What: M&S, New Look and Sainsbury's have joined Oxfam and Circle-8 to launch The Circuit, a UK initiative to sort and recycle post-consumer textile waste into new raw materials.

Why it is important: The initiative shifts retailer circularity efforts from collection and resale towards industrial-scale sorting and recycling, the missing link needed to turn post-consumer waste into usable raw materials.

Marks & Spencer, New Look and Sainsbury's are setting aside their high street rivalry to co-found The Circuit with Oxfam and Circle-8, a UK-based company building infrastructure for automated textile sorting and chemical recycling. According to Circle-8, around 1.4 million tons of post-consumer textiles were generated in the UK in 2024, nearly half of which is estimated to be non-reusable.

The Circuit brings together retailers, textile recovery partners, recyclers and manufacturers to develop both the infrastructure and the commercial model needed to turn end-of-use textiles into new raw materials. Its first phase launches in January 2027 at Oxfam's site in Batley, Yorkshire, where partners will test automated sorting, traceability and routes into fibre-to-fibre recycling. The partnership aims to develop mechanical and chemical recycling processes that can supply regional and global textile manufacturing with materials recovered from UK post-consumer textiles.

Circle-8 notes that demand for recycled textile materials is growing while the systems to produce them remain immature, and argues that retailers who help build these value chains now will be best placed to influence and benefit from them. Development and recycling partners include Biffa, Ekman Group, Usha Yarns, Kipas, Reju and Worn Again Technologies.

IADS Notes: The Circuit tackles a bottleneck that has long held back textile circularity. The fashion industry discards 120 million metric tons of textile waste each year, with less than 1% recycled into new fibres, and the high cost of recycled materials and inadequate infrastructure remain the main barriers, a gap that calls for industry-wide collaboration (BCG, September 2025). M&S had already moved on the materials side, partnering with Circulose to scale circular materials made from textile waste and reduce its reliance on virgin fibres (Fashion Network, November 2025). The Circuit's focus on automated sorting and traceability matches the operational challenge in secondhand, where every item is unique and scale depends on industrialising identification, assessment and logistics rather than on sustainability claims alone (Journal du Net, June 2026). Department stores are building the collection end of the chain too: El Corte Inglés gathered more than 630 tonnes of textiles for reuse, recycling and energy recovery through its partnership with Moda re-, within Extended Producer Responsibility schemes that now cover textiles (Control Publicidad, August 2026).

Marks & Spencer, New Look and Sainsbury's unite to fight textile waste in the UK clothing industry