The shift from linear to circular economy needs also a shift in how we measure our economy and how we interact with public statistics. To make effective decisions around the development of infrastructure, plan policy change to support businesses or offer best practice guidelines for circular economy, we need to know what's the current status quo and how much progress is being made with each decision. We need real-time information on the material flows not only in monetary value, but in physical kilograms of different types of materials and its value in terms of the material hierarchies. And the best way to capture such data in real time is to connect existing and emerging digital solutions, make them speak to each other, and start connecting the data we already have at hand. This is why TEXroad was initiated - to create a dialogue between public and private sector around the opportunities of real-time data exchange around the textile material flows through our economy. 

The Reverse Resources team attended the Global Fashion Summit in Copenhagen this week. This summit is one of the leading forums for global sustainability. 

After more than a year of hard work and research, Reverse Resources is proud to share the final textile waste mapping report for Egypt. This report was developed and compiled in partnership with our colleagues at Blumine, under the UNIDO SwitchMed program. The report is a significant step towards establishing an effective circular economy system in Egypt textile industries. Many thanks to all the valuable stakeholders who contributed to this unprecedented effort for a more circular and sustainable fashion industry.

Industry organisations, working on related circularity projects, are aligning efforts to create the infrastructure to enable the recycling of post-consumer textile waste. Through their own projects and together through pre-competitive industry-wide collaboration, Accelerating Circularity, Fashion for Good, Global Fashion Agenda’s Circular Fashion Partnership, Reverse Resources, SMART, and WRAP are supporting the scaling of digital solutions to create the infrastructure for textile recycling. Reverse Resources is launching one such platform for collectors, sorters, and pre-processors - its goal is to facilitate textile-to-textile recycling.

The RCS and GRS certificates have played an important role for the fashion industry to distinguish recycled materials from virgin ones and communicate this easily to consumers. However the scope of the GRS/RCS has so far, due to the current status quo, been more aligned with the linear supply chains, and thus not providing enough support for the industry to unlock the circular supply chains as efficiently as it could.