Textile producers and fashion brands are facing new regulations: they had until July 1 to register with California’s new textile recycling program under SB 707, the Responsible Textile Recovery Act, the first extended producer responsibility law of its kind in the United States.
Days later, on July 28, Italy’s government advanced its own national textile EPR decree, following similar frameworks already active in France, according to Ecotextile News.
The law will not fully take effect until 2030, but the scramble to comply has forced an industry reckoning that has been building for two decades: only about 12% of textiles are collected globally for reuse or recycling, and less than 1% of used clothing is recycled back into new garments, according to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. The rest, some 92 million metric tons of textile waste a year, is landfilled, incinerated or shipped abroad.
Even young consumers are beginning to take note. Social media reels, such as this one by Rachael Brownfield on Instagram, are asking the same question: “Is anyone else stressed by the sheer amount of stuff being created?"
Amelia Eleiter has been trying to solve that problem since before most of the industry had a name for it. Eleiter co-founded Debrand, a Vancouver based reverse logistics company, with Wes Baker in 2008, long before "circularity" entered the fashion lexicon.
"We started Debrand over 18 years ago, so well before circularity was a thing," Eleiter says.
An Origin Story On A Sri Lankan Beach
Eleiter’s path there was not direct. She spent over a year in Sri Lanka volunteering after the 2004 tsunami. On a surf trip, her now business partner pulled a bottle wrapper off her leg, still printed with its brand name, on an otherwise pristine, undeveloped stretch of coast.
"We had this conversation around, one day, this is going to matter, that you can literally trace the ways back to the originator, the company that created it," Eleiter recalls.
Back in Vancouver, the two built a business decommissioning branded marketing displays, then added a "debranding" service, stripping logos and repurposing materials, for an extra fee. The real turn came 15 years ago, when Lululemon, then a much smaller company also based in Vancouver, approached them with a warehouse of customer returns and no plan for what to do with them.
"They said, we don't have a lot of marketing assets for you to decommission, but we actually have quite a few products that come back to us from our guests," Eleiter recalls. That partnership pushed Debrand into apparel full time.
Most "Recycled" Clothing Still Is Not Really Recycled
Debrand’s own numbers illustrate why the industry's recycling claims deserve scrutiny. The company published a Transparency Report, disclosing that it processed more than 2.4 million pounds of apparel, footwear and accessories in 2025.
Of that, 70.54% went to recycling channels, the majority through fiber reclamation, shredded into insulation, furniture stuffing or industrial padding rather than new clothing. Just 1.06% reached true textile-to-textile advanced recycling. Reuse, meaning resale and donation, accounted for 12.66%, and 16.32% was directed to waste-to-energy and other disposal pathways.
"In an industry as oversimplified and misunderstood as fashion, we believe real progress starts with clarity," Eleiter argues. “If we can't see what's happening behind the scenes, and be honest about what's working and what isn't, we can't meaningfully move forward. This report is our commitment to opening that black box.”
Closed-loop recycling, turning old clothes back into new ones at scale, remains rare, Eleiter says, not for lack of will but for lack of infrastructure, technology and financing operating together. "This is not an overnight success," she notes, comparing the shift to the decades-long arcs of the Industrial Revolution and globalization. “It takes infrastructure, it takes technology, innovation, and it takes regulation in most cases.”
Nellie Cohen has spent more than 15 years advising brands on circularity, including nearly a decade building Patagonia’s Worn Wear resale program before founding her own consultancy, Baleen.
"Debrand's DNA is unique," Cohen says. “They take a very inquisitive approach to developing their solutions offerings. They ask big, hard questions and then do the work to find the answers, such as traveling to the places where textiles are exported to try to understand the full value chain.”
What Cohen considers Debrand's real function is sortation, the unglamorous work of matching a used garment to whichever channel, such resale, recycling or disposal, actually creates value from it.
"Sortation is the key that unlocks a batch of aggregated textiles into monetized resale inventory and T2T feedstock," she explains, using industry shorthand for textile-to-textile recycling. "Put simply, it returns value to waste."
Why Regulation Only Gets You So Far
That is where laws like SB 707 come in, though Eleiter is wary of treating regulation as a shortcut.
France introduced Europe’s first textile extended producer responsibility framework roughly 12 years ago, offering a preview of what does and does not work, she says. “I think California has a big role in setting that up properly to start.”
She would push regulators to build in a formal needs assessment before rules take full effect, arguing that operators who move textiles every day understand the constraints better than policymakers do. "The regulators aren’t always the ones that are on the ground, doing the work."
Landbell USA was approved in February as the law’s official producer responsibility organization, according to Recycling Today, giving companies a single body to register with.
Cohen sees the same regulatory momentum as a double-edged sword. More EPR laws mean more used clothing flowing back into the system, but only if sorting capacity can keep pace.
"As additional textile EPR laws pass, such as Italy’s this week, the volume of clothing recirculating is about to drastically increase," she says. “If there are not circular solutions and advanced sortation to match textiles to these solutions, then we run the risk of EPR falling short of its objective to shift the world from a linear to circular textiles economy.”
