Vancouver, Canada – 19 May, 2025 – The future of fashion just took a major leap forward. Today, Circ, a trailblazing Next Gen textile innovator, announced the launch of France’s first commercial-scale textile-to-textile recycling facility. It is the first in the world capable of taking commercial volumes of blended textiles, like poly-cotton which make up the majority of the world’s textile waste, and turning them into recycled cellulose and PET inputs for next season’s textiles.
Canopy, a global solutions-driven environmental nonprofit leading the transition of forest-based supply chains to Next Gen Solutions, hails this launch as a landmark moment in the transformation of fashion supply chains.
“This facility will be a game-changer,” said Nicole Rycroft, Canopy’s Founder and Executive Director. ““For decades, fashion has been locked into a take-make-waste model — fuelling pollution, forest degradation, and climate instability. Circ’s new mill flips that script: transforming worn-out clothes into new textiles, reducing reliance on both forests and fossil fuels, and proving that the future of fashion is circular, low-carbon, and here. This will be a game-changer”
Each year, over 300 million trees are logged to make textiles like viscose and rayon — many from the world’s most climate and biodiversity critical forests. At the same time, nearly 7 million tonnes of textiles are wasted annually in Europe alone — the vast majority incinerated or landfilled, according to the European Environment Agency (EEA).
Circ’s new facility will:
- Recycle textile waste — including hard-to-process blends — into virgin-equivalent fibre,
- Ease pressure on Ancient and Endangered Forests by reducing the need for forest-derived feedstocks, and
- Cut dependence on fossil-fuel-based polyester, helping reduce the fashion industry’s carbon footprint.
France, home to some of the world’s most iconic fashion houses and progressive policies, is now home to this historic site. It’s a powerful signal that scaling circular fashion solutions is not a distant goal — it’s happening.
