[pageLogInLogOut]

#Recycling / Circular Economy

€11.6 million boost for circularity research – textile industry in the spotlight

The shift toward a circular economy is gaining momentum — and the textile industry is taking center stage. With €11.6 million in new funding, the VolkswagenStiftung has approved nine ambitious research projects under the initiative “Circularity with Recycled and Biogenic Raw Materials.” The goal: to enable closed-loop systems that reduce waste, reclaim resources, and rethink how materials are used and reused — especially in sectors like textiles, where resource intensity and waste volumes remain high.

The textile and fashion industries are among the largest contributors to global material consumption and waste. Fast fashion, synthetic fibers, and limited recycling infrastructures pose major environmental challenges. While millions of garments are discarded each year, only a fraction is recycled into new fibers. The rest ends up in landfills, incinerators, or is downcycled into low-value applications.

To tackle this, the VolkswagenStiftung is specifically funding practical and scalable innovations that address material recovery and circular production in real-world contexts. The call for proposals, which closed on March 1, 2024, received 83 applications from across the natural and technical sciences. Nine projects were selected — including two with direct relevance for the textile sector.

Two textile-focused projects exemplify this shift:

CloseT – Closing the Loop for Used Textiles

Lead Institutions: Süddeutsches Kunststoff-Zentrum (SKZ), Würzburg (Dr. Hatice Malatyali); Fraunhofer IFAM, Bremen (Prof. Dr. Andreas Hartwig)

Funding: ~€1.1 million

Recycling worn-out clothing remains one of the textile sector’s greatest unsolved challenges. While garments unsuitable for reuse are typically downcycled or burned, many still contain high-quality fibers such as polyester that could be recovered and reprocessed — if the right technology exists.

The CloseT project aims to close this gap with a chemical recycling process tailored to post-consumer textile waste. Drawing from established methods in PET bottle recycling, the team is developing a scalable solution to regenerate mixed fiber blends into like-new textile materials. If successful, CloseT could provide a blueprint for industrial-scale fiber-to-fiber recycling — a gamechanger for sustainable fashion and circular production.

HotCircularity – Biodegradable Alternatives to Microplastics from Industrial Waste

Lead Institutions: University of Duisburg-Essen (Prof. Dr. Bettina Siebers, Dr. Christopher Bräsen); TU Wien (Prof. Dr. Oliver Spadiut)

Funding: ~€1.4 million

Microplastics are ubiquitous in the textile sector — from fiber shedding during washing to intentional use in coatings for fertilizers and seeds. HotCircularity explores a radical alternative: replacing synthetic microplastics with biodegradable lipids, produced by thermophilic microorganisms that thrive on industrial waste such as crude glycerol from biodiesel production.

The project aims to develop a low-cost, industrial-scale biofactory that transforms waste into high-performance biopolymers — offering new, circular material options for functional textile coatings and other applications where biodegradability is key.

With textile circularity now recognized as both an environmental imperative and a strategic innovation frontier, the projects funded under this initiative represent critical steps forward. They also reflect a wider trend: the textile industry, once a symbol of linear production, is becoming a laboratory for circular design, materials science, and cross-sector collaboration.

More textile projects are: 

Textile Materials Designed for Circularity (teXirc) (Prof. Dr. Stefan Mecking, Universität Konstanz; Prof. Dr. Michael R. Buchmeiser, Deutsche Institute für Textil- und Faserforschung, Denkendorf; Prof. Dr. Ulrich Schwaneberg, RWTH Aachen; rd. 1,4 Mio. Euro)

ADMIRATION - Accelerated Discovery of Living Fiber-reinforced Mineral Composite Materials for Circular Construction (Prof. Martin Ostermann, Dr. Achim Weber, Universität Stuttgart; Prof. Dr. Wilfried Weber, INM – Leibniz-Institut für Neue Materialien, Saarbrücken; rd. 1,4 Mio. Euro)

Plasma-assisted recycling of glass-fibre reinforced plastics (Dr.-Ing. Diego Gonzalez, Leibniz-Institut für Plasmaforschung und Technologie, Greifswald; Prof. Dr.-Ing. Dieter Bathen, Institut für Energie und Umwelttechnik (IUTA), Duisburg; Prof. Dr.-Ing. Martin Gräbner, Technische Universität Bergakademie Freiberg; rd. 1,4 Mio. Euro)

