Mending South Africa’s Textile Recycling Gap

South Africa’s fashion waste challenge is not just about what we discard, but what we fail to recover. While consumers are increasingly willing to return unwanted clothing, the systems needed to turn old garments into new resources remain limited. Bridging this gap presents a significant opportunity for industry, policymakers and innovators to accelerate circularity in the local textile value chain.

Most post-consumer garments collected in South Africa are downcycled, converted into industrial rags, stuffing or insulation, rather than recycled back into new yarn or products. True fibre-to-fibre recycling remains limited by the prevalence of blended fabrics and a lack of sorting and processing infrastructure. An additional constraint is that textile production is very limited in South Africa. Reliance on imports and fabric content details create further hurdles. Several initiatives are working to close this gap.

Clothes to Good, in partnership with H&M South Africa, operates a nationwide garment collection programme that incentivises consumers to return unwanted textiles. Items are sorted into rewear, reuse and recycling streams, supporting micro-enterprises, education initiatives and industrial applications, with over one million kilograms collected since 2019.

Taking Care of Business is a non-profit social enterprise that works with retailers and manufacturers to divert excess merchandise from landfill, enabling resale, repair and redistribution into secondary markets while supporting small business development and financial independence. (Read ENS - News - A runway to nowhere)

These initiatives demonstrate strong private-sector appetite for collection and sorting, but they operate without a producer-funded financial mechanism to sustain and scale their work. A textile extended producer responsibility (“EPR”) scheme would provide that mechanism. Eco-modulated fees, where producers of easily recyclable mono-fibre garments pay lower fees than those producing difficult-to-recycle blends, , would create a financial incentive to design for recyclability and reward brands that invest in circular design.

At the same time, global regulatory scrutiny of online retail platforms highlights the risks of weak oversight in fast-moving textile supply chains. Chinese online retailer Temu has been fined EUR200 million (approximately ZAR3.78 billion) by European Union (“EU”) regulators for failing to adequately prevent the sale of illegal products on its platform, following a wide-ranging investigation under the Digital Services Act. The case underscores growing international pressure on large-scale retailers to take responsibility for product compliance and lifecycle impacts, reinforcing the need for robust regulatory frameworks such as EPR regulations that ensure accountability across the textile value chain[TC1.1] to protect stakeholders, particularly consumers.

Designing a South Africa-ready textile EPR scheme

The building blocks are largely in place. The existing EPR framework under the National Environmental Management: Waste Act 59 of 2008 provides the legal architecture for identifying new product streams, registering producers, setting targets and collecting fees. A textile notice would need to define the products in scope, set phased targets for collection, reuse and recycling and establish clear rules for cross-border e-commerce. Labelling reform, aligned with fibre-identification technology would provide the data layer required for sorting, reporting and recycled content verification.

South Africa does not need to start from scratch. Locally, GreenCape and WRAP, with support from the Anglo American Foundation, have already taken concrete steps towards a voluntary circular textiles initiative, following workshops in Cape Town, KwaZulu-Natal and Johannesburg in 2025. They have also published a Potential Pathways and Value Proposition paper dated May 2026, uUnderscoring the urgency of intervention.

Internationally, momentum is accelerating. France has noted a significant increase in collection and recycling rates, with material recovery reaching high levels with substantial government investment to improve infrastructure. The Netherlands introduced EPR obligations requiring 50 % of textiles sold to be prepared for reuse or recycling by 2025, rising to 75 % by 2030. Sweden’s proposed scheme targets a 90 % reduction in textile disposal by 2036, while Hungary has already introduced textile EPR covering apparel, clothing accessories, footwear, household linens, curtains, blankets, rugs and carpets.

In January 2026, WRAP published a ten-point blueprint for a UK textiles EPR scheme, co-designed with industry through the UK Textiles Pact, recommending a mandatory, industry-led scheme operated by a single non-profit producer responsibility organisation with eco-modulated fees, waste hierarchy prioritisation and ringfenced funding for domestic collection and recycling infrastructure. WRAP has also supported Ireland in developing its own national scheme aligned with the EU’s revised Waste Framework Directive. In the United States, California’s Responsible Textile Recovery Act SB 707 will adopt textile EPR with penalties for non-compliance ranging from ten thousand to fifty thousand dollars per day.

These examples offer rich precedent for South Africa. What is needed now is a clear regulatory roadmap and meaningful engagement across the textile value chain. Thankfully, the Draft National Waste Management Strategy (NWMS) 2026 published on 19 December 2025 includes clothing and textiles as a priority waste stream.

What’s next: stitching circularity by fibre

The next step is to consider whether an EPR scheme can be designed fibre by fibre, addressing cotton, polyester and blends, and how legislation can steer design for disassembly, scalable recycling and genuine circularity. The runway can lead to markets that reward what lasts, for the benefit of future vintage seekers and fabric technologists.

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