A Washington State entrepreneur, Clarabeth Concaret, has founded Fabricure, borrowing from the ideas of carbon credits and plastic credits to try to give textile waste economic value through "Fabric Credits." According to UNICEF Innovation, fashion brands can purchase credits corresponding to the amount of textile waste they generate, with the funds channeled into textile recycling and regeneration projects. By November 2023, Fabricure was processing about 50 tonnes of textile waste per month in Ghana, Togo, Kenya, and Chile.

The real-world backdrop to this model is the complexity of textile waste processing. Once clothing is damaged, unsold, or discarded, it becomes difficult to reuse if it contains mixed fibers, dyes, and blended compositions. Research published in the Journal of Cleaner Production has examined the feasibility of using infrared spectroscopy and automated sorting to identify post-consumer textile waste, showing that advances in sorting technology are key to recycling waste fibers. Fabricure's approach is not to require every apparel company to build its own recycling facilities, but to layer a financial mechanism on top of existing recycling challenges, letting brands fund recycling projects in regions where discarded clothing has already piled up in large quantities.

By its definition, one fabric credit corresponds to 1 kilogram of textile waste that would otherwise be landfilled or incinerated. Brands can purchase credits based on the amount of waste they generate, complementing Fabricure's supply chain interventions. By 2023, the model began piloting outside the United States, with Ghana, Togo, Kenya, and Chile becoming countries receiving Fabricure support, where women-led recycling partners played an important role in implementation. The company also says three major brands have partnered with it to develop "neutral fabric" lines.

According to the Forest Valley Institute, Fabricure co-founders Payton McGriff and Concaret noticed that many recycling and upcycling projects, while able to reduce waste, rely heavily on grants or charitable funding, and the purpose of the credit model is precisely to open up commercial revenue streams for such projects. Currently, Fabricure's approach is to collect materials from landfills or other waste sites, sort them by fiber type and weight, and send them to recycling partners capable of handling different materials; recovered textiles can have multiple destinations rather than following a single recycling path.

Its partnership with Eco2librium in Kenya is one implementation case. Fabricure says a pilot program launched in autumn 2023 diverted 7.5 tonnes of textiles from Kenyan landfills while researching whether cellulose-based textile waste can be used as compost for agricultural soil, thereby linking textile recycling to the environmental problem of soil degradation.

However, paying for waste recycling does not by itself mean the fashion industry has achieved circularity. Fabricure also acknowledges that reducing fabric use, reducing clothing production, and reducing overall consumption should come first; recycling only handles the waste that remains, and the credit mechanism acts precisely on this downstream segment. As governments and consumers keep pressing brands to take responsibility for the waste they generate, this approach of pricing textile recycling and having brands fund recycling projects may gain more attention. But credits are not a panacea: if brands merely use them to offset the waste from increased production, they may instead perpetuate existing consumption patterns; their value is fuller only when the funds genuinely help textiles that would otherwise be discarded to be recycled, regenerated, and reused. The standard for measuring this system is not just how much waste is recycled, but whether it serves the larger goal of "producing less and discarding less."