The European Commission has outlined 10 best practices for textile entities across Europe to transition toward sustainability, circularity, digitalization, resilience, and social responsibility. Published as the third edition of its Report on Best Practices of the EU Textiles Ecosystem, the document highlights how innovation and European production capabilities can support the resilience and strategic autonomy of the textile industry.
The 10 examples span several European countries, including Belgium, Bulgaria, Denmark, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Romania. They represent a broad range of stakeholders — from large industrial companies to nonprofit organizations — all working within the EU textiles ecosystem.
“These practices address multiple areas of the transition pathway,” the report stated. “They center on sustainable competitiveness, research and innovation, and infrastructure development, while also dealing with skills, governance and investment.”
Turning Waste Into Opportunity Through Industrial Symbiosis
Italian company Pulvera is one of the highlighted cases, transforming textile production scraps into fiber-based composite materials for applications in the furniture and automobile sectors. Report authors noted that “the company demonstrates how industrial symbiosis can turn textile waste into new business opportunities.”
In a complementary model from the Netherlands, United Repair Center combines scalable business-to-business garment repair with an inclusive employment framework that generates skill-building opportunities for individuals facing barriers to the labor market. “It shows how environmental and social objectives can be embedded in the same circular business model,” the report noted.
Cross-Sector Collaboration and Pre-Competitive Initiatives
The European Outdoor Group’s Carbon Reduction Project brings European brands together around shared suppliers, providing facilities with technical support to measure emissions, develop reduction plans, and implement concrete decarbonization measures. According to the report, the initiative “demonstrates the potential of pre-competitive collaboration to address emissions in global textile supply chains.”
Meanwhile, Dutch sustainable furniture manufacturer Planq and Kvadrat Really — a Danish company that transforms textile waste into table tops — have collaborated to incorporate discarded textiles into durable surfaces, panels, and furniture components. “These companies illustrate the potential for cross-sector collaboration to reduce reliance on virgin materials and create value from waste streams,” the report stated.
Italian leather companies Sicit and Ilsa have worked together to recover collagen-rich residues from tanning processes, converting them into bio-based products such as fertilizers and biostimulants — “creating value from materials that would otherwise be treated as waste.”
Consumer Engagement and Circular Education
Romanian initiatives Humana People to People and Viitor Plus focus on consumer engagement through education, awareness campaigns, and practical tools that support the circular transition. These initiatives encourage reuse, repair, and responsible consumption while helping consumers identify opportunities to extend the life of textiles within the circular economy.
Technology-Led Transformation in Manufacturing
Bulgarian textile manufacturer E. Miroglio has overhauled its production process by investing in modern technologies, certified materials, traceability systems, resource efficiency, lifecycle assessments, and environmental monitoring — a multi-layered approach to achieving textile sustainability across its operations.
Digitalization is also reshaping how textile products are made and distributed. Research institutes and companies including DITF Denkendorf in Germany, Danish fashion-tech startup Rodinia Generation, and German fashion company and microfactory OMIMAI have demonstrated how digital tools can enable more local, flexible, and on-demand manufacturing. All three entities connect digital design directly with production to shift toward a “design-sell-make” model — a method intended to address overproduction and long supply chains that have long burdened the sustainable fashion sector.
Resilience Through Vertical Integration
Belgian technical textiles company Sioen Industries has showcased the strength of a predominantly European production base in building supply chain resilience. As a vertically integrated business, Sioen serves multiple sectors including defense and security, public safety, maritime applications, energy, and infrastructure, while simultaneously advancing circularity and product traceability initiatives within the EU textiles space.
In 2024, Sioen partnered with textile eco-design and end-of-life waste management firm Resortec to develop workwear using heat-dissolvable sewing threads that allow garments to be easily disassembled at the end of their lifecycle — a concrete example of circular economy principles applied at the product design level.
From Ambition to Implementation
These collective examples reflect a clear shift in how the EU textiles ecosystem is approaching long-term change. “Taken together, these examples show how the transition of the textiles ecosystem is increasingly moving from ambition to implementation,” the report concluded. “They demonstrate practical pathways for reducing environmental impacts, creating value from waste, developing viable circular business models, using digitalization to rethink production, and strengthening the resilience of the European textiles ecosystem.”
The report further noted that by sharing these practices, the aim is to guide other companies in implementing similar initiatives that will advance the transition to a more circular textile economy in Europe. “By highlighting these practices, the report aims to serve as both a reference and an inspiration for stakeholders across the textiles value chain, supporting knowledge-sharing and the replication of successful solutions.”
The third edition of the EU Textiles Ecosystem Best Practices Report reinforces EU textile sustainability as a living, expanding framework — one grounded in real-world examples that make textile recycling, responsible production, and circular business models increasingly tangible for companies across the continent.
