Piloting a Circularity solution in E-Commerce

A new pilot project orchestrated by Fashion for Good, together with Zalando and circular.fashion, an innovator from the Fashion for Good Accelerator Programme, has launched to test their circularity.ID at scale; a traceability solution that increases the resale and recycling opportunities for clothing. The current linear system is the root cause of the fashion industry’s immense environmental footprint: more than 70% of garments are thrown away due to style preference rather than quality and less than 1% of garments are recycled into new clothing. Integrating circularity.ID into products enables companies to have a transparent flow of information between material suppliers, brands, consumers and recyclers, facilitating garment sorting for reuse or recycling and further driving circularity in the e-commerce sector.

“I​nnovation that helps to inform end-of-use decision making and facilitates sorting towards either re-commerce or recycling is a key enabler for circularity. By establishing a transparent flow of information between brands, consumers, sorting and recycling facilities, we take a step closer to achieving that goal​.” –​ Katrin Ley, Managing Director, Fashion for Good

The partnership between Fashion for Good, Zalando and circular.fashion in this pilot project furthers the development of a vision of a circular system and ties directly into Zalando’s recently launched do.MORE sustainability strategy, in which they are integrating circularity principles into their garments and supply chain. Effective sorting of post-consumer textiles is the gateway to circularity, having the potential to reduce our dependence on virgin materials and is a focus area of increasing importance for Fashion for Good. In order to capture the full value of post-consumer waste, sorting must sit alongside​ ​recycling​ technologies and other​ ​circular business models​.