When a garment leaves its original owner, it carries a set of characteristics that determine every possible future use. Its fibre composition determines whether it can be recycled and, if so, through which process. Its construction determines whether it can be repaired and, if so, by whom and at what cost. Its condition determines whether it can be resold and, if so, in which market and at which price. Its care history determines whether its current condition is likely to deteriorate further or whether it has been maintained in a way that extends its usable life.
All of this information exists, in some form, somewhere in the garment’s history. The fibre composition was recorded in the tech pack before the garment was made. The construction method was specified in the same document. The care instructions were printed on the care label. The condition at the point of return is observable. The care history, in most cases, has not been recorded anywhere.
The circular economy’s information problem is not that garment data does not exist. It is that the data exists at the production stage and is rarely transmitted to the end-of-life stage in a form that the operator at that stage can use. A resale platform, a repair technician, a mechanical recycler and a rental operator each need different information to do their work. In most cases, they receive a garment and must determine what it is by inspection alone. Inspection is slow, inconsistent and does not reveal what inspection cannot see: the blend percentage of a mixed fabric, the chemical treatment applied at the finishing stage, and the seam allowance remaining inside the hem.
A garment at the end of its first life has several possible next lives. Which one it gets depends on what the operator receiving it can find out about it. This analysis maps exactly what each circular economy operator needs – and where the information currently does not exist.
Circular Fashion Is an Information Problem
The most precise recent articulation of what circular fashion requires comes not from sustainability advocacy but from an analysis of what each pathway needs to function. A circular garment does not follow one predetermined path. It may be resold, repaired, rented, altered, remade or recycled, and each of those paths requires different information from the person making the routing decision. What The Ellen MacArthur Foundation identifies is that circular fashion’s difficulty is not primarily a technology prob business model problem. It is an information availability problem: the information needed to make the correct routing decision is not available when the decision needs to be made.
The Ellen MacArthur Foundation groups circular fashion’s primary models as resale, rental, repair and remaking, with recycling as the final loop. Resale gives a garment new owners. Rental sells access rather than ownership. Repair extends the life of a specific garment. Remaking transforms the garment into something different. Recycling recovers the fibre. Each model has different economics, operational requirements, and information needs. A garment routed into the wrong model because the routing decision lacked the necessary information loses value at every step: a repairable garment sent to recycling surrenders the value its continued use would have provided; a non-recyclable garment sent to a mechanical recycler contaminates the recycling stream it enters.
A garment should not become an unidentified bundle of fibre the moment it leaves its original retailer. The information that would allow it to remain a legible, routable object with a documented history does not disappear at the point of return. It was never transmitted from the production stage in a form the end-of-life stage could access.
What Each Operator Needs
The resale operator
A resale platform or second-hand retailer making a stocking decision needs enough information to grade the garment and price it accurately. Grading requires knowledge of the garment’s original condition standard, its current condition, what the discrepancy represents, and whether it is likely to worsen with further use. The information required: the garment’s original measurements and current measurements (since garments can stretch, shrink or distort), its care label instructions and whether the previous owner followed them, any previous repairs or alterations and where they were made, the original retail price to anchor the resale pricing decision, and the brand’s standard for condition grading where that standard has been published.
Most of this information is not available from inspection alone. The garment’s original measurements are in the brand’s spec sheet; they are not on the garment. The care history is in the previous owner’s head; it is not recorded anywhere. The previous repairs are visible if they were visible mending and invisible if they were professional repairs that restored the garment’s appearance. The resale operator makes a grading decision from what they can see, which is the garment’s current appearance, and from what they know, which is the category and brand whose quality standard they have learned from experience. The information gap is filled by expertise rather than documentation.
The repair technician
A garment sent to a repair technician arrives with a specific problem whose solution requires information about the garment’s construction that may or may not be accessible. A split seam requires thread that matches the original specification; the original thread specification is in the tech pack, which the repair technician does not have. A replacement button requires a match for the original; the original button specification and supplier are in the garment’s production record, which the repair technician cannot access. A hem that needs re-stitching requires knowledge of the original seam allowance; the seam allowance is inside the hem, where it cannot be seen without opening the garment, and it may have been consumed in a previous alteration that is not recorded.
