Oct 13, 2026 · 23 min · 10 segments
Sydney Badger, VP of Commercialization and Circular Strategy at Fillogic, joins Arthur Zaczkiewicz fresh from Climate Week to explain why circular fashion keeps stalling: nobody has built the sorting…
Arthur ZaczkiewiczHostSo I think first aligning on a definition of what circularity means for this industry.
If you're a bit of a purist and, you know, I have my master's in sustainability and my professor of circularity would have a very strict lens of what it means for this to be truly circular.
moving away from a take-make-waste model to something where your inputs stay in use as long as possible and your inputs become your inputs back at the beginning of the cycle again, meaning that, you know, you are maintaining everything at its highest value, you are reusing, you are refurbishing, you are remanufacturing, and that nothing becomes waste.
That is... really hard for this industry to execute in practice because um the second that first order has gone out it's kind of like you know a car loses 50 of its value once it goes off like it is the same issue and it is really hard for us to assess value of the vast majority of fashion merchandise um I think that's changing really quickly, but I guess what I mean by that is we start bouncing this product around over and over again into these secondary markets and tertiary markets, and it becomes worthless very, very quickly.
Yeah, no, I just thought of something I haven't thought about in a while, but what about like scarcity? So I have this wacky idea, and it's very utopian.
What if... you know, all the factories like shut down for like two months, right? Or rotated.
And then you let that product cycle through all those different places that you just mentioned.
I mean, I think that you're tapping into something that I think is underlying the crux of this industry, which is like, Can fashion ever be truly circular and truly sustainable within a capitalist model where we reward newness and growth at all costs? Degrowth is a very scary word for the industry.
And I, but the concept of what does production caps or taxes on material usage, you know, some of what France has brought in with like an anti-fast fashion or like you are, there is the emergence of what would kind of actually start to shift the level of the floor of the industry.
But we're, you know, there's issues with all of the proposed legislation that really, you know, there is no silver bullet here.
You know, just to answer that previous question about why circularity is so hard to scale.
I mean, the primary bottleneck is really in the sorting infrastructure for post-consumer waste.
Like, Who's going to do it? Who's going to sort for effective reuse streams to maintain everything at its highest value? How is there enough value in a $6 dress to be able to do that? when historically we were able to just export that waste back to China or back to somewhere else.
And the burden is now domestic to actually solve some of these problems and these EPR mechanisms will require that we think through a lot of this and build the markets for it.
But my takeaways from last week is still from a brand lens, Unless it comes with a revenue line, it's not interesting and it's not a priority.
So I think first aligning on a definition of what circularity means for this industry.
If you're a bit of a purist and, you know, I have my master's in sustainability and my professor of circularity would have a very strict lens of what it means for this to be truly circular.
moving away from a take-make-waste model to something where your inputs stay in use as long as possible and your inputs become your inputs back at the beginning of the cycle again, meaning that, you know, you are maintaining everything at its highest value, you are reusing, you are refurbishing, you are remanufacturing, and that nothing becomes waste.
That is... really hard for this industry to execute in practice because um the second that first order has gone out it's kind of like you know a car loses 50 of its value once it goes off like it is the same issue and it is really hard for us to assess value of the vast majority of fashion merchandise um I think that's changing really quickly, but I guess what I mean by that is we start bouncing this product around over and over again into these secondary markets and tertiary markets, and it becomes worthless very, very quickly.
Yeah, no, I just thought of something I haven't thought about in a while, but what about like scarcity? So I have this wacky idea, and it's very utopian.
What if... you know, all the factories like shut down for like two months, right? Or rotated.
And then you let that product cycle through all those different places that you just mentioned.
I mean, I think that you're tapping into something that I think is underlying the crux of this industry, which is like, Can fashion ever be truly circular and truly sustainable within a capitalist model where we reward newness and growth at all costs? Degrowth is a very scary word for the industry.
And I, but the concept of what does production caps or taxes on material usage, you know, some of what France has brought in with like an anti-fast fashion or like you are, there is the emergence of what would kind of actually start to shift the level of the floor of the industry.
But we're, you know, there's issues with all of the proposed legislation that really, you know, there is no silver bullet here.
You know, just to answer that previous question about why circularity is so hard to scale.
I mean, the primary bottleneck is really in the sorting infrastructure for post-consumer waste.
Like, Who's going to do it? Who's going to sort for effective reuse streams to maintain everything at its highest value? How is there enough value in a $6 dress to be able to do that? when historically we were able to just export that waste back to China or back to somewhere else.
And the burden is now domestic to actually solve some of these problems and these EPR mechanisms will require that we think through a lot of this and build the markets for it.
But my takeaways from last week is still from a brand lens, Unless it comes with a revenue line, it's not interesting and it's not a priority.
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