Recycled tights: inside Life Re-Tights, the Golden Lady and Calzedonia project

A pair of tights weighs a few grams and often lives for a few weeks: one fingernail or the corner of a chair and it is in the bin. Multiply that across a European market that FashionNetwork put at around 402 million pairs in 2024 and you have a waste problem nobody sees and everybody contributes to. Life Re-Tights, the EU-funded project led by Golden Lady Company with Calzedonia, goes after it where it hurts most: pulling nylon apart from elastane so that laddered tights can become new ones. The project formally ends on 30 November 2026. Here is what it promises, what it has done, and what is still unclear.

The problem: 85% nylon, 15% elastane

A pair of tights is a small feat of engineering and, for exactly that reason, a recycler's nightmare. The Italian environment ministry's March 2025 profile of the project is blunt: tights are 85% polyamide and 15% elastomer, and blended-fibre fabrics are even harder to recycle because they need technology that does not compromise performance. Mechanical recycling, shredding and re-spinning, does not work here. The two fibres are extremely fine and knitted together precisely to deliver sheerness and stretch. It takes chemistry, and that is exactly the bet Life Re-Tights is making.

The upshot is that worn hosiery has had few destinations other than landfill or incineration. Swedish Stockings, which has worked on the issue for years, states on its website that traditional nylon tights "are made from synthetic fibers that do not decompose or can be recycled into new tights."

How Life Re-Tights works

In the European Commission's LIFE programme database, the project's full name is a mouthful: Advanced post-consumer polyamide fibres REcycling for an innovative circular production of TIGHTS. Reference LIFE22-ENV-IT-LIFE-RE-TIGHTS, running from 1 December 2023 to 30 November 2026, with a budget of €3,764,765, of which €2,258,859, or 60%, comes from the EU.

The process, set out in the ministry's project sheet, starts with in-store collection. The tights are scanned to identify their fibres, then fed into a purpose-built machine that treats 50 kg at a time and separates the fibres in an hour using a solvent: 5 kg for every kilo of product, recovered and reused, with around 100 g lost to evaporation per cycle. The recovered polyamide is spun into new yarn that the project describes as equivalent to virgin.

The consortium splits the work like this:

• Golden Lady Company, the coordinator, handles separation and recycling and produces the new yarn;
• Calzedonia provides its stores for collection and handles knitting;
• Union developed the separation plant with Golden Lady;
• Asendia Italy runs collection logistics;
• Ytres, in Croatia, cleans and dyes the finished tights.

The LIFE database actually lists a wider group, adding Firbimatic, S.M. Group, F.M.B. Fabbrica Macchine Bologna and Oniverse Holding, Calzedonia's parent company.

The numbers, and a typo worth 4,500 shops

The official targets are specific: collect up to 150,000 pairs of worn tights; produce 120,000 pairs with up to 100% recycled material; cut 18.4 tonnes of CO2 equivalent, and reduce energy use by 57% and water use by 47% compared with standard production. Italian outlet Greenplanner added, in April 2025, the recovery of 80% by weight of the collected polyamide, with 3,600 kg of polyamide and 480 kg of polyurethane regenerated. The ministry sheet, confusingly, mentions 100,000 pairs of "Re-Tights": a gap the project has not publicly explained.

Then there is the question of stores. A case study by Tinexta Innovation Hub cites 5,000 participating stores in Italy; Greenplanner says 500. A look at Tinexta's page settles it: every counter carries a stray trailing zero, from "150K0" pairs to "80%0". The correct figure is 500 stores in Italy. The larger number may echo the size of the whole Oniverse group, which trade press reported at more than 5,500 shops across Calzedonia, Intimissimi, Tezenis and its other brands at the end of 2025. It has nothing to do with tights collection.

From Ecomondo to Europe, then silence

The project was unveiled at Ecomondo in Rimini in November 2024. At the end of September 2025 it scaled up: FashionNetwork reported a Europe-wide roll-out, branded "ReFilés" in France, with collection in Calzedonia stores (around 230 in France) and machines that can each recycle "up to 1.6 million pairs of tights per year". Milano Finanza quoted the wider ambition: "Re-tights aims to create a reproducible and sustainable model that could be applied to other complex textile products". In November 2025 L'Officiel France called it a pioneering European project turning used tights into high-quality new textile fibre.

Since then, silence. As of 28 September 2026 we have found no public update on collection results, the plant, or recycled tights going on sale. The ministry sheet names the post-project goal as building Europe's first industrial plant for the chemical recycling and regeneration of tights. With the project ending in November, that is where the answers should come from.

Why Europe is rewriting the rules

The timing is no accident. On 30 March 2022 the Commission adopted the EU Strategy for Sustainable and Circular Textiles, with a 2030 vision in which "all textile products placed on the EU market are durable, repairable, recyclable, and, to a great extent, made of recycled fibres". The starting point is grim: by the Commission's count, 5 million tonnes of clothing are discarded in the EU every year, around 12 kg per person.

Since then the rules have got teeth:

• From 2025, member states must have separate collection systems for used textiles, as the European Environment Agency notes.
• Since 16 October 2025, the revised Waste Framework Directive (Directive (EU) 2025/1892) has been in force: each country has 30 months to set up extended producer responsibility schemes for textiles and footwear, under which the companies selling the products pay for collection, sorting and recycling.
• Since 19 July 2026, large companies may no longer destroy unsold clothes, accessories and footwear; medium-sized companies follow in 2030.

For an industry in which tights-to-tights recycling barely exists, rules like these turn a pilot project into a competitive edge.

Beyond Calzedonia, and what you can do

Others are trying different routes. Swedish Stockings' Recycling Club takes nylon tights of "any brand, any condition", currently from within the EU only, in exchange for 20% off your next purchase; the collected material has been turned into a series of tables with designer Gustaf Westman. It is creative reuse rather than closed-loop recycling, but it proves the appetite is there, and that customers will make the effort of posting back a pair of tights.

In the meantime, a few things that help:

• Ask in store whether your branch takes part: not all do.
• Bring them clean, laddered or holed is fine: the value is in the fibre.
• Read the label: tights with recycled yarn state the percentage of regenerated material.
• Make every pair last: hand wash or use a laundry bag, skip the tumble dryer, and choose a higher denier for daily wear.

The most sustainable pair of tights is still the one that ladders last. But if Life Re-Tights delivers, the next best will be the pair that goes back to the shop broken and comes out new.