Fashion for Good today announces the launch of the Cotton Reloop Matrix Project, a cross-industry initiative that will map and physically validate the quality of commercially available recycled cotton yarns against brand specifications, giving the industry a data-backed overview of how quality, price, and recycled content intersect. The project is convened with Fashion for Good partners Arvind, BESTSELLER, C&A, Interloop, Reformation, Shahi, and ecosystem partner Uster.
Cotton accounts for 19% of global fibre production and a core part of the material mix. Although alternative recycling pathways exist to use cotton-rich textile waste feedstock, they do not make a cotton output. Therefore, mechanical recycling is a crucial pathway to utilise waste and create recycled cotton yarns and fabrics.
Through the mechanical recycling process, textile waste is shredded and re-opened into loose fibers that can be respun into yarn. However, shredding shortens and weakens the fibres, so only 45 to 50% of the input survives as usable material. The rest is lost as short fibres and processing waste, and because the surviving fibres are shorter than virgin cotton, spinners can only blend a limited share back into new yarn. In practice, that caps most yarns at around 10% recycled content: any higher and the fabric isn’t durable enough for commercial use. While recyclers have available capacities, integrating a meaningful percentage of recycled cotton remains complex for brands navigating trade-offs around quality and price.
Testing happens in isolation, with recyclers and brands working from separate data sets, and no shared reference comparison to close the gap between them. Alongside this, brands often evaluate recycled blends against 100% virgin cotton standards, which makes for a challenging comparison for recycled cotton. To help unlock greater market adoption, the industry must shift its focus from virgin parity to fit for purpose, matching the realistic performance profile of recycled fibres to appropriate product applications while utilising targeted quality augmentation pathways where higher performance is required.
“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. “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.”