Summary of Research Findings

In June 2025, corporate questionnaire was sent to 59 major domestic apparel companies (manufacturers, wholesalers, retailers, and trading companies) to find out their challenges in promoting circularity in fashion, particularly regarding the current status on collection, reuse, and recycling of unwanted garments, as well as on environmental reporting.

In line with the global trends, companies are increasingly addressing environmental issues from sustainability perspective. Collection of unwanted clothes, which can accelerate resource circulation further, is known to be mainly carried out by major apparel companies. However, our survey revealed that only 36% are actually collecting unwanted clothing, Roughly 63% are still not collecting, and when this is compared to the result of last survey conducted in June 2023, suggesting that there was no significant increase in the number of companies collecting unwanted clothes in two years.

The response option chosen the most as a reason for not collecting unnecessary clothing was “too much investment upfront” (40.5%), followed by “understaffed” and “limited merchandise output for collection” (both at 27.0%). In comparison with the last survey, marked decline was observed in the number of respondents choosing “skeptic about benefits of circularity initiative”, decreased by 17.8 percentage points from 28.6% to 10.8%. This indicates the increasing environmental awareness in Japanese apparel industry.

Noteworthy Topics

Cost Hinders Collection of Unwanted Clothes

Results of our survey revealed that cost is the main reason apparel companies hold back from collecting, reusing, and recycling unwanted garments.
Managing the entire process in-house is often prohibitively expensive, especially for small- and medium-sized enterprises. To reuse and recycle clothes collected at retail stores, companies need to collaborate with external partners, particularly textile recyclers capable of handling collection, sorting, and recycling. In addition, without buyers/retailer downstream for reused garments or recycled materials, the transition from a linear to a circular model cannot progress effectively. This underscores the importance of developing viable strategies to support the shift toward circular fashion.

Research Outline