ETC CE Report 2025/7 Measuring Europe’s textiles circularity – through the lenses of the EEA Circularity Metrics Lab
26 Mar 2025
Tom Duhoux, Anse Smeets, Lea Kress, Lars Fogh Mortensen
Textiles have been identified as a key value chain in the EU’s Circular Economy Action Plan, leading to the development of the EU Strategy on Sustainable and Circular Textiles. Despite growing political focus, significant data, monitoring, and indicator gaps remain, making it difficult to assess the state of circularity in the European textile sector. With its work, the European Environment Agency (EEA) and its European Topic Centre on Circular Economy and Resource Use (ETC CE) provide necessary data, information and knowledge to support the shift towards a circular economy in the EU. This report aims to address these gaps by identifying key data streams and evaluating textile circularity using the EEA’s Circularity Metrics Lab (CML) framework.
The report provides a background report for the 2025 EEA briefing on “The textiles value chain in numbers – bending the trend in Europe’s circular economy” and supplements the 2025 ETC CE report on “Textiles and the environment – the role of digital technologies in Europe’s circular economy”.
