COMPANY NAME Proudd
COUNTRY Belgium
SECTOR Textiles (professional clothing / workwear)
CIRCULAR BUSINESS MODEL Circular design; Product as a Service (Circularity-as-a-Service); Product life extension; Recovery and recycling
CHALLENGE
It is commonly agreed that the clothing industry belongs to the top 10 least environmentally friendly industries. In addition, the vast majority of global textile and garment exports are produced in developing countries, where poor working conditions and labour rights violations remain a concern.
Clothes are generally not designed to be recycled. Mixed materials and construction make fibre-to-fibre recycling difficult, so even the garments that are collected are largely downcycled into lower-value products rather than turned back into new clothing.
Professional clothing is no stranger to this trend: 80% of professional clothing reaches landfill within 18 months of purchase.
When it comes to professional clothing, the problem is compounded. Logos and corporate identity limit any reuse of garments beyond the organisation they were made for, and the commercial structure works against circularity: workwear is bought as a low-cost consumable, distributed across large numbers of employees and then effectively lost from view. Without knowing how many garments are in circulation, where they are or how long they last, there is nothing to organise a take-back around, no business case for repair, and no reliable basis for the environmental figures companies are increasingly asked to publish.
That gap is now a compliance gap as well. Separate collection of textile waste has been mandatory across the EU since January 2025, ecodesign and digital product passport requirements for textiles are being phased in under the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation, and corporate sustainability reporting is shifting from estimates towards verifiable, product-level evidence. Buyers of professional clothing therefore need two things at once: garments that can genuinely be recycled, and proof of what happened to each one.
Proudd was founded in 2023 to close that gap — to make circular professional clothing an operational, measurable service rather than a product claim.
SOLUTION
Proudd is a Belgian company supplying professional workwear as a circular service. Rather than selling garments that end their life as waste, it designs, produces, tracks, collects and recycles them under a single model: Circularity-as-a-Service (CaaS).
Design and produce
Garments are made from recycled cotton and recycled polyester and engineered to be more than 95% recyclable without compromising on quality. Production is kept entirely in Europe, with manufacturing in Portugal on short, traceable supply chains. A stock collection — T-shirt, polo, sweater and shirt — is available with low minimum order quantities, alongside a custom collection from 500 pieces in which clients keep their own brand identity and technical specifications while retaining the same circular DNA.
Track and trace
Every garment carries a unique QR-coded digital product passport recording materials, production origin, care instructions and end-of-life guidance, with RFID scanning as an additional option for bulk lifecycle capture. The passports feed a multi-tenant platform on which each client manages its own fleet, users, lifecycle stages and reporting. Alongside it, a central administration console gives Proudd oversight of inventory, garment health and environmental metrics.
Extend, collect and recycle
Periodic garment health checks keep items in service as long as they remain usable, and a repair stage can be added to any garment’s lifecycle. Each client is onboarded with a tailor-made return process; once enough garments have been collected, Proudd organises pick-up and routes them to specialist European partners for textile-to-textile recycling rather than downcycling.
Verify
Proudd is pursuing Global Recycled Standard (GRS) certification across its full chain of custody, so that its recycled-content and traceability claims are independently verifiable rather than self-declared.
CIRCULAR ECONOMY STRATEGIES/BUSINESS MODEL IMPLEMENTED
Circular design
Garments are designed for recyclability from the outset, using recycled cotton and recycled polyester. The colour range is deliberately restricted to black, navy and white so that returned garments can be recycled colour-to-colour without re-dyeing; other colours are offered only where a client commits to reordering garments made from its own returned waste.
Circularity as a Service
Clients do not buy a disposable product. Proudd contracts for the garment and its lifecycle — supply, traceability, health monitoring, collection and recycling — as one continuous service, shifting workwear from a purchasing line into a managed material flow.
Product life extension
Platform-driven health checks keep garments in use until they are genuinely no longer usable, and a repair stage can be added dynamically to a garment’s lifecycle. A dedicated repair service for larger clients is under development with a socially inclusive workplace partner.
Recovery and recycling
Returned garments are dismantled, sorted and recycled fibre-to-fibre by specialist partners; the residual fraction is downcycled rather than landfilled, and process dust is converted into cotton paper that Proudd intends to use for its own packaging.
Digital enablement
The digital product passport is the backbone of the model. It is what allows materials, usage and end-of-life status to be tracked per garment and per client at scale, turning circularity from a one-off claim into a monitorable, repeatable and auditable service.
Supply-chain circularity
Proudd extends verifiable circular practice upstream by working with its suppliers through their own GRS certification, strengthening the wider European recycled-textile ecosystem it depends on.
Social innovation
A partnership with a socially inclusive workplace explores how supported employment can carry the distribution, end-of-life collection and repair legs of the loop.
IMPACT
Environmental impact
• Garments engineered to be more than 95% recyclable, with a validated recycling route that recovers over 90% of the recycled-cotton / recycled-polyester blend fibre-to-fibre; the residual fraction is downcycled and process dust is converted into cotton paper rather than sent to landfill.
• Per-garment passport data — materials, origin, care and end-of-life guidance — with CO₂, water consumption and waste figures bound to verified queries rather than estimates, making client sustainability reporting auditable instead of self-declared.
• 100% European production on short supply chains, on a recycled-fibre base, with a colour palette restricted specifically to protect recyclability.
• A product-specific life-cycle assessment has been commissioned to quantify per-garment environmental gains on a verified basis.
Social impact
• Manufacturing kept in Europe with fair wages and responsible production conditions.
• Joint communication campaigns with client organisations raise employee and public awareness of the textile industry’s impact, turning individual supply decisions into shared advocacy. •
A partnership was opened with a socially inclusive workplace to embed supported employment into distribution, end-of-life collection, and repair.
KEY TAKEAWAY
Sustainability efforts matter, but only circular models make them impactful. A recycled or recyclable garment changes the material; it doesn’t change the end. What closes the loop is knowing where every individual garment is — that is what makes take-back organisable, product life measurable, and environmental claims auditable rather than self-declared. Traceability, not material choice alone, is what turns a circular product into a circular service.
A second lesson is that verification is a supply-chain exercise, not a company-level one. Certification becomes achievable only once every tier of the chain of custody has been reviewed and, where necessary, supported in closing its own gap—meaning circularity is built with suppliers and clients together, not declared alone.