A hotel group changes its name. Somewhere in a back office, a decision is being made about four thousand garments that now carry the wrong logo. Almost always the decision is destruction: baled, shredded, invoiced as a disposal line. Front of house uniform, aprons, jackets, all of it perfectly wearable, all of it gone in an afternoon.
The reason is not laziness. It is brand security. Nobody wants a stranger walking into their building wearing their logo and a plausible expression. So the cloth is destroyed in order to destroy the identity, which is a sensible instinct solving the wrong half of the problem.
I have sat in that meeting. The waste question and the security question are usually being asked by two different departments who are not in the room at the same time, and destruction is what happens when neither of them owns the outcome. It is the option nobody can be criticised for. Nothing leaks, nothing embarrasses anyone, and the cost appears as a single line on a facilities invoice that gets read once. Reuse, by contrast, needs a named person willing to make a judgement and stand behind it.
Workwear is where circularity is easiest, which is what makes this awkward
Consumer clothing is genuinely hard to bring back. It is bought by millions of individuals who have no relationship with the maker. Workwear is the opposite in every respect. It is specified centrally, ordered in bulk, made to one construction, worn by a known population, and it physically returns to the employer at the end of a contract or a rebrand. Every condition that makes a take-back scheme difficult is absent.
The sector has noticed. Carhartt has been expanding its reworked and trade-in programme through 2025 and 2026, and workwear circularity was a headline theme at the Textiles Recycling Expo in Brussels this June rather than a side room with twelve chairs. When professional clothing bodies programme the main stage around end of life, the argument has been won in principle. It is the contracts that have not caught up.
Retire the identity, not the garment
This is where the shredder is answering the wrong question. If every garment carries a permanent identity of its own, branded status becomes a property of a record rather than a property of the cloth. Mark a batch decommissioned and it stops being a valid staff uniform the moment anybody scans it, regardless of what it still looks like.
That frees the physical garment to go somewhere useful, and the same record decides where. Good condition and still in specification: back into stock. Good condition but out of brand: de-badged and resold, or given to a training programme. Damaged: repaired, if the repair history says it is worth repairing. Beyond repair: fibre recovery, with the composition attached, which is the only form in which a recycler will accept it.
Write the loop into the tender, not into the skip
The moment to design a return route is the day the uniform is specified, and it costs close to nothing then. Three clauses do most of the work. One: the supplier accepts return of decommissioned garments and reports what happened to them, by weight and by route. Two: every garment carries a scannable identity that survives industrial laundering. Three: composition is declared per production run, including thread and interfacing, so that the final step is possible at all.
Put those in at tender and end of life becomes somebody's defined obligation. Leave them out and it becomes a disposal invoice in five years, at a price nobody modelled.
What this has to do with a school
More than it appears. A school uniform is workwear. It is centrally specified, bought in bulk, worn by a known population, and it comes back, outgrown rather than rebranded. Schools have been running an accidental version of corporate uniform procurement for a century, without any of the take-back thinking that corporate procurement is now being pushed into. The advantage is that a school does not need a rebrand to trigger the loop. It gets one every July, when several hundred children stop fitting their clothes on roughly the same weekend.
The garment does not need to die because the logo did. It only needs to stop being allowed to speak for you.