Hello from Japan 🏯 I am remote working for 6 months this year, travelling East to West across the Silk Road. Japan is our first stop! I've been incredibly impressed by Japanese waste management, the meticulous sorting, and the litter-free streets. While also wondering, how do you build a case for reducing single-use plastics (Japan has a strong single-use society linked to hygiene), when the impacts are not seen in the environment? More thoughts on that in this edition 🤔
I'm also excited to share the final deep dive of our Circular Fashion series, exploring what's next for circular fashion and the opportunities that lies ahead, written by Wendy Lau. Read on below ⬇️
Circular Roundup
Kayleigh's Thought Leadership: Japan's streets are spotless, waste is meticulously sorted and there is no litter anywhere. But, Japan also has a strong single-use culture centered around hygiene and convenience. What do you do when the usual arguments against single-use plastics (litter, pollution and leakage) don't translate? Solutions need to operate in the cultural context and circularity needs thoughtful tailoring for effective systems change. More reflections here.
Research: Circle Economy's annual Circularity Gap Report has been released. For the first time, the 'value gap' has been quantified. Each year, an initial estimate of €25.4 trillion (± €4.7 trillion) in economic value is lost due to resource inefficiencies, premature product disposal, and underutilised assets... equivalent to almost 31% of global GDP. Value loss is structural and systemic, through the fundamental design of our linear economy. Coordinated cross-value chain action, from businesses, financiers, and policymakers to align innovation, investment, incentives and regulation, is needed to close this gap.
Source: Circularity Gap Report 2026: The Value Gap (Circle Economy and Deloitte)
Industry: The EU and China have launched two major circular economy pilots under their joint CE Action Project. This joint project, launched in 2024, identified three key sectors: plastics, batteries, and remanufacturing. It supports high-level dialogue and technical exchange between the two regions to jointly tackle global circular economy challenges and promote circularity in products and processes in China. One focuses on car‑to‑car recycling by recovering PP plastics from end‑of‑life vehicles and reintegrating them into new components. The second pilots closed‑loop r‑PET and r‑PP recycling for food‑grade packaging, a first in China.
Action This 💡
How to get signoff from your board on circular economy actions? Speak in their language.
Circular supply chains → supply chain resilience.
Circular commitments → stronger ESG ratings.
Waste reduction → less regulatory exposure.
Product‑as‑a‑service → recurring revenue.
Resource efficiency → costs savings.
The circular economy makes sense, it just needs business translation.
Circular Fashion: What is the future of circular fashion?
With Wendy Lau
While some versions of a circular model exist across businesses with resale, rental services, recycling, repair, innovation and design, and donations that targets the three key principles of a circular economy – 1) eliminate waste and pollution, 2) circulate products and materials (at their highest value), and 3) regenerate nature – many challenges exist around circular fashion, much of which are high costs and a heavy lift of an operational transformation. This article will conclude this three-part series with a deep dive of the future circular fashion holds.
Adressing Key Consumer Challenges
As consumers increasingly consider the sustainability of their clothing purchases, factors like high price, limited style, durability questions, and information access and trust are driving barriers to sustainable fashion purchases. While there are third-party certifications like the Climate Neutral Label, Fair Trade Certified, 1% for the Planet, and B Lab certification that identifies companies that are socially and environmentally responsible, there are few companies with a circular Cradle-to-Cradle (C2C) certification to easily identify circular fashion pieces. This pushes the onus on consumers to do their due diligence and be informed of their purchases. Additionally, price barriers to sustainable pieces of clothing from brands also make it challenging for consumers to access.
Business Opportunities in Circular Fashion
The nascent nature of circular fashion, particularly in innovation and design, and brand-owned resale requires companies to rethink their traditional linear business operations to one that is more circular and conducive to less waste.
