibilities. Second, selected recyclers produce 10 test fabrics and run five trials to find ways of improving quality in real production conditions. Together, these build up a picture of how using more recycled cotton affects price and quality.
That lack of shared data is something Fashion for Good's Managing Director, Katrin Ley, is determined to address:
"Recycled cotton has been talked about as a scale-ready solution for years, but the industry has been working from fragmented data and siloed testing. This project is about closing that gap with hard evidence. By plotting real recycler capabilities against real brand quality targets, and by co-developing the operational standards to support them, we can move recycled cotton from a case-by-case experiment to a category the industry can actually plan around."
The project brings together a wide group of companies from across the cotton industry. BESTSELLER, C&A, PVH Corp. and Reformation are participating as innovation partners, with Arvind, Inditex and Shahi providing industry knowledge and advice. Rieter and Uster contribute specialist spinning and yarn-testing expertise, which sits at the heart of the testing work. The findings will feed into a practical, freely available guide for spinning recycled cotton consistently, and a Roadmap for Cotton Circularity, setting out what the industry needs to start using more recycled cotton across more products and regions.