ABSTRACT
Circular economy (CE) models are driving the next restructuring of global textile production and secondary markets, but their socio-political configurations are largely untested. New textile recycling technologies have the potential to redirect material resource flows, disrupt global secondary markets and reconfigure the waste hierarchy. Mainstream CE modelling tends to include people simply as product users in a system of material flows governed by large brands. However, anthropological research into collaborations of small-scale urban designer-producers show how they are using CE principles to prototype new regional cloth economies that aim to reproduce the types of societies they wish to live in.
