👕 Sustainable & Circular Textiles - Deep Dive

A full breakdown of the sector, the solutions, the gaps, and the funding landscape.

Hey there,

For 4 years now I’ve sent a weekly digest about the latest in climate, but readers keep asking me to go deeper — not just what happened this week, but which solutions are actually working and where the money is going. What sectors and companies should you pay attention to, invest in, or apply to?

So I’m kicking off this new series. And I wanted to start with a problem we can all relate to on a personal level.

Roughly 80% of you reading this are based in Europe, where the average person buys 19 kg of clothing every year and throws away 12 kg. At 26,000 readers, that means we collectively toss out 312,000 kg of clothes a year. Dayum!

So I spent the last two weeks mapping every company that’s trying to fix this — 247 across 31 countries. I reached out to all of them, dug into the data, and put together the most comprehensive breakdown I could on what’s happening in sustainable textiles.

Three questions drove the research:

What are the real problems — not the headlines, but the data? Do the solutions actually make sense at scale? Is funding going to the right places?

The full deep dive - with sourced data, funding breakdowns, and all 247 companies - is live on inClimate. You can expand each section to go as deep as you want:

This is my first deep dive, so I’d genuinely love your feedback.

What’s good? What’s missing? What sector should I cover next? Just hit reply.

I might also add a way for members to directly add comments and notes to the deep dive so that it can become more collaborative to improve these together. But that’s an April project.

Thanks for reading along,

Tim