The European textile and fashion sector is entering one of its most significant transformation periods in decades. Policy pressure, resource constraints, labour shortages and rising environmental expectations are converging to challenge long-standing business models, yet responses across the sector remain largely fragmented.
This report synthesises collective intelligence from the Future-Ready Textiles workshop series led by Climate-KIC in 2025, bringing together manufacturers, brands, researchers, NGOs and policymakers across Europe and beyond.
Three headline insights emerge: the challenges are systemic, not only technical; signals of change are accelerating; and transition-ready capabilities are the missing link.
In the battery ecosystem emerging from the growing diffusion of battery-powered electric vehicles, second-life applications for batteries can contribute to more sustainable management.
This report recommends that more clarity be provided regarding the liability framework governing responsibilities for batteries entering repurposing pathways. Further efforts will be needed to adequately standardise the second-life EVB framework and provide harmonised approaches in areas such as State of Health and State of Charge.
In addition, more must be done to boost demand for second-life applications and help create a market for them. Funding schemes and EU-funded projects can continue supporting innovation, particularly in the automation of repurposing processes to enable further cost reductions.
The second edition of the European Reuse Barometer is an evidence-based report which draws on data from 115 reuse companies across Europe.
The Barometer is Europe’s leading benchmark of reusable packaging models. It compiles economic, social and operational data from reuse programmes across key sectors. In 2025, it went broader and deeper, covering retail, e-commerce, hospitality and transport packaging.
The report tracks return rates, funding needs and business models across reusable systems.
The Barometer gives policymakers, investors and industry the evidence they need to set ambitious reuse targets and support infrastructure.
Scaling circular business models will help the EU achieve its objectives of competitiveness, circularity, resource security and resilience. However, these models have yet to be taken up widely across Europe.
Circular business models can be scaled in three main ways: scaling out (expanding customer numbers); scaling up (influencing structural conditions to support broader adoption); and scaling deep (inducing cultural and behavioural shifts).
Critical thresholds to scaling can be identified: a minimal viable scale; a niche scale; and a transformation point.
There are five key enablers for scaling: regulation and other policies; technological innovation; finance and insurance; social innovation and behavioural change; and supply-chain and ecosystem collaboration.
This report presents the results of a joint research project by the European Investment Bank Group and the European Commission (DG ENV) to assess the circular economy investment gap in the EU.
Annual investments have reached around €120 billion but there is still an investment gap of around €82 billion per year between 2025 and 2040. Gaps are most significant in circular design and end of life infrastructure, and in key sectors such as construction, batteries and vehicles, and textiles.
The report highlights persistent market failures and investment barriers and outlines how EU regulation can help markets to develop and how coordinated EU and EIB financing and advisory action can mobilise investments and accelerate Europe’s circular transition.
This is the fourth edition of the strategic environmental monitoring reports that the Basque Ecodesign Center produces based on the knowledge acquired through its monitoring system.
The report compiles the latest regulatory and market developments driving the transition towards a decarbonised, more circular economy and explores how they are relevant to the value chains in which the Basque Ecodesign Center’s partner companies operate.
It identifies new standards and recognised methodologies that are relevant to those chains and identifies ten key challenges for the circular economy for 2026, such as security of supply and self sufficiency of materials as keys to competitiveness and circularity in the new geopolitical context.
This year’s CGR introduces a new tool: the Value Gap.
This represents the total avoidable value lost through inefficient material use (including energy and food), premature obsolescence and asset deterioration, and partially unpriced externalities. It is an absolute figure that can also be expressed relative to GDP (that is, as euros of avoidable value lost for every euro of value created), indicating how much value is lost for each unit of economic output generated.
Accounting for the Value Gap alongside GDP would provide a more realistic measure of net value creation by revealing how much economic value is structurally lost to linearity and highlighting the scale of opportunity for circular strategies to retain and recover that value.
The Circular Industry Coalition, led by Circul’R and CEA ISEC with the support of the French Ministry of Economy and Finance, brings together nine major industrial companies to address the growing systemic risks facing European industry.
After a year of collective work, the coalition has published a report highlighting the limits of the linear model and positioning a strong circular economy as a strategic lever for competitiveness, resilience and industrial sovereignty.
The report provides a shared assessment of industrial vulnerabilities and an operational roadmap to accelerate circular transformation at scale.
Europe generates considerable post-consumer textile waste (around 25kg per person in 2025), but the system captures and qualifies only a fraction for recycling.
This report, prepared by the Boston Consulting Group, finds that:
A viable European textile-to-textile system requires major investment but is not deemed to be profitable.
Enabling mechanisms coordinating the chain and sharing risk are needed to bridge the economics gap.
Textile-to-textile recycled fibres are a new product category answering a planetary need for circularity, but with structurally higher prcessing costs. Under current conditions, they will not be cost-competitive with existing recycled routes.
Electric vehicles are rapidly transforming the transportation landscape. Circularity solutions, namely recycling and second-life applications, are central to addressing environmental impacts and securing access to valuable materials in electric vehicle batteries (EVBs).
Consolidating lessons learnt from the BATRAW project, this report identifies three key enabling conditions for scaling up circularity applications for EVBs in the EU: (i) effective implementation of the EU policy framework underpinned by the Batteries Regulation; (ii) strengthened financial support for scaling up battery circularity applications; and (iii) further harmonisation of the standardisation landscape impacting EVB circularity.
