UK textile brands cut carbon by 6%, water use by 9%

Sustainability teams in the United Kingdom are driving real progress to reduce impacts by improving products, materials, and processes, yet production continues to climb as many brands and retailers pursue familiar models of growth, according to the UK Textiles Pact’s fourth Annual Progress Update.

In an increasingly volatile global textiles marketplace, these models are still treated as the default for competitiveness and commercial survival, it notes.

The pact has two ambitious targets that will drive transformation of the textiles sector by 2030: Fifty per cent reduction in the overall carbon footprint of new textile products placed on the UK market and 30 per cent reduction in the overall water footprint of new textile products placed on the UK market.

For the fourth consecutive year, signatories delivered action under the pact and made products better by shifting to less impactful fibres, increasing recycled content and adopting more sustainable manufacturing processes.

These efforts are paying off and impacts per tonne of textiles have fallen, with carbon down by 6 per cent and water down by 9 per cent compared to 2019 figures, the Waste and Resource Action Programme (WRAP), a global environment action non-governmental organisation (NGO), said citing the Update.

Combined with the efforts of our reuse and recycling signatories, who displaced 1.12 million tonnes of carbon dioxide in 2024 alone, this represents marked progress.

However, these gains are being cancelled out by volume growth. In 2024, brands and retailers placed 17 per cent more textiles in the market than in 2019, leading to a 10-per cent rise in total carbon emissions and a 7-per cent increase in water use.

This implies product impacts are decreasing, but they are being produced in such vast quantities that the overall footprint continues to grow, WRP noted.

All signatories are continuing to make improvements to reduce their products’environmental impacts. Sixty-two per cent of textiles being put on the market by signatories have reduced environmental impacts, up from 25 per cent in 2019; 16 per cent of fibres used by signatories are now recycled, up from 2 per cent in 2021, outperforming the global average of 7.6 per cent.

Reuse and recycling organisations handled 210,000 tonnes of used textiles in 2024—a 27 per cent increase since 2019.

The volume of products collected by brands and retailers for reuse and recycling has nearly tripled since 2019, capturing items that might otherwise have ended up in household waste.

Circular business models continue to gain traction. While they currently account for a modest 0.02 per cent of total tonnages sold/put on the market, business adoption is rising year on year, and 13 per cent of used textiles reported by reuse and recycling signatories were sold through peer-to-peer platforms in 2024.