Five organisations — The Or Foundation, adidas, BESTSELLER, H&M Group and Inditex — have launched the Apparel Recovery Coalition (ARC), a two-year effort to build a producer responsibility blueprint for post-consumer textiles in the countries that receive them rather than the markets where they are first sold.

The scale of the material stream frames the problem. The European Environment Agency puts EU exports of used textiles at roughly 1.4 million metric tonnes per year, flowing mainly to countries in Africa and Asia. Producer responsibility systems, by contrast, remain largely anchored to primary sales markets. Post-consumer garments cross borders, and the costs of managing them land elsewhere.

ARC will spend the next two years building and testing a producer responsibility model that reflects that global flow of material, with support from Circle Economy. The coalition plans to engage brands, producer responsibility organisations, sorters, recyclers, policymakers and affected communities in developing the blueprint.

The launch took place at Kantamanto Market in Accra, Ghana — one of the world's largest hubs for second-hand clothing reuse, repair and upcycling. The Or Foundation estimates the market recirculates 25 million garments every month. That throughput makes Accra the testing ground for ARC's first demonstration project, which will examine how producer responsibility contributions can strengthen Ghana's existing circular textile ecosystem.

The Or Foundation will continue to organise and implement initiatives across Accra under the project, including infrastructure improvements at Kantamanto Market, environmental remediation and training programmes. A second demonstration project in at least one additional recipient country will follow, though the coalition has not yet named the jurisdiction.

Funding for the 2026–2027 period comes from voluntary contributions by adidas, BESTSELLER, H&M Group and Inditex, earmarked for circular economy activities in second-hand markets. The Or Foundation, which has campaigned on the impacts of textile exports to Ghana for years, anchors the coalition's on-the-ground presence.

The coalition frames the demonstration projects as evidence generators. Practical learnings from Accra and the second site are intended to inform brands, policymakers, producer responsibility organisations and other stakeholders working to strengthen post-consumer textile management systems worldwide.

The launch lands at a moment of regulatory flux. EU member states must establish separate collection systems for textiles by 1 January 2025 under the revised Waste Framework Directive, and the European Commission is developing harmonised extended producer responsibility (EPR) rules for textiles. Those rules will shape who pays for collection, sorting and recycling — and, critically, whether that obligation extends to exported post-consumer volumes.

ARC's blueprint offers one possible answer: producer responsibility contributions directed to recipient-country infrastructure rather than only to domestic collection. Whether regulators and PROs adopt that approach, and whether the voluntary contributions from the four brands scale into binding obligations, will determine whether the coalition's two-year experiment changes how the EU's 1.4 million tonnes of exported used clothing are managed — or remains a side channel alongside national EPR schemes.

The milestones to watch: the design of the Ghana demonstration project's contribution mechanism, the selection of the second recipient country, and the shape of the EU's textile EPR proposal as it moves through the legislative process.