Repair at scale, which is what the circular economy requires to make repair economically viable across volumes rather than as a luxury service for individual garments, needs garment-level information that makes each repair decision fast and accurate. A repair technician who can access the garment’s original construction specification, trim details, and thread and button records can execute the repair correctly on the first attempt. A repair technician working from inspection alone must estimate, test, and sometimes undo unsuccessful attempts before producing a satisfactory result. The time cost of that process is what makes repair economically unviable at scale in most market contexts.
The recycler
The recycler’s information requirement is the most specific and the most consequential for what happens to the material at the end of the process. Mechanical recycling, which shreds the garment into fibre and spins it back into yarn, works efficiently on relatively pure fibre streams: garments made of a single fibre type (cotton only, polyester only, wool only) can be processed with substantially higher efficiency and lower contamination than blended garments. A cotton-polyester blend garment entering a mechanical cotton recycling stream contaminates the stream: polyester does not break down the same way as cotton, and the resulting recycled fibre has lower quality and narrower applications than a pure cotton stream would produce.
Sorting garments into the correct recycling stream requires accurate, accessible fibre composition data. In most current recycling facilities, sorting is still done manually: a sorter looks at the care label, reads the fibre composition if it is legible, and directs the garment to the appropriate stream. The care label may be worn, faded or missing. The composition declared on the label may not accurately reflect the garment’s actual composition if the brand’s supply chain had an undisclosed substitution at the fabric level. The label declares the composition at the time of manufacture; it cannot reflect fibre degradation, contamination from washing or chemical finishing treatments whose presence affects recyclability but is not disclosed on the label.
Chemical recycling, which dissolves the fibre and reconstitutes it at the molecular level, can handle blends that mechanical recycling cannot. Still, it too requires accurate input composition data to optimise the chemical process and to produce output fibre of consistent quality. A recycler working without composition data must test the input material, which adds cost and time and reduces the economic viability of chemical recycling at the volumes the circular economy requires.
The rental operator
A rental platform’s information requirement is the most time-consuming of the four: a rented garment circulates through multiple users, and the platform must maintain a condition record that tracks the garment’s deterioration across rental cycles, identifies when it crosses the threshold from rentable to repairable, and determines when it reaches the end of its rental life and must be redirected to resale, repair or recycling. The information the rental operator needs includes: the garment’s original condition standard, its care requirements, its durability characteristics for the specific types of use it will experience in rental and a condition assessment at each return point in the rental cycle.
Rental requires the garment to carry its history. A garment whose condition history is not recorded accumulates an invisible record of previous use that the platform cannot assess except by inspection at each return. A platform that cannot see the previous collar repair, the previous hem stain, or the previous shrinkage from a hot wash cannot accurately judge the garment’s remaining rental life or route it appropriately when that life ends.
The Gap Between What Exists and What Is Available
The information that each operator needs exists somewhere in the garment’s production and use history. The fibre composition was established when the fabric was sourced and confirmed when the garment was produced. The tech pack specified the construction method. The care instructions were printed on the label. The previous owner’s care history was lived but not recorded.
The gap is not between the existence of the information and its non-existence. It lies between when the information is created and when it is needed. At the production stage, the brand holds detailed garment-level data: fibre composition by percentage, construction specifications, trim details, chemical treatments applied at finishing. At the end-of-life stage, the operator does not have this data. The production record was not designed to travel with the garment. The care label carries a fraction of the production record’s content. The rest was left behind when the garment left the factory.
As Omiren Styles has established, in its analysis of the EU Digital Product Passport framework, the DPP is the regulatory mechanism designed to close this gap by attaching a machine-readable data record to each garment that travels with it through its lifecycle and makes composition, construction and end-of-life routing information available to whoever receives it at any stage. The DPP’s textile delegated act, which will fix the specific data fields the garment record must contain, is planned for Q3 to Q4 2027. Until then, the information gap at the end-of-life stage is managed through operator expertise, inspection, and estimation rather than documented garment-level data.
What ‘Recyclable on Paper’ Means in Practice
A garment that is recyclable on paper may still be difficult to recover in practice if its composition, construction, and sorting requirements don’t align with the recycling infrastructure actually available. A 70% cotton, 30% elastane fabric is technically a blended material. The cotton is potentially recyclable. The elastane is not recyclable through the same process. The garment as a whole requires chemical separation before either component can be recovered, and chemical separation infrastructure is not widely available at the scale or cost level that makes it economically viable for most brands’ typical production volumes.
