13 recycling technologies, 12 risk factors: only 3 are bankable today

Textile-to-textile recycling is stuck in the missing middle. The technologies exist, but the capital to deploy them at scale is not available. Many reports identify the missing middle, but none has looked at it from a systemic bankability perspective.

Today we published Systemic Bankability of Textile-to-Textile Recycling, a framework that scores 13 textile-to-textile recycling technology variants against 12 risk factors that decide whether commercial capital will fund them.

What we found

1. Only mature routes can be financed on commercial terms today, and they address a small share of the post-consumer textiles stream. Mechanical recycling, the only unblocked route that runs on post-consumer textiles, can address at most 6.6 percent of that collected stream.

2. For almost every other route, the binding constraints sit around the technology: demand, the cost gap, the transfer of first-plant performance risk, and coordination between adjacent steps of the textile recycling process.

3. The capital grant, the instrument most used in the sector, does not alone resolve any of these blockers at the systemic level.

The pattern underneath: the further a route reaches toward genuine circularity, the more blocked it is today.

"The barriers to textile-to-textile recycling at scale are commercial rather than technical, and the instruments to fix them already work in other sectors."
— Edd Denes, CEO, Accelerating Circularity

The report proposes interventions that address the systemic bankability blockers, several of which already exist in workable form in other sectors. For brands and retailers, volume-firm, multi-year offtake is the highest-impact action they can take without waiting for policy.

What's next

Side meeting at the Textile Exchange Conference 2026

We will present them at Textile Exchange 2026 in Vancouver on October 15, in the session The bankability gap: What textile-to-textile recycling needs to get funded.

Join the Systemic Bankability Coalition

We are turning the findings of the report into action, starting with a pre-competitive coalition that will set shared priorities and launch joint initiatives on the systemic blockers to scaling circularity. We are looking for brands and retailers, recyclers, investors, lenders, insurers and policymakers who are in a position to move the risk. Express interest to join the Coalition