BCG and ReHubs just published new numbers on what it will take to scale textile-to-textile recycling in Europe: €8–11 billion in capex, €5–6.5 billion in annual opex. So the total price tag would exceed €50 billion by 2035?
These are serious numbers. And I have no way of knowing how many times they are under- or overestimated. Nobody does.
Not because the analysis is poor — it's one of the most comprehensive attempts to model this system. But because the underlying data doesn't exist yet. Every major study on textile waste flows, including work done with Textile Exchange for global target-setting, ends in guesstimates. The volumes vary 2–3× depending on how you do the analysis and which estimates you use. We don't have reliable statistics on what's collected, what's sorted, what's actually recyclable, and what ends up incinerated or landfilled. When you build an investment model on guesstimates, the output is a guesstimate too — just with more decimal places.
Here's what concerns me more than the capex figure, though. The report acknowledges that profitability is unattractive across the chain — especially for recyclers — and recommends enabling mechanisms like EPR fee modulation, capex grants, and offtake agreements. These are the right levers. But they assume a functioning market underneath.
That market doesn't exist today.
There's a counter-story to the profitability problem that nobody is telling. The prices of recycled materials look prohibitively high because every step of the supply chain — waste sourcing, preparation, sorting, the actual recycling process, post-recycling material development — adds cost in isolation. Each handoff is offline, informal, or negotiated between single parties with no visibility into what came before or after. There is no online data comparison of waste prices going into recycling plants. No consistent market data on material values at any point in the chain. The real problem isn't that recycled materials are too expensive — it's that we've accepted that narrative without a transparent market to test it against.
What the current default policy path actually does is this: it collects more textiles from households, shifts volumes from reuse toward recycling, increases costs for sorters — and then hits a wall. No functional demand market for sorted material. The result? Storage costs escalate. Material gets incinerated. Brands pay their EPR fees and walk away with a compliance receipt but zero operational understanding of where their waste goes. Money moves through the system. Connection never happens.
Renewcell went bankrupt not because the technology didn't work or the recycling cost was too high — but because as a frontrunner, they had to solve the entire supply chain challenge upstream and downstream on their own. Soex, one of Europe's largest sorters, closed its operations in Germany as the reuse-recycling business case collapsed around them. One of the world's largest fashion groups built its own collection infrastructure — warehouses filled up, operational friction defeated the economics. These aren't technology failures. They're coordination failures.
The BCG report estimates that collection needs to go from 33% to 50% and sorting from 36% to 63% by 2035. Yes, collection and sorting need to grow. But no hands should touch the waste without knowing where it ends up in recycling — otherwise cost already emerges at the first step. Rather than collecting and sorting mindlessly, we should start creating supply chains, connections, and flow. At Reverse Resources we're tracking the live movement of around 80,000 tonnes of industrial textile waste — a tiny fraction of the market — but we live and breathe with it daily, and we can see that recycling capacity today already exceeds the volumes actually reaching the plants. The bottleneck isn't capacity. It's that the operational market data from existing sorters is hidden from the rest of the market. Build that data layer. Connect the currently functional supply chains end to end digitally. Inform brands on how much waste matches their recycling orders. Enable PROs to track how much waste can actually be connected to brand orders. That's the connective tissue that turns collection and sorting from a cost centre into a functioning market.
The report recommends capex grants, eco-modulated EPR fees, recycled-content mandates, and offtake agreements. All valid. But they miss the most critical enabler: operational digitisation of the market itself. The industry keeps treating traceability as something you bolt on afterwards — a separate action, a separate budget line. Meanwhile, the actual operational data exchange between players in the supply chain never gets built. Both cost money. But only one of them can simultaneously reduce the operational cost of running the system and generate the baseline data we need to make investment decisions that aren't blind.
It comes back to a very simple question: can we start tracking in real time how much textiles are already circulating in the market? Create a baseline and start measuring it. Because we can't build what we can't measure.
Without that layer, every euro of the €8–11 billion in capex is a bet placed blind. And the opex — which I suspect is far more dangerous than the headline capex — keeps escalating with no market to absorb it. Or perhaps it's already buried inside the capex estimates, which would be worse, because then we're not even seeing the real running cost of a system that doesn't function.
We're already seeing what happens without supply-demand balance. Take 100% white cotton clips — one of the few waste streams with a clear recycling route. It's now in hypercompetition. Waste prices are driven up to unbearable levels, killing the business case on the recycler side. Worse, it incentivises bleaching of waste to make it white instead of using colour-to-colour recycling principles that would be far more efficient. This is today's mechanical recycling challenge. But chemical recycling will face exactly the same dynamics if the supply and demand balance is not kept under control.
My conviction, based on a decade of building the digital coordination layer for textile waste flows: if Europe builds the data and coordination infrastructure first, the total investment needed drops by at least half. Not because you need less recycling capacity — but because you stop building capacity that sits idle, stop collecting material nobody can place, stop funding sorting operations that produce output for which no buyer exists, and stop driving waste prices into cycles of hypercompetition and collapse.
The policy direction is right. The sequencing is wrong. Digital infrastructure for textile waste flows isn't a nice-to-have that comes after the physical infrastructure. It's the prerequisite that determines whether the physical infrastructure pays for itself — or becomes Europe's most expensive waste management cost trap.