Debrand’s own partner list shows how fragmented the solution side still is. The company works with brands including Lululemon, Target and Vuori, and with Samsara Eco, an enzymatic textile recycling startup, on takeback pilots and textile-to-textile recycling trials. A whole ecosystem, Eleiter argues, has to happen before any single regulation can move the needle.
Vuori, for example, built what it calls a Next-Life Program with Debrand to handle excess inventory, packaging and samples.
"For us, sustainability has to be practical, scalable and built into how the business operates," said Dave Williams, Vuori’s vice president of sourcing and production. “Leveraging Debrand’s expertise and reporting, we've been able to divert more than 100,000 pounds of materials from landfill while strengthening cross-functional engagement across the business."
Lisa Diegel, a sustainability expert in fashion, spent years watching the fragmentation from inside brands, most recently as director of sustainability at Faherty Brand and previously at Ralph Lauren, Marc Jobs, and Aritizia. She first encountered Debrand in 2017, she said, back when the ask was purely practical.
"That’s where I first heard of Debrand," Diegel says. "I think I found maybe one or two other entities in the United States that were able to take product and to responsibly manage it."
Today, she says, brands can choose from partners covering resale, repair, upcycling and downcycling.
“There seems to be a partner for almost every aspect of circularity. But then it depends on if the brand is willing to commit to that. And that's probably the biggest holdback.”
Diegel expects EPR laws to change more than compliance checklists, reaching into a part of the business that rarely gets scrutinized for sustainability at all: merchandising. Brands routinely order far more units than they need to hit a target margin, she explains, a habit that regulation could finally make expensive.
"They might be committing to 500 pieces when they only need 200," Diegel says. "It's gonna be really interesting and very positive to see how those EPR policies hit internally on those teams. Maybe it's not so beneficial to commit to those higher volumes when you're gonna have to pay for it at the other end."
The Real Constraint Is Economics
So what is holding the industry back from embracing circularity altogether?
Eleiter says it’s cost rather than technology. Recycling a garment properly is still more expensive than sending it to a landfill, she explains, because decades of product design and fragmented supply chains have stripped value out of clothing the moment it is sold.
“If we're saying, is it the same cost as sending something to landfill, which they can do right now, then no, it's more expensive. We've added barriers to this. We've designed things in a certain way, and we've created a fragmented system. So we've devalued it.”
That is also why Debrand avoided venture capital for most of its history, Eleiter says.
“I needed more clients, I needed more demand, and I needed market maturation. I didn't just need a bunch of money to tell a story that wasn't ready to be told.”
Eleiter is direct about what still has not changed: overproduction. Brands make more clothing than the market needs, then lean on recycling to absorb the excess rather than producing less in the first place.
Cohen arrived at the same diagnosis: overproduction paired with a culture that equates buying with belonging. The fix runs on two tracks, she says.
For consumers, she points to spending less time in places that sell fulfillment through shopping. "Connecting with our communities, deepening friendships, and being present with ourselves are the antidotes to ephemeral fulfillment through shopping.”
For brands, she wants accountability built into the business model itself, not treated as a side project. "Brands need to set circular revenue goals that they are held accountable to," she says, replacing a meaningful share of linear sales with revenue from resale, repair and rework. “This shifts the business strategy from rapid linear production to smarter circular design.”
Diegel has watched that bet pay off firsthand. Faherty, for example, invested in a resale program for several years before it turned a profit, she notes, a timeline that explains why many brands hesitate.
"I understand it’s kind of scary for brands to invest in it, but I think there's definitely a payoff eventually."
She argues that in-store repair, done by brands like Arc’teryx and Veja, is an underused lever alongside resale, since a garment that gets fixed rather than discarded avoids the recycling question altogether.
On the technology itself, Diegel sees real, if incomplete, progress. Recycling blended fabrics was "completely dismissed" a few years ago, she explains, and early recycled cotton was so poor in quality it was only fit for tote bags. Both have improved substantially since. Still, she does not think the industry has reached true garment-to-garment recycling. “I don't think we're there yet where you can just recycle your garment, unfortunately.”
Debrand’s facilities over the next few years aim to process 10 million to 15 million pounds of material annually at each site, alongside deeper partnerships with recyclers and brands to prove the model can scale beyond pilot projects. "Regulatory and investment support is probably what’s gonna help us get there,” Eleiter says.
Cohen, for her part, sees genuine progress since her Patagonia days.
"Ten years ago, we were making a big bet on adding re-commerce to the Worn Wear program at Patagonia," she explains. "Today, for many apparel brands, re-commerce is a central component of their environmental strategy."
The scale of any single program is still debatable but consumer behavior has shifted underneath the industry regardless. "We now live in a world where the vast majority of the global population regularly purchases used clothing, and that is a huge win for textile circularity," she adds.
"The intent of this report is not perfection, it's progress," Eleiter iterates. "We hope it serves as a starting point for more open dialogue across the industry. The more visibility we create together, the faster we can identify solutions and scale what works."