Copenhagen's Global Fashion Summit brought together over 1,200 leaders from across the global fashion and textile industry for two days of dialogue on the industry's sustainability transition. The Reverse Resources team attended as exhibitors and speakers, presenting findings from our global waste mapping programmes and sharing data on the growing gap between brands' circular commitments and the traceability infrastructure needed to deliver them.
The headline event of the Summit was the release of the Global Fashion Agenda's annual Monitor report — the most comprehensive annual benchmarking of the fashion industry's progress against collective sustainability targets. The 2022 edition delivered a sobering verdict: despite strong commitments from major brands on recycled content and circularity, actual progress against measurable targets remains well behind the pace required.
The Monitor confirmed what our field data has shown for years: ambitions are real, but the enabling infrastructure — particularly around data, traceability, and certified waste sourcing — is critically underdeveloped. Brands cannot meet their recycled content targets without reliable access to certified, traceable recycled material. That supply does not yet exist at the required scale.
Several productive conversations emerged from the Summit around pre-competitive collaboration. A growing number of brands are recognising that competing on circularity metrics is counterproductive when the fundamental systems — shared traceability protocols, common waste quality standards, connected digital platforms — need to be built collectively. The willingness to invest in pre-competitive infrastructure is measurably higher today than at any previous Summit.
For the Reverse Resources team, the Summit reaffirmed the centrality of our platform in solving the industry's data and traceability gap. Demand from both brands and recyclers for our waste flow documentation tools has accelerated significantly in the six months since Copenhagen, reflecting the practical urgency the Monitor report articulated so clearly.