Design and Development of a New Circularity Potential Index Metrics for the Textile Industry: The Case of OVS SpA

Globally, the textile industry is one of the most resource-intensive sectors, and it is mostly characterized by a linear economy where the majority of garments ends up in landfill or incineration at the end of its life. OVS S.p.A., one of Italian fashion retailers, has developed Eco Valore, which allows customers to discover how much water is used in the manufacturing process, the carbon footprint, and the circularity score at the product level of each garment sold on its e-commerce site. The method to measure circularity was developed in 2019 with a scoring tool called CPIT (Circular Potential Index for Textile), which assigns a 1-10 score to quantify the circularity of a product. As the model was developed based on earlier methodological assumptions from a general Product Environmental Footprint (PEF) and a new Product Environmental Footprint Category Rules (PEFCR) for apparel and footwear was published in 2025, several methodological gaps and room for improvements have been identified and a new method for CPIT is developed. Key methodological changