Strategic Allocation of Post-Consumer Textiles across Reuse, Recycling and Value Recovery Pathways

Post-consumer textiles vary considerably in physical condition, fiber composition, remaining product life, recoverable material quality, processing requirements, transportation burden, resale potential, and recycling compatibility. As a result, directing all discarded apparel toward a single recovery strategy may cause unnecessary loss of economic and material value. Effective circular textile management requires systematic decisions regarding whether recovered garments should be reused, repaired, resold, refurbished, repurposed, recycled into fibers, or directed toward other end-of-life pathways. This study develops a strategic allocation framework for directing heterogeneous post-consumer textiles toward circular pathways that maximize value retention while reducing waste. The proposed framework evaluates textile recovery alternatives according to product condition, material composition, remaining useful life, resale demand, repair requirements, recycling yield, processing cost, transportation requirements, recovered-material value, environmental burden, and available recovery capacity. Rather than prioritizing recycling automatically, the framework emphasizes preservation of the highest feasible level of product or material value. A series of simulated textile-recovery networks was developed to represent variations in collection volume, textile quality, fiber mixtures, recovery capacity, transportation distance, resale demand, recycling technology availability, and recovered-material markets. Alternative allocation strategies were evaluated under normal operating conditions as well as scenarios involving sudden collection increases, declining secondary-market demand, recycling-capacity limitations, and changes in processing costs. Performance was assessed through textile diversion from disposal, product reuse rate, material recovery rate, retained economic value, processing requirements, recovery cost, recycling yield, pathway utilization, and overall circularity performance. Sensitivity analysis identifies the conditions under which reuse, repair, resale, repurposing, or recycling becomes the preferred pathway. The framework was demonstrated using simulated material flows and publicly available textile-waste and apparel information, without requiring confidential operational data. The resulting framework is intended to provide a reproducible approach for evaluating post-consumer textile pathways and to support the development of more resource-efficient and resilient circular apparel supply chains.