To become a Vogue Business Member and receive the Sustainability Edit newsletter, click here.
A new Zara collection made in partnership with circular textile company Circ could be a breakthrough for the industry because it is made from existing textile waste that can be recycled again after use.
The collection includes four lightweight women’s garments in burgundy, made from either lyocell or polyester, both produced with polyester-cotton textile waste. This is a notable development — blended fibres like polyester-cotton have been virtually impossible to recycle, getting in the way of the industry’s goals for a circular economy. Circ says it can not only separate the polyester from the cotton, but can transform both back into new textiles. Zara’s lyocell garments, priced at $69.90 each, are made with 50 per cent recycled cotton fibre that Circ separates out from the polycotton waste and processes into a lyocell-like cellulose. The other 50 per cent of the material in the garment is conventional lyocell. The polyester garments are made with 43 per cent recycled fibre — similarly, the polyester fibres that Circ separates out from the polycotton — and 57 per cent conventional polyester.
“[They are] the first, to our knowledge globally, circular products made from polycotton waste,” says Circ founder Peter Majeranowski. The collection will be available from today across 11 markets, and is the beginning of what he says is “definitely a long-term commitment”.
“We have really great visibility all the way to the C-suite of the organisation and the board. For me that’s really important because I can see that their commitment is there, it’s a long-term commitment,” he says.
Zara and parent company Inditex, which invested in Circ last year, say the move will drive progress towards a circular fashion industry. It’s hard to see how a single capsule collection will change the overall impact that one of the world’s biggest fast fashion companies has on the planet, or its business model of relying on continued growth in production and sales. However, it does move the needle on what can be expected of how fast fashion companies source materials and opens up possibilities for handling garment end-of-life more responsibly and sustainably than today’s norms.
Fashion needs to transform the materials it uses to meet its sustainability goals. How it gets there varies by material.
“Circ’s technology opens the door to effectively separate and recycle any blend of polyester and cotton — which is one of the most common textile blends in clothing,” Javier Losada, chief sustainability officer at Inditex, said in a statement.
Zara recently discontinued its sustainability “indicator” programme, Join Life, which critics had said amounted to greenwashing because it didn't change the larger culture of encouraging people “to consume as much clothing as possible”. In explaining its decision to end the programme, Zara said in its most recent annual report that in 2022, 61 per cent of its products complied with the Join Life standard, “amply exceeding” its commitment of 50 per cent of products. “We have therefore reached a point in the development of our strategy where it is no longer necessary to differentiate the products in our collections with this label,” the report said, adding that it will continue to use Join Life as an internal standard.
For Circ, the launch could be a game-changer. While the startup has participated in programmes including Fashion for Good and worked with brands to test the technology and develop prototypes — and received investment from Patagonia, Alante Capital and the Bill Gates-founded Breakthrough Energy Ventures, in addition to Inditex and others — the collaboration with Zara is its first commercial release. Majeranowski is encouraged by the fact that Zara didn’t just dabble with the concept, but has gone all in. “A lot of brands are very risk averse and they look at a material and say let’s use it for a pocket liner to start. While Zara took a different approach, where it is the garment. That was very important for us,” he says.
Because the Circ recycling process breaks materials down to the monomer level, the polyester and cotton fibres that it produces can be recycled again and again, according to Majeranowski. And while recycled fibres often lose some of their strength during the recycling process, and need to be blended with virgin fibres to create a finished fabric, he says Circ’s recycled fibres are capable of being turned into a 100 per cent recycled fabric; the launch with Zara uses blends not because of issues with quality, he explains, but because of logistical issues with the current infrastructure and industry setup. The plan is to change that over time. “As we are scaling, we aim to go to 100 per cent on the lyocell and polyester,” he says.
Beyond the Zara launch, other projects are in the works. Majeranowski declined to say which brands they are working with actively or when they plan to launch; Target has said publicly that it has worked with Circ on a pilot, and Patagonia is said to have been running some of its worn-out clothing through Circ’s machinery. Majeranowki says Circ will have at least two more launches this year, including one where Circ is helping the partner to design products for circularity from the start.
The field is crowded. Startups such as Evrnu and Infinited Fiber Company, Mango Materials and Rubi Technologies have been racing to not only develop technologies to replace fashion’s most-loved fabrics with alternatives that avoid or reduce the use of virgin resources, but also scale them — a tough task in an industry that is very slow to change. Majeranowski believes that adoption is starting, for Circ and for others operating in the space — and says that while a capsule collection may appear small or insignificant to critics who want the industry to change fast, it is major for a startup like his because the process of scaling doesn’t happen by itself.
“A lot of brands are making commitments, but the solutions have not fully scaled yet. There’s going to be a lot of demand and relatively low supply over the next several years, and so I think it’s very important that brands, if they’re serious about their commitments, look to offtake [agreements] — not just from Circ but from all the recyclers,” he says.
He is conscious that critics are likely to question Circ’s partnership with a company like Zara. It’s an intentional strategy to work with mass market brands, he says, because a key goal for Circ is accessibility. “We don’t want circularity to be only for high price points, we want circular to be truly accessible to everybody,” he says. It was also important to meet with the company’s top leadership, to make sure they were committed to longer-term change. “There’s a real solid commitment from the top down,” he says. “To change an industry this big and this old, you need to work with the largest players.”
Comments, questions or feedback? Email us at feedback@voguebusiness.com.
More from this author:
Who’s shouldering the weight of fashion’s microfibres problem?
A California bill is taking action against microfibres by focusing on washing machines
Time is running out to close fashion’s ambition-action gap, report says