When we designed the Nature of Fashion: Design for Transformation initiative, we made a deliberate choice: to work with pilot partners rooted in three different regions, each pursuing the question of textile waste transformation from the conditions of their own context. What became clear over time is that the questions themselves are as different as the places.
What the industry is missing
Start at the bottom of the ocean. A whale dies and sinks: its body, still enormous, still full of stored energy, becomes an ecosystem of its own. Within days, sharks and hagfish strip the soft tissue. Over the following months, worms and crustaceans work through what remains. Then, for years, sometimes decades, bacteria colonize the bones themselves, drawing energy from the lipids locked inside, releasing sulfur compounds that feed a community of organisms found nowhere else. A single death sustains life on the sea floor longer than most forests take to regrow, and the nutrients it releases eventually rise back to the surface where they feed the plankton the next generation of whales will depend on. Nothing about the whale is lost because every part of it becomes something else, in sequence, until what began as a single body has cycled back into the wider system that produced it. Another way of saying this is that the whale is completely composed of molecules and materials that are useful to the community.
This works because natural systems are built around three interlocking actors. Producers that concentrate energy and matter into useful forms, consumers that extract that value, and decomposers that break everything back down into the building blocks that producers need to begin again. Each depends on the others; each makes the others possible.
Fashion has built extraordinary infrastructure around the first two. We grow fibres, spin yarn, weave cloth, design garments, and following the primary/initial use phase, circulate them through increasingly sophisticated resale and recycling channels. “Built” is not the same as “perfected”, though: production and design remain toxic and resource-intensive, driven by overproduction, while consumption operates at a pace and volume no ecosystem could sustain. However, what is missing almost entirely is the third function: decomposition. The capacity to receive what remains and transform it back into something useful. The consequences of that absence are now visible everywhere: in the waterways receiving our discards; in the communities managing waste they did not create; in the growing category of textiles for which the industry has no answer, that have no better options than to end up incinerated, in a landfill, or polluting public landscapes.
Three places, three expressions of the same gap
We took this question into three very different places, and what we found is that the fashion industry’s failure to design for endings does not look the same everywhere. It produces different crises, carried by different communities, in different material conditions. Understanding those differences matters because they shape what transformation can actually mean in each place.
In the Netherlands, the crisis is a story of ambition outpacing infrastructure. The country discards approximately 215,000 tonnes of post-consumer textiles every year. Half of that ends up in municipal waste and is incinerated. Incineration is permanent destruction: once a textile is burned, its valuable polymers, fibres, and chemical building blocks are irreversibly lost, converted into greenhouse gases and residues. The Netherlands has set an ambitious target to prepare 75% of textiles for reuse or recycling by 2030 under its Extended Producer Responsibility framework. As of early 2025, the industry had collected just 0.3% under those mandates. The gap between policy intention and material reality is enormous, and incineration fills the space between them.
In Germany, the landscape is fragmented in a different way. Approximately one million tonnes of textile waste are collected across the country each year, yet around 54,000 tonnes are still incinerated annually, and thousands more are exported to the Global South. Fiber-to-fiber recycling, the dominant model of circular textiles today, requires materials that are at least 95% homogeneous. In practice, the vast majority of what gets collected is blended: cotton-polyester, wool-acrylic, elastane-nylon combinations designed for performance and affordability. These materials fall outside the scope of existing recycling infrastructure. Funding structures, meanwhile, favour single-technology solutions over the kind of integrated systems that complex waste streams actually require. What results is a significant category of textiles that the system has quietly given up on.
In Accra, Ghana, the picture is different again, and demands to be understood on its own terms. Kantamanto Market, one of the world’s largest secondhand clothing hubs, receives roughly 15 million used garments every week from the UK, the EU, the US, Canada, and China. The tens of thousands of people who work there (sorting, repairing, upcycling, recirculating) provide a service of extraordinary value: keeping garments in use within a system built on overproduction. As fashion accelerates and garments are designed to be disposable, the task becomes harder. What cannot be resold accumulates. Much of it ends up in Korle Lagoon, known colloquially as Naa Korle, a sacred waterway in Accra that has absorbed decades of the world’s textile waste. An estimated 147,000 tonnes of textiles arrive in Ghana annually. The communities living alongside Korle bear the cost of a crisis they did not create.
Because the challenge in each place is different, so is the answer.
This is what the pilots have demonstrated most clearly: that there is no universal solution to the problem of textile waste, because the problem does not present itself universally. Each context requires a response built from what it knows, what it has, and who it centres.
