Reports

Governments in more than two dozen markets are adopting or planning Extended Producer Responsibility schemes for textiles, building funding architectures designed to make fashion brands pay for end-of-life waste management. The infrastructure to sort and recycle what those schemes collect barely exists. A new analysis by WRAP maps how the gap between collection mandates and processing capacity is producing stockpiles, exports and at least one regulatory enforcement action.

For decades, scientists knew that upland cotton, the species behind around 90% of the world's natural textile fibre, was domesticated somewhere in the Americas, but could not say exactly where. A new genomic study has now provided the answer, tracing the crop's origins to the coastal scrublands of northwestern Yucatán, where farmers worked thousands of years before the Maya.

The secondhand clothing market is growing fast, and the gap between that growth and genuine circularity is growing faster. A major new study by Circle Economy and Fashion for Good, covering sorting facilities across four EU countries and receiving markets in Ghana and Pakistan, shows that most discarded garments are physically rewearable. What keeps them out of circulation is not damage; it is economics.

Nearly 70% of textile products could, with existing technology, be recycled today. That figure did not land as a reason for optimism at Performance Days' March edition this year in Munich. It landed as a diagnosis. The industry has the tools. What it lacks is the data infrastructure, the coordination, and the design fluency to make those tools work at the scale the market requires.

As industries seek bio-based materials with lower environmental impact, alternative plant fibres are drawing new policy and commercial attention. Yet output remains marginal and forecast to contract, constrained by fragmented chains, weak processing capacity and uncertain offtake. A FIBRAL report argues diversification will depend on standards, investment and market architecture, not fibre discovery alone at scale.

Textile recycling has long been treated as a waste management problem. A growing body of European regulation is repositioning it as a design problem—one that begins with what a product is made of, not where it ends up. New research examines how mono-material carpet construction interacts with the EU's environmental measurement framework, and finds the system significantly less settled than the policy ambition surrounding it.

The economic case for textile recycling in India is no longer speculative. With a market projected to reach $3.5 billion by 2030 and the potential to create nearly one lakh green jobs, discarded fabric is increasingly being treated as recoverable capital. But a new government-commissioned report reveals that the systems required to actually capture that value remain underdeveloped, informal, and unevenly distributed across the country.

The UK garment manufacturing sector has long been positioned as a responsible alternative to offshore production—faster, closer, and more accountable. A new study challenges that framing. It finds that the same brands promoting domestic sourcing are routinely transferring financial risk onto the factories that make their products—through pricing practices, cancellations, and contract terms that consistently favour the buyer.

School uniforms are among the most visible features of institutional education, yet their psychological consequences have received limited empirical attention. A new study finds that the visual design logic of a uniform — whether it signals individuality, shared values or physical comfort — shapes students' hope, resilience and confidence in distinct and measurable ways. The research, conducted across China with 210 participants, uses structural modelling to map how each aesthetic orientation produces its effects.

A local Australian company, FanFirm, has won a landmark trademark case against the global retail giant, Fanatics. The dispute highlights the critical importance of a meticulous trademark strategy in Australia, as the court's final ruling powerfully affirmed that a local business's first-to-market presence and due diligence take precedence over an overseas brand's international reputation.