Textile Recycling Market | From Nuisance to Necessary (Global Outlook 2025–2035)

At face value the Textile Recycling Market looks small. In 2025 it’s worth USD 8.3 billion, and even by 2035 it’s only projected to reach USD 15.6 billion — numbers that, on their own, don’t scream “investor frenzy.”

The market may look small in value, yet its role in waste reduction, raw-material substitution, and brand compliance makes it far more consequential than the numbers suggest. Textile waste is ballooning — industry estimates point toward ~100 million tonnes a year by 2030 — and recycling is the practical lever that turns discarded garments into an industrial feedstock.

In short: the Textile Recycling Market may be modest in headline size, but its strategic impact is outsized.

Hard numbers you should remember

• Market (2025): USD 8.3B → USD 15.6B (2035).


• Incremental opportunity (2025–2035): ~USD 7.3B.


• Polyester share (2025): ~32% — the single largest recyclable fiber pool.


• Asia Pacific (2025): 34.5% market share (~USD 2.8B).


• Market concentration: Top five players ≈ 35% of market.


• Operational fact: Recover’s Dong Nai plant — 14,000 m², ~10,000 t/yr capacity for cotton–poly blends.

Want a closer look? Check out our sample report in PDF.

Textile Recycling Market 2025 | the year the tide turned

Two types of developments make 2025 a pivot point:

1) Technology that fixes the impossible in the in the Textile Recycling Market

eeden (Germany) closed a €18M Series A (lead: Forbion; investors: Henkel Ventures, NRW.Venture, HTGF, TVF, D11Z). Their process chemically/enzymatically separates cellulose and PET from cotton-poly blends — the single largest technical barrier in the recycling chain. A working demonstrator in Münster moves this from lab curiosity to industrial pilot.

Why it’s huge: blended garments are currently a major fraction of collected waste but are often non-processable by mechanical means. If you can separate the components at scale, millions of tonnes of feedstock become reusable.

2) Scale that underwrites capital

Syre (Sweden) is aiming to industrialize circular polyester: partnerships with Gap, Target, Houdini (June 2025), and backers including H&M, TPG, Vargas. Ambition: >3 million tonnes cPET capacity by 2032. First prototype in North Carolina (~10,000 t/yr by 2026), with much larger plants planned (150k–250k t scale).

Why it’s huge: in the Textile Recycling Market, commodity-grade, reliable recycled polyester coupled with brand offtakes (Gap ~10k t/yr; reported H&M $600M commitment) converts recycling from a sustainability pilot into a billable supply chain.

What this pairing means (short)

Think in pairs: solve blends (eeden) + build commodity supply (Syre) = unlock the two largest material pools (polyester + blended cotton/poly). This alignment — capital, tech, and offtake — is what shifts recycling from a boutique effort into an industrial sector.

Practical risks (don’t ignore these)

• Sorting & feedstock quality: Brands and recyclers still report a major share of collected garments as “unprocessable” because sorting tech isn’t widespread.


• Economics vs virgin: Recycling costs often exceed virgin inputs absent policy support, carbon pricing, or long-term offtakes.


• Regulatory cliff-edges: EPR and other rules accelerate adoption but also raise compliance costs for laggards.


• Scale execution risk: Large plants require logistics, energy, and feedstock contracts; execution is non-trivial.

Where the real returns hide

If you’re allocating capital or building strategy in the Textile Recycling Market, focus on three corridors:

1. Sorting & purification tech — hyperspectral sorting, automated lines, and blend separation. These increase usable feedstock yield and shrink per-ton processing costs.


2. Industrial cPET capacity with brand contracts — plants only pencil out when big retailers sign multi-year offtake deals. Syre’s model exemplifies this.


3. Adjacency demand — automotive interiors, furniture, insulation, and industrial textiles create stable, high-volume outlets that de-risk fashion seasonality.

Tactical moves for each stakeholder in the Textile Recycling Market

• Brands: Lock in offtake and invest in upstream collection and sorting (own or partner). Long contracts beat PR declarations.


• Investors: Back tech that raises feedstock yield (sorting/separation) or facilities with pre-signed offtake. Those two are the levers of value.


• Policymakers: Prioritize standardized collection systems and capital incentives for demo-to-scale plants — small grants or EPR carve-outs for new tech accelerate deployment.


• Recyclers: Form vertical partnerships (feedstock → processing → fiber supply) to capture margin and stabilize input flows.

The human line

This Textile Recycling industry is not about abstract sustainability metrics but about rewiring supply chains so that a jacket’s fabric can be fed back into a new jacket instead of a landfill. That requires technical grit and industrial patience — not vanity projects.

Final tilt

Yes, the Textile Recycling Market will be a modest dollar in 2035 when it comes to textile recycling. The strategic value is massive however: each tonne recycled will replace virgin polymer or cotton, lessen carbon and water footprint, and its brands will no longer be at the mercy of the raw material. The business entities capable of disaggregating the blends as well as constructing trustworthy and vast outlets will determine the economics of the circular textiles over the next ten years.

Making Sense of Textile Recycling with MarketGenics

The textile recycling market may look modest — USD 8.3B today, rising to USD 15.6B by 2035 — but the signals around blend-separation tech, industrial-scale circular polyester, and brand offtake contracts point to a sector that will reshape how fashion and beyond manage waste.

At MarketGenics, our focus is to move past headlines and deliver data-grounded intelligence: where technology is scaling, which players are winning the capital flows, and how policy shifts are creating investible openings. Whether you’re mapping risk in raw material costs, sizing new capacity in Asia Pacific, or tracking early movers like eeden and Syre, we decode where strategy, regulation, and capital converge.

If your organization is preparing for the next decade of circular textiles and material recovery, let’s connect.

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