China's Planning 2030. UK Retail's Planning Black Friday
China busy taking action
Is anyone else getting increasingly frustrated by waiting for the UK to actually publish its Circular Economy Growth Plan.
Two years of "early 2026," "spring 2026," "soon" later, we've given up waiting. So instead, we thought we would share what's actually happening on the other side of the world, and what it says about where the UK have landed.
China is on its latest national circular economy plan. The UK doesn't have its first one yet.
China's been formalising this since 2005, when the State Council issued its first circular economy policy document. It's been written into national planning ever since, most recently as a dedicated Five-Year Plan for Circular Economy Development. The 14th one (2021-2025) set out to lift resource productivity by 20%, cut energy use per unit of GDP by 13.5%, and get the resource recycling industry to 5 trillion yuan (roughly £550 billion at today's exchange rate). By most accounts, they got close.
This summer, the National Development and Reform Commission quietly rolled out the follow-up: the 15th Five-Year Plan, running to 2030. The numbers step up again, resource productivity up another 16%, secondary material recycling hitting 510 million tonnes a year, the recycling industry itself targeted to be worth 8 trillion yuan (roughly £880 billion) by the end of the decade.
What's interesting here wasn't the figures though, it was the shift in what the plan is trying to do. China's own experts describe this one as a genuine move away from end-of-life recycling and toward something much more upstream: producers now have real obligations around how products are designed and what recycled content goes into them, not just what happens once you're done with them. There's a specific push on the waste nobody's really thinking about yet, retired EV batteries, decommissioned wind turbines, dead solar panels, before it becomes a genuine crisis. And secondary materials are being written into government procurement, so there's an actual guaranteed market for the stuff, not just a nice idea that brands can pursue if they fancy it.
It's industrial policy. Binding, funded, dated. Businesses there know exactly what target they're building towards and by when.
Meanwhile, here's the UK timeline
Late 2024: Circular Economy Taskforce set up, chaired by Andrew Morlet (ex-Ellen MacArthur Foundation), to design England's first ever circular economy framework
March 2025: Plan announced. Consultation promised for autumn 2025
September 2025: Cabinet reshuffle. Pushed to "early 2026"
November 2025: New Defra Secretary tells MPs she's now "looking at the New Year"
May 2026: Fifty-plus businesses, IKEA, Michelin, Veolia, SUEZ, the British Plastics Federation, the UK Fashion and Textile Association among them, write an open letter begging the government to just publish the thing
June 2026: Defra minister tells Parliament it's coming "soon." Still no date
Today: Still nothing
That's a year and a half of "soon." And somewhere in that queue, still waiting on its promised sector roadmap, is textiles and the UK fashion industry.
Why this actually matters for fashion specifically
While we've been waiting, China has already built extended producer responsibility, secondary-material traceability standards, and green procurement demand into a legally binding national plan, covering manufacturing broadly, which naturally includes the textile mills producing a huge share of the clothes on UK rails. Chinese manufacturers already know the direction of travel and have a decade-long head start to build towards it.
UK brands, on the other hand, are still designing collections, sourcing fabric and making sustainability claims without knowing what the actual domestic rulebook will require of them. No EPR scheme confirmed for textiles here. No target for recycled content. No clarity on what "circular" will legally need to mean once the greenwashing rules landing right now start hitting (you'll remember we covered those fines a few weeks back, they are not messing about).
The bit that worries us more than the delay itself. Is not just that the UK is behind on ambition, it's that the uncertainty is actively unhelpful. You can't build a fibre-to-fibre recycling supply chain, or invest in take-back infrastructure, or plan a resale range, against a plan that might land next month or might land next year. China's brands get a plan. The UK gets ambiguity.
So where does that leave us?
I don't think the UK lacks ambition on paper or indeed the many, many experts we speak to working in this space, the language from Defra ("end throwaway culture," "make reuse and repair the norm") isn't so different from what's coming out of Beijing. What's missing is delivery: a date, a target, and a market for the recycled materials our own industry is being asked to use, we need the support of regulation to build the business case.
Is it fair to compare a state-planned economy with two decades of circular economy planning behind it to a five-sector taskforce that's barely out of its first cycle? Maybe not entirely. But if China can turn "urban mining" and secondary materials into procurement policy while we're still waiting on a consultation, it's worth asking what exactly we're waiting for.
What do you think, is this a fair comparison, or apples and oranges? And if you're in the textiles industry, has the delay actually changed how you're planning, or has business simply carried on regardless?
If you are building tools for the future relying on the support of regulation to move the dial how long can you truly hold your nerve?
#CircularEconomy #SustainableFashion #TextilesPolicy #OurFashionFix