Remember the last time you cleaned out your wardrobe, how you filled a bag with clothes and then, as you stood at the op shop bin, you wondered whether everything in that bag belonged there? For a long time the honest answer would have been that, here in Australia, we didn't really know, because Australia has had no coordinated way to collect and sort the clothes we no longer wear. As a result, roughly 220,000 tonnes of clothing has ended up in landfill every year (Seamless, 2024; The Australia Institute, 2024).
A national first for circular clothing in Australia
That is why the results from the Seamless Circular Clothing Textiles Fund are both exciting and groundbreaking. Over a few short months, seven pilots ran across metropolitan and regional Australia, drawing in more than thirty organisations, from clothing and uniform brands to charities, councils, recyclers and universities. Together they collected and sorted close to thirty-one tonnes of clothing and turned thirteen tonnes of unwearable items into eight new products, including acoustic and insulation panels, hydromulch for revegetation, and filling for everyday homewares like cushions, pet beds and draught stoppers (Seamless, 2026). As the first investment of its kind in this country, it is a genuine step toward a circular clothing economy, and the people behind it deserve real congratulations.
Australians are ready to take part
While we congratulate them, we should also, quietly, be encouraged about what the initiative discovered about us, the people doing the donating. When convenient and trusted options were on offer, Australians turned up in numbers and were willing to do the right thing, and in one kerbside trial more than one in five households took part, well above what these collections usually see (Seamless, 2026). The willingness to be an active participant (where it has been tested) is clearly there. This is often the hardest part of a circular system, and the Seamless pilots provided evidence that Australians are prepared to stand up and take part.
Why collecting clothing is the easy part
The pilots are also refreshingly honest about where the difficulty in creating circular systems actually sits. It turns out that collecting clothing is the comparatively easy part. The harder work, and the real skill, happens downstream in sorting, and, importantly, a system only holds together when there is somewhere for the material to go once it is sorted. Several pilots made the same point in different ways, that committed buyers for recycled textiles need to be lined up before collection begins, so that good material flows on into new products rather than piling up in a shed (Seamless, 2026). It is a useful corrective to the idea that we can simply collect our way to circularity, and it places the emphasis on understanding what happens to a garment across its whole life rather than at the single moment we let it go.
What Yackandandah shows about regional circularity
For us, the pilot that resonates most is the one in Yackandandah, a town of around two thousand people in north-eastern Victoria. Working through the local op shop, the community kept resaleable clothing in circulation nearby, and the items that could not be sold were shredded close by and turned into stuffing for locally made pet beds, cushions and draught stoppers. This particular project demonstrated that even small, local communities could achieve a complete loop running from donation to remanufacturing without the material ever leaving the district. Importantly, while it is a small, low-cost and probably unglamorous example in the fashion and textiles sector, it is exactly the kind of place-based, skill-led approach that regional communities, including our own here on the Fleurieu Peninsula, are well suited to run.
Circular systems and the dignity of work
Together with the demonstration of systems and skills development, true social value is threaded through these results. In the industrial workwear pilot, used safety gear from remote mining sites was laundered by an Indigenous-owned business and prepared for its next life by a workforce that included people with disability, before wearable items were repaired and redistributed and the rest was recycled into fibre (Seamless, 2026). This pilot demonstrated how circular systems, when well conceptualised, are not only about diverting material from landfill; they are about the dignity of the work and the people the work supports. This distinction matters to how we think about making clothes in the future, especially with a renewed interest in sovereign manufacturing.
A garment's future is decided long before the bin
If there is a single thread to take away from the Seamless initiative, it is that a garment's future is largely decided long before it reaches a bin, in the fibres it is made from, the way it is put together, and how legible its story is to whoever has to sort it later. The Seamless pilots have shown, with real evidence rather than good intentions, that the practical pathways already exist and that, where they have been tested, Australians have been ready to use them. The task now is to build the demand, the skills and the connections that let those pathways carry weight at a national scale, and I admit to being particularly excited about that future for our sectors.
Congratulations to the Seamless team, to Ainsley Simpson for her leadership and to every partner who participated in these pilots. We will all stand on the foundations that you have prepared for us all.
Where to next
At Fleurieu Made we work with vintage and deadstock yarns on vintage knitting machines to make knitwear that is designed to last and easy to read at the end of its life. If the Seamless pilots have you thinking about where your own clothes go when you are done with them, we would love you to keep reading with us, because we write often about circular design, local making, and the small decisions that quietly shape a garment's whole life. You can find those pieces, and follow where this work is heading next, on the Fleurieu Made at www.fleurieumade.com.
Angelina Russo, PhD, MBAHEM, Founder, Fleurieu Made, Green Industries SA 2025 Women in Circular Economy Scholar, Adelaide University 2025 Venture Catalyst Alumna, +61 447 177860
Read the full report, Pilot data and outcomes: From the Seamless Circular Clothing Textiles Fund (Seamless, 2026).
References
The Australia Institute. (2024). Textiles waste in Australia: Reducing consumption and investing in circularity. https://australiainstitute.org.au/report/textiles-waste-in-australia/
Seamless. (2024). National clothing benchmark for Australia: 222,000 tonnes of clothing sent to landfill in 2023. https://www.seamlessaustralia.com/news/despite-rise-in-second-hand-shopping-australia-sends-222-000-tonnes-of-clothing-to-landfill
Seamless. (2026). Pilot data and outcomes: From the Seamless Circular Clothing Textiles Fund. https://www.seamlessaustralia.com/news/building-australias-circular-clothing-future