Recyclable Materials Mean Nothing if the Product Cannot Be Disassembled

For years, the circularity conversation in apparel has been conducted largely between brands and their material suppliers—with suppliers expected to deliver recyclable inputs and brands expected to communicate that fact to consumers. The Helium Loop project disturbs that arrangement. It suggests that the more consequential design decisions are made at the level of product construction, and that those decisions belong unambiguously to brands.

Matthew Betcher, Creative Director at Allied Feather + Down, puts it plainly. Material suppliers, he notes, have been engaging with end-of-life design for some time. The gap lies elsewhere. "It's not enough to say that all the materials are recyclable and then push back upstream for recycling absolving them of that responsibility," he says. A brand that selects recyclable components but constructs a garment that cannot be disassembled has simply relocated the circularity problem and made it someone else's.

Down is the high-value material in a garment like the Helium Loop Anorak, and brands have become increasingly willing to explore its recovery. But Betcher observes that when brands approach Allied about recycling end-of-life down, the question that follows is invariably the same: what happens to the textiles? "Not enough work has been done here," he says, "and in the worst case, brands absolve themselves once the product leaves their hands." The garment, taken as a whole, remains unresolved.

Betcher notes that even in pilots conducted with major brand partners, end-of-life return volumes have been too low to sustain brand-specific recovery programmes—which, he argues, is in itself instructive. The deeper problem is one of design: products are not being conceived with end-of-life as a live constraint. "Origin stories make nice marketing claims for a brand and show well on the indexes," he says, "but true sustainability or circularity lie in end of use cases." Recyclable provenance is no substitute for recoverable construction.

By making end-of-life recoverability a live requirement during product development, the Helium Loop project places accountability where the relevant decisions are actually made—at the brand level, from the earliest stage of design. Betcher is clear that this is not a new argument. "It's something we have been saying and asking for for some time," he says. What the project does is make it visible in product form: all the elements required to build a truly circular performance garment are production-ready now. The barrier is brand willingness to own the design conditions that circularity requires.

Why that willingness has been so scarce is a harder question. Among those working closest to the production system, the problem is less a shortage of technical capability and more a surrounding system that has not been organised to support change.

Cédric Vanhoeck, Chief Executive Officer of Resortecs, identifies the dominant constraint with some precision. "The biggest barrier to change is not a single factor but a combination, with the strongest being system inertia," he says. That inertia, as he describes it, operates across three interlocking dimensions. Manufacturing processes have been optimised for speed and cost, with reversibility an afterthought. Cost structures create a temporal mismatch, where circular value is realised downstream while the expenditure required to enable it is incurred upfront. And at the level of mindset, design remains largely disconnected from end-of-life realities—a disconnection that is cultural as much as organisational. "The biggest resistance is often habit, not capability," Vanhoeck says, "because technically, many of the required changes are incremental, not radical."

This matters because the circular design conversation has sometimes implied that the industry is waiting on breakthroughs that have not yet arrived. Vanhoeck's account points elsewhere. The technologies exist and have done for some time. The organisational architecture to deploy them coherently, and the economic logic to make deployment attractive, are what remain underdeveloped.

A significant part of that failure, he argues, stems from fragmentation within the industry itself. Product developers and factory floors operate in separate worlds, and the consequences of that separation compound at every stage of the design process. "Many product developers have never spent significant time in a factory setting," Vanhoeck says. "This 'silo-isation' means they often can't see the ripple effects of their design choices on total production efficiency." The result is that the value of circular technologies remains invisible to those making the decisions that would determine their uptake. Smart Stitch, he notes, is not only an end-of-life tool—it reduces defects, lowers substandard output, and limits overproduction. But because the industry is fragmented, those benefits do not register in a brand's cost calculations. "We aren't just fighting a lack of capability; we're fighting a lack of visibility across the value chain," he says.

The lever most likely to shift that dynamic, in Vanhoeck's assessment, is economic alignment. Circularity adoption accelerates when it becomes cost-neutral or advantageous—and stalls when framed purely as an ethical obligation. But economic alignment alone is insufficient. "Scale requires all three factors to evolve together: economic incentives to make it viable, infrastructure to make it possible, and mindset to make it desirable." The Helium Loop project demonstrates that the system can function. The next challenge is making circular design the default choice rather than the experimental one. "The real shift is not in how we recycle garments," Vanhoeck says, "but in how we design them to exist beyond their first life."

Even where brands accept responsibility and systems begin to align, the physical reality of garment construction presents its own set of obstacles. When a product cannot be separated into clean, single-material streams at end-of-life, the value embedded in its components cannot be preserved. Disassembly is the condition on which circular material flows depend—and the infrastructure to support it remains, across most of the industry, largely absent.

David Stover, Chief Executive Officer of Bureo, the company behind NetPlus, is clear about the stakes. Brands designing for recyclability, he argues, should prioritise monomaterials where possible and, where multiple materials are unavoidable, build in the means to separate them. "Most garment disassembly and textile recycling processes are challenged by the use of mixed materials," he says. NetPlus material has been incorporated into millions of products. Those products represent a substantial reservoir of recoverable resource, but the infrastructure required to recapture them remains underdeveloped, and design for disassembly has not kept pace with the scale of material already in circulation.

"The infrastructure is in its infancy, and design for disassembly is lagging," Stover says. "This limits the amount of material that can be captured." His conclusion is structural: the two systems—design and recovery infrastructure—must develop concurrently, each creating the conditions the other requires. Designers must build garments with end-of-life as a live constraint; suppliers must build the capacity to handle what those garments yield when they are returned. The Helium Loop project, Stover argues, makes that interdependency visible in a way that isolated material innovations cannot.

The technical demands of high-performance construction add a further layer of difficulty. Andy Laycock, Brand Director at Pertex, notes that membranes and coatings—the components that deliver water resistance in performance outerwear—have historically been selected purely on performance grounds, with no consideration given to how they might behave at end-of-life separation. "In the past, membrane selection has been primarily driven by performance metrics, without consideration for end-of-life separation," he says. That is beginning to change. Matching membrane polymers to the base fabric is becoming more prevalent, driving the development of new membrane technologies using materials that would not previously have been considered. Laycock sees room for cautious optimism. "With innovation in fabric engineering and material separation technologies, we can see a future where high-performance fabrics need not be a barrier to circularity," he says.

Stover's and Laycock's accounts arrive at the same underlying point: material value is contingent on the conditions of recovery. A recycled input that cannot be cleanly separated at end-of-life exits the material cycle—through downcycling or outright loss. Design for disassembly is a mechanism for preserving the value already invested in material innovation, and for ensuring that investment compounds across lifecycles rather than terminating at first use.

The Choice That Remains

The Helium Loop project has demonstrated that a performance garment can be built to come apart cleanly, that the materials to do so are available, and that the technical barriers are less formidable than the structural ones. What has been shown to be possible and what the industry is prepared to do as standard practice remain, for now, some distance apart.

The harder work ahead involves reorganising incentives, closing the distance between design and production, and building recovery infrastructure at a scale commensurate with the volume of material already in circulation. The industry now has a working proof of concept. Whether it chooses to treat that as a template or a curiosity is another matter entirely.