Fashion for Good has launched the Cotton Reloop Matrix Project, a cross-industry initiative that will run mill trials producing 10 demonstrator fabrics and five quality improvement trials to push mechanically recycled cotton past its current commercial ceiling of roughly 10% blend content.

The project brings together partners Arvind, Bestseller, C&A, Interloop, Reformation and Shahi, plus textile testing specialist Uster. The target audience is practical: sourcing teams and spinning mills (the tier that turns fibre into yarn) who need to know where recycled cotton actually performs and where it fails.

Why is recycled cotton stuck at low blends?

Cotton accounts for approximately 19% of global fibre production, but mechanical recycling constrains how much of it can return to new yarn. The process shreds and reopens textile waste into fibres, shortening and weakening them. According to Fashion for Good, only 45–50% of the original material survives as usable fibre.

Those shorter fibres limit recycled content in new yarns, with many commercial applications currently restricted to around 10%. Pushing higher affects yarn strength, fabric durability and handle — the deal-breakers for most brand spec sheets.

There's also a measurement problem. Recycling capacity exists, but brands and manufacturers work with fragmented testing data and differing quality specifications. Recycled blends are commonly assessed against standards written for 100% virgin cotton, which stacks the deck against adoption.

"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," said Katrin Ley, Managing Director at Fashion for Good.

"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," she said.

What do the workstreams deliver?

The project runs two parallel tracks:

• Quality Matrix: mapping commercial recyclers' capabilities against brand requirements across knitted and woven fabric categories, identifying suitable applications and development gaps.
• Mill trials: selected recyclers and partners produce the 10 demonstrator fabrics and run the five quality improvement trials under real commercial manufacturing conditions.

The trials feed a Trade-off Analysis examining the relationships between recycled content, yarn and fabric quality, and production costs — the numbers buyers will need before committing volume. Uster contributes its spinning technology and yarn testing expertise to the physical validation process.

Nikki Player, Senior Director of Raw Materials at Reformation, said the brand has worked with recycled cotton for years but keeps hitting the same wall on blend percentages.

"What's been limiting is the ability to scale to higher blend percentages without compromising fabric quality or hand-feel," she said. "What this project offers is a shared reference point where brands and recyclers work from the same evidence."

What comes out at the end?

Two concrete outputs matter for supply-chain practitioners. First, an open-source spinning Standard Operating Procedure (a documented process for consistent mill production) designed to improve manufacturing consistency across global supply chains. Second, a Roadmap for Cotton Circularity outlining the technical requirements and data infrastructure needed to expand recycled cotton adoption across product categories and geographical markets.

For sourcing teams, the near-term decision is whether to engage now: partners gain early access to the Quality Matrix and trial data that will define which recycled-content claims survive contact with commercial spinning conditions. For everyone else, the Trade-off Analysis will be the first evidence base robust enough to plan recycled cotton programmes around, rather than piloting blind.

By James Calloway