Help us measure the financial value of keeping textiles in circulation

GCN is currently developing a financial model to understand how much financial value could be returned to brands and downstream operators when textile products are kept in circulation for longer.

Separate from any eco-modulated fees charged by governments, GCN are investigating how resale, rental, repair, redesign, reuse and recycling can create new financial pathways — while also helping businesses meet emerging EPR, product-data and circularity requirements.

An important part of this work is understanding what brands and downstream providers themselves consider to be a fair and commercially meaningful financial return.

We want to hear from you

GCN is conducting two surveys:

Brand Survey
For apparel and textile brands selling into the EU and/or California.

Downstream Providers Survey
For any global organisation working with textile products after sale — including Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) operators: resale, rental, repair, reuse, plus sorting sorting and dismantling and end-of-life processing: recycling and remanufacturing.

The surveys are helping us investigate how much financial and resource value could potentially be recovered through better-connected circular business models.

France already provides an operating example of textile EPR eco-modulation, where qualifying product characteristics can generate financial bonuses and certain product characteristics can result in penalties. The EU is developing its own textile ecodesign and Digital Product Passport requirements, while California is implementing a textile EPR system under SB707. These developments make it increasingly important to understand not only what data businesses will need, but also whether that data can help create commercially valuable circular relationships.

What could your products be worth after they are sold?

A product that is resold, rented, repaired, redesigned or reused can continue to generate value rather than becoming waste or sent straight to end-of-life processing - skipping the essential EPR 'centre of circularity' stage that results in the biggest impact on emissions mitigation.

We want to understand how that value could potentially be shared between the businesses that design and place products on the market and the downstream organisations that collect, transport, repair, sort, resell, redesign, reuse, recycle and remanufacture them.

Complete the relevant survey and receive the survey results by email.

The findings will provide an indication of what interconnected businesses believe could be recovered through circular business models — including financial returns and resource value that may currently go undocumented or ultimately be lost to landfill.

Your responses will help us develop the Circular Rewards financial model and investigate how big the financial rewards are alongside the environmental and social impacts that are gained by connecting an interconnected, global circular economy at scale and provide verifiable, interoperable and accessible data to support the development of best-practice pathways based on measurable metrics.