The fashion industry is undergoing a transformation, with brands increasingly looking for solutions to reduce textile waste and move toward a circular economy. One of the key challenges remains scaling fiber-to-fiber recycling – ensuring that discarded textiles can be transformed into new high-quality materials instead of ending up in landfills or incinerators.
In line with these ambitions, sportswear brand PUMA and textile recycling innovator RE&UP have announced a multi-year collaboration to accelerate circularity in the industry. Through this partnership, the companies will work to scale textile-to-textile recycling by converting textile waste into Next-Gen Cotton and Next-Gen Polyester, reducing reliance on virgin materials and enhancing circularity across PUMA’s supply chain.
This collaboration builds on the success of PUMA’s RE:FIBRE program. Now, with RE&UP’s advanced recycling technology, the program will now expand further – including into the Americas – bringing fiber-to-fiber recycling into more product categories and regional supply chains.
RE&UP’s technology plays a key role in enabling this transition. By processing diverse textile feedstocks – including traditionally hard-to-recycle blends like polycotton and polyester-elastane – the company provides a scalable solution for textile circularity. With an annual processing capacity of 80,000 tons and a production system powered entirely by renewable energy, RE&UP is helping set new standards for low-impact, high-performance recycled fibers.
For PUMA, the partnership represents a step toward its Vision 2030 sustainability targets, which include sourcing 30% of its polyester fabric from fiber-to-fiber recycled polyester by the end of the decade.
“We want to integrate high-quality, circular materials into our products without compromising performance,” said Howard Williams, Director of Global Innovation Apparel & Accessories at PUMA. “Our work with RE&UP opens new possibilities for achieving our sustainability targets while reducing textile waste.”
As demand for sustainable raw materials grows, partnerships like this highlight the potential of textile-to-textile recycling in reshaping the industry. By demonstrating that circularity at scale is achievable, the collaboration between PUMA and RE&UP sets an example for other brands looking to close the loop in textile production.