Brand-owned resale is being rapidly incorporated into brand-owned channels from players like Lululemon, Patagonia, Levi’s, Mulberry, and Eileen Fisher, and even incorporating repair services to extend the life of their clothing. While resale and buying secondhand from secondhand stores like Goodwill and Ebay has been around for decades, brand-owned resale is relatively unique and is now rapidly growing with the overall global secondhand market projected to reach $393 billion by 2030, according to ThredUp’s 2026 Resale Report. Furthermore, consumers are increasingly viewing their apparel as assets, with 60% of customers say resale value is a key factor when buying new apparel. Both trends are factors in which can keep clothing continuously circulated.
Technology can also support circular fashion. While resale presents an excellent opportunity to keep clothing circulated, not all items get resold; thus, technology can deal with a supply of unsold items. For example, Autosort for the Circular Textiles project, led by the UK Fashion and Textile Association (UKFT), is a project to develop a framework to recycle clothes not suitable for resale using optical scanning, robotics, and AI to streamline the process.
Digital products like DressX and the Fabricant are providing users with digital clothing, and collaborating with physical brands like Tommy Hilfiger and Napajiri, to avoid the production of items that would not have been used for long.
Bio-based materials are also increasingly being researched and used for innovative sustainable clothing. The Biomimicry Institute believes that recycled synthetic materials shouldn’t be used in clothing if there’s no way to decompose them and should instead rely on local natural fibers further and explore new developments to make them more cost competitive.
For instance, color-grown cotton avoids toxic dyes, reduces water usage, and its non-transferable color gets more intense with each home washing. It is naturally soft and has a pleasant scent, adding to the list of attributes that don’t have to be added chemically.
Another example, Chinese brand Aimer uses seaweed fiber for some of their underwear and sleepwear, which is naturally antibacterial and anti-mite, designed to be comfortable to wear and be environmentally friendly.
Mulberry incorporates various lower impact materials such as ECONYL, which is crafted from nylon waste like fishing nets, fabric scraps, carpet flooring, and industrial plastic. In various bags, they also incorporate scotchgrain made of repurposed inedible cereal waste blended with responsibly sourced viscose (certified by the Forest Stewardship Council) and recycled polyester.
Many brands are also collaborating with the Footwear Collective to scope, develop, and scale circular footwear.
At the very end of the life of an apparel, recycling can serve as a sufficient End-of-Life solution. There are recycling companies like Eastman, JEPLAN, Bolder Industries, Reju, and Sortile working on this. The Circular Partnership at BoF also has many brands, recyclers, and manufacturers that are willing to collaborate with to scale circularity and textile recycling.
Revenue benefits: brand loyalty, access to customer and product use data, increased customer base, access to rare and unique clothes, proactive for financial institutions requirements, newness without the new, improved organizational performance
Cost benefits: improved inventory management, improved employee retention, increased resilience, ahead of regulation, positive impact on reputation
Overall, fashion brands will increasingly find opportunities in this space with increased consumer demand and regulatory pressure of circular policies.
Most importantly, a level of collaboration within the fashion industry will be needed to build a distributed network and create economies of scale for circular fashion to thrive.
Wendy Lau is a sustainability professional and Bard MBA candidate driven by a commitment to building more circular and sustainable businesses. Her experience spans circularity implementation, emissions reduction, and corporate climate strategy, including working with TerraCycle as an account manager to advance recycling and circularity engagement across CPG and apparel brands, with CDP as a fellow to support corporate environmental disclosure, and with B Lab as a student researcher, where she developed a climate action case study for a certified B Corporation.
Rethinking Business Models for a Thriving Fashion Industry -
Circular business models for fashion, which allow companies to make revenue without making new clothes, represent a significant opportunity for new and better growth in the fashion industry. The Ellen MacArthur Foundation digs into 4 key actions businesses must take to achieve this.
What did you think of this edition of Circular Digest? If you have any thoughts, questions, or ideas for future content, reply to this email. 😊
See you next month!
Kayleigh
How can I help you? 💪
Here are a few ways, whenever you are ready:
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