Circular Design Principles in Garment Construction: A Literature Review of Seams, Closures, and Disassembly Strategies for Textile Recycling

Abstract

The global apparel industry generates textile waste at a rate that current recycling infrastructure cannot absorb, with well under a tenth of discarded clothing recovered into new textile products. A growing body of research identifies garment construction — specifically seams technology, closures and trims, and material-combination strategy — as a primary determinant of whether a garment can be mechanically or chemically recycled at end-of-life, independent of the fibres it is made from. This paper presents a narrative literature review synthesizing peer-reviewed and institutional research on circular design principles applied to garment seams, closures, and disassembly. Three constructs are examined: (1) Design for Disassembly (DfD) as a strategy for enabling material separation; (2) seam and stitch technologies, including thermally and microwave-triggered disassembly threads; and (3) closures and trims as recyclability bottlenecks. The review situates construction-level design choices within the broader circular economy literature and emerging European Union regulatory drivers, including the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation and textile Extended Producer Responsibility schemes. Findings indicate that mono-material construction, modular and detachable components, and engineered disassembly-triggered stitching show the greatest technical promise, but adoption remains constrained by production cost, absent standardization, and a persistent disconnect between design practice and recycling infrastructure capability. The paper concludes with a synthesis framework for construction-level circular design and identifies gaps warranting further empirical research, particularly the need to quantify disassembly-time and recyclate-quality trade-offs across garment categories.

Keywords: circular economy; design for disassembly; garment construction; seam engineering; closures and trims; textile-to-textile recycling; sustainable fashion; extended producer responsibility.