A garment labelled ‘made with recycled materials’ is carrying an input claim: some of the material used to produce it was recycled before production began. The label says nothing about whether the garment itself can be recycled at the end of its life. The input claim and the end-of-life claim are different claims about different things. A garment that uses recycled polyester as an input may be no more recyclable at the end of life than a garment made from virgin polyester, because end-of-life recyclability depends on the garment’s current construction and composition, not on what its materials were made from before they entered the garment.
As Omiren Styles has established, in its material-claim evidence checklist, the decision for any material claim is: approve it at the level the evidence reaches, narrow it if the evidence supports only part of the full implication, hold it if the evidence has not been supplied, or remove it if it cannot be supported. The recyclability claim requires evidence about the garment’s end-of-life processing options, not about its input materials. A brand that makes a recyclability claim on the basis of input materials alone has applied the wrong evidence to the wrong claim.
What Brands Can Do Before the DPP Is Mandatory
The DPP’s textile delegated act will not be adopted before 2027. The information gap at the end-of-life stage is present now, and brands that want their garments to circulate effectively through resale, repair, rental and recycling infrastructure do not need to wait for a regulatory instrument to begin transmitting the data those operators need.
Several practices are available immediately. Detailed care labels that include fibre composition by percentage (not rounded to the nearest five percent), specific care instructions rather than generic symbol codes, and disassembly guidance for recycling-relevant components such as non-recyclable trims and closures give end-of-life operators significantly more information than the current minimum care label standard requires. A take-back programme whose collection process records the garment’s condition at return provides the resale platform with a graded inventory whose condition has been assessed at the point of return rather than estimated at the point of resale listing. A repair guide published on the brand’s website gives the repair technician access to the construction information they need without requiring access to the production tech pack.
None of these practices requires the full infrastructure of the EU DPP. They require a brand decision to transmit garment-level information to the operators who will handle its products at end of life. That decision is available now, and the brands that make it are building the data infrastructure from which DPP compliance will eventually be assembled rather than beginning DPP compliance from a blank starting point in 2027.
The Omiren Argument
The question the title asks is an operator’s question. It is not a brand’s question or a regulator’s question. It is the question that the person receiving a garment at the end of its first life needs answered before they can route it correctly. The answer determines whether the garment continues to circulate or becomes waste. The information that makes the answer possible was created at the production stage. The production stage and the end-of-life stage are currently connected by a care label and an inspection, which is not enough to route a garment accurately through a circular economy whose value depends on getting that routing right.
As Omiren Styles has argued throughout its coverage of production documentation and the Global South, the Global South made fashion and never got credit. The circular economy’s information requirement adds a new dimension to that argument: the brands that do not transmit garment data to end-of-life operators are brands whose garments lose their identity at the point of return, becoming unidentified bundles of fabric whose circular potential cannot be assessed and therefore cannot be realised. The garment whose production data travels with it is the garment that can be resold accurately, repaired correctly and recycled efficiently. The data is not the sustainability claim. It is the operational infrastructure that makes the sustainability claim possible to honour.
WHAT EACH OPERATOR NEEDS
Resale operator:
- Original and current measurements; condition grade; care history; previous repairs or alterations; original retail price.
Repair technician:
- Construction method; original thread and trim specifications; seam allowance; disassembly notes; previous repair history.
Recycler:
- Exact fibre composition by percentage; blend complexity; chemical treatments applied at finishing; trim and closure materials; processing route for each component.
Rental operator:
- Original condition standard; care requirements; durability characteristics; condition at each return point across the rental cycle.
ALSO READ
- Digital Product Passports for Fashion: The EU Framework Exists. Textile Rules Do Not Yet.
- Which Technical Pack Version Reached the Factory? Why Revision History Matters
- The Documentation Gap: What Fashion Supply Chains Still Fail to Record
- The Global South Made Fashion. It Just Never Got Credit.
EXPLORE MORE
Read the full Material Intelligence and Circular Economy coverage at Omiren Styles for ongoing analysis of garment data, end-of-life routing and the information infrastructure circular fashion requires. Discover travel and heritage intelligence across Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America at Rex Clarke Adventures.
