Resortecs’ position on the Textiles Labelling Regulation

Resortecs’ feedback on the call for evidence on Textiles Labelling Regulation revision

Resortecs welcomes the European Commission’s initiative to revise the Textiles Labelling Regulation. In addition to delivering on the targets set in the EU Strategy for Sustainable and Circular Textiles and the EU Circular Economy Action Plan, this revision is an opportunity to:

(1) Integrate information and labelling requirements on disassembly, alongside those that will be set under the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR) delegated act on textiles and for the EU digital product passport (DPP).

(2) Boost the sector’s circularity by building a standardised information infrastructure that encompasses cradle-to-cradle, expanding from today’s cradle-to-gate/grave information infrastructure.

Today, the textiles industry heavily relies on a linear model and does not design products for circularity. Only 1% of all garments are effectively recycled. A main barrier is the complexity of disassembling garments. To recycle a garment, it first needs to be disassembled – currently this is still a manual, labour-intensive, and costly process. This means that without efficient disassembly at scale, there will never be a truly circular textiles ecosystem.

Resortecs’s active disassembly innovation provides the solution to make recycling easy. Resortecs’ system of heat-dissolvable threads and thermal disassembly is five times faster than traditional disassembly and makes it possible to recycle up to 90% of a textile product’s fabric content. It is also a drop-in solution to existing industrial processes.

To make smart disassembly the norm, Resortecs urges the European Commission to:

1. Set information and labelling requirements covering disassembly, ensuring consistency with the ESPR and the DPP. 

2. Build a standardised information infrastructure that expands from today’s cradle-to-gate/grave to cradle-to-cradle, including information on disassembly. Making this information available is essential to enable value-retention operations such as disassembly and high-quality recycling and to recognise product materials and components that enable ecodesign, such as Resortecs innovative threads for textiles. An ecodesigned product will only fulfil its circularity potential if the information needed – including crucial information on how it can be efficiently disassembled – is readily available and accessible to the right actor. Such a standardised information infrastructure is not available today, meaning that consumers, sorters, recyclers, and manufacturers lack crucial information throughout, from making informative purchasing decisions to processing a garment once it reaches its end of life. A garment’s physical label should contain simple, harmonised, and comparable visual symbols reflecting its key circularity characteristics. A garment’s readiness for disassembly should be included to guarantee adequate sorting, processing, and waste prevention, as well as a garment’s recycled and recyclable content. This information should also appear in a textiles product’s DPP and provide the detailed information substantiating the physical label.

3. An ambitious Textiles Labelling Regulation that goes beyond its current strict focus on fiber identification is crucial to spur circular innovation and foster the development of novel fibers. It should grant recognition to emerging innovative novel fibers and set a regulatory framework that allows them to scale.