MyPro - A Platform for Sustainable Mycelium Material Production using genetically engineered filamentous Fungi (Dr. Hannes Hinneburg, Fraunhofer-Institut für Angewandte Polymerforschung IAP, Potsdam; Dr. Gita Naseri, Max-Planck-Forschungsstelle für die Wissenschaft der Pathogene, Berlin; rd. 1,3 Mio. Euro)

More information on the program and funded projects is available via the foundation’s website.

https://www.volkswagenstiftung.de/en/




More News from VolkswagenStiftung

More News on Recycling / Circular Economy

#Recycling / Circular Economy

Recover™ names Enes Adak and Fehmi Yüksel as Co-CEOs to accelerate its next growth phase

Recover™, a leading materials science company and global producer of consistent high-quality, recycled cotton fibers and circular material solutions at scale, today announced the appointment of Enes Adak and Fehmi Yüksel as Co-Chief Executive Officers. This leadership transition marks an important step in Recover’s evolution as the company enters its next stage of development.

#Recycling / Circular Economy

Arc'teryx introduces System 0™, a new framework for the future of product design and circularity

Arc'teryx Equipment, the global design company specializing in technical high-performance apparel and equipment, today introduced System 0™, a new framework that reimagines how products can be designed, manufactured, used, repaired, and ultimately regenerated. System 0 represents the next evolution for sustainability in the outdoor industry, as it embeds circular thinking across an entire product lifecycle while maintaining the uncompromising performance standards that define the Arc’teryx brand.

#Recycling / Circular Economy

2. RETRAKT EU Conference - „Join the Circle“: Turning challenges of the textile sector into chances

On 19 November 2026, the second RETRAKT EU Conference – “Join the Circle” will take place in Brussels. The event, which focuses on the transformation of the textile sector towards a circular economy, will be held under the motto: “Turning Challenges in the Textile Sector into Chances.”

#Recycled Fibers

Indorama Ventures supports KH Editions in building on its RECO experience Taking Thai circular fashion to New York Fashion Week

Indorama Ventures Public Company Limited, a global sustainable chemical company, is supporting KH Editions, a Thai fashion brand that has grown through the RECO program, by providing fabrics woven with deja™ recycled polyester yarn. The fabrics have been used to create two fashion looks and accessories from the brand’s ten-look Spring/Summer 2027 collection, which will be presented in New York City, United States, on 15 September 2026 during New York Fashion Week.

Latest News

#Sustainability

Jeanologia Sustainability Report highlights environmental impact of textile technologies

Jeanologia has published its Sustainability Report 2025, reporting a 13.64% reduction in its own carbon footprint and quantifying the environmental impact associated with the use of its technologies across the global textile industry. According to the company’s calculations, their use avoided the pollution of 21.52 million m³ of water and emissions of approximately 103,530 tonnes of CO₂ compared with conventional textile finishing processes.

#Sustainability

Global Standards announce launch of a new textile processing standard

The 14th September 2026 marks the public launch of the Global Responsible Textile Standard (GRTS), a new standard for the processing of textiles made from fibres certified to third-party standards recognised by GRTS and covering a broad range of plant, animal, synthetic, man-made cellulosic and recycled fibres.

#Industry 4.0 / Digitalization

Orient Rongheng connects production planning across China and Bangladesh with FastReactPlan

Chinese apparel manufacturer Orient Rongheng is implementing Coats Digital’s FastReactPlan to digitalize production planning across its manufacturing operations in China and Bangladesh. The project aims to connect capacity, materials and order planning across multiple factories while integrating these processes with the company’s existing ERP and Manufacturing Execution System (MES).

#Raw Materials

ALLIED expands down traceability with lot-level carbon footprint data

ALLIED Feather + Down has expanded its TrackMyDown traceability platform to include validated cradle-to-gate carbon footprint data linked to individual down lots. The initiative is designed to provide brands and consumers with more detailed environmental information on the materials used in finished products and could also support future data requirements associated with Digital Product Passports.

TOP