What: John Lewis has launched a fully circular knitwear collection made from 100% reclaimed and repurposed wool, produced entirely within the UK.

Why it is important: The launch highlights the financial and technical challenges of circularity, reinforcing the need for investment and collaboration.

John Lewis has introduced its first circular knitwear collection, the Closed Loop Initiative, featuring 19 unisex pieces crafted entirely from reclaimed and repurposed wool sourced and manufactured within the UK. The process begins with the retailer’s FashionCycle takeback scheme, in partnership with the Salvation Army Trading Company, where donated garments are sorted, graded, and processed using advanced Fibersort technology. Unwearable wool is recycled and blended with pre-consumer waste, eliminating the need for traditional dyeing and significantly reducing water and chemical use. The yarn is spun and knitted into seamless garments by UK-based partners, with production volumes determined by the amount of collected waste. The project required deep collaboration, significant financial investment, and a willingness to adapt to technical and design limitations, particularly in meeting John Lewis’s high durability standards and certification requirements. The initiative not only models a scalable approach to circular manufacturing but also highlights the operational and mindset shifts necessary for retailers to integrate circularity into mainstream business practices.

IADS Notes: John Lewis’s Closed Loop Initiative exemplifies the retail sector’s accelerating shift toward circularity, as documented in recent industry analyses. The operational overhaul required to collect, sort, and recycle wool entirely within the UK reflects the broader transformation described in the Kearney CFX 2025 report (July 2025), where regulatory and consumer pressures are pushing retailers from pilot projects to systematic circular practices. The business and financial hurdles faced by John Lewis, including investment, risk-sharing, and certification, mirror the challenges outlined in BCG’s February 2025 report on scaling next-gen materials, which stresses the need for strategic capital and collaboration. Product development for circularity, with its design limitations and durability requirements, aligns with the findings from Euromonitor (February 2025), highlighting how sustainability is now embedded in innovation but must be balanced with consumer affordability. The scalability of John Lewis’s approach, and its potential to expand into other categories, echoes the commercial-scale adoption seen in H&M’s Circulose partnership (June 2025), underscoring how leading retailers are moving from experimental to mainstream integration of recycled materials.

How John Lewis is closing the loop with circular knitwear