And this is not incidental, it reflects one of biomimicry’s Life’s Principles: being locally attuned and responsive. Biological systems are shaped by the specific materials, organisms, and pressures present in a given place. A mangrove’s root system and a desert plant’s root system solve different problems because they exist in different places. Fashion’s decomposer function works the same way, in that it cannot follow a single blueprint, because ecological systems never do. They form from what is locally available, in response to what is locally needed.
In the Netherlands, Circle Economy and its partners asked what would happen if the fraction of textiles currently routed to incineration were redirected through a cascade of complementary processes that each handle a different part of the waste stream, each feeding its outputs into the next stage. Enzymatic hydrolysis breaks down cellulosic fibres into glucose. Bacterial fermentation converts that glucose into biodegradable bioplastics. Thermochemical gasification transforms remaining synthetic fractions into syngas and chemical feedstocks. The model is the decomposition cascade found in any healthy ecosystem: a network of actors working in sequence, each one extending the value that the previous one extracted. A tangle of contaminated, unsortable, mixed textiles that would otherwise burn become valuable resources used in packaging, agriculture, and industrial production. The Netherlands pilot is proving, at a scale that matters, that this kind of industrial symbiosis is feasible.
In Germany, the Beneficial Design Institute and its partners are working on the fraction that sits even further from existing pathways. They call it the “stubborn 10%”: the blended, chemically-treated textiles that fall below the threshold of what any current system can handle. The question they asked is not how to return these materials to the textile loop, but what they could become through transformation into something entirely new. Polyester-rich textiles are broken down and the resulting building blocks fermented by bacteria into PHB, a fully biodegradable polymer with applications in medicine, agriculture, and environmental protection. CO2-rich syngas from gasified textiles feeds microalgae cultivation, producing biomass compounds for soil health. A nurse’s discarded uniform becomes the starting point for a surgical suture. Fast fashion waste becomes a biofertilizer. The German pilot shows that a material’s journey does not have to end where the fashion system ends: it can open into cycles that serve entirely different industries, and return safely to the earth from there.
In Accra, The Or Foundation’s work begins from an entirely different premise. Rather than engineering new transformation technologies, the pilot starts from what is already happening in Korle Lagoon. Under the evolutionary pressure of decades of synthetic polymer accumulation, microbial communities in the lagoon have been developing metabolic pathways capable of breaking down materials once considered indestructible. A pollution hotspot has also become an evolution hotspot: a Living Lab where biological adaptation is happening in real time. The Or Foundation’s approach is to learn from that, support it, and restore the lagoon and the communities surrounding it. Citizen Scientists collect and analyse samples, build monitoring databases, and develop the science from within the community. This is science shaped by proximity: the people closest to the crisis are also the ones producing the knowledge.
The Ghana pilot also carries the most urgent argument of the three. The decomposition already happening in Korle is converting textile polymers into CO2 and methane, and the climate implications of unmanaged decomposition at this scale are significant. The conclusion that The Or Foundation’s work points toward is one the entire industry has to take seriously: we cannot out-decompose a broken production model. As long as fashion operates on overproduction and planned obsolescence, waste generation will outpace any decomposition or recycling intervention. What is needed is ecosystem restoration paired with production transformation: restoring living systems so they can safely cycle carbon, while dismantling the production systems that generate waste at unsustainable volumes.
What this project is teaching us
Taken together, the three pilots reveal something that no single pilot could: decomposition is not a technology but a function. And like all ecological functions, it is profoundly shaped by place: on the materials available, the microbial communities present, the industrial infrastructure nearby, and the communities whose knowledge and whose wellbeing are at stake.
The right question in the Netherlands is different from the right question in Berlin, which is different again from the right question in Accra. This is the bioregional argument made concrete. Transformation requires starting from here, with these materials, in this ecosystem, with these people. The pilots are not implementing a monolithic methodology, instead, they are demonstrating what it looks like when a question is taken seriously in the place where it actually arises.
What the project is also making visible is an accountability gap that the industry has not yet reckoned with fully. The communities absorbing the greatest cost of fashion’s waste are not the communities with the most power to change how fashion operates. Closing that gap is not a downstream problem. It belongs at the centre of how the industry thinks about production, material design, and what it means to take responsibility for what it makes.
The infrastructure for endings is being built in laboratories, in living waterways, in communities that have been waiting for the rest of the system to catch up. That work is at an early stage. What the pilots are showing is that it is possible, that it is already underway, and that it looks different in every place where it takes root. In biological systems, that is not a flaw;it is what local attunement looks like. That is exactly as it should be.
The Nature of Fashion: Design for Transformation is led by the Biomimicry Institute and funded by Laudes Foundation. Case studies from all three pilots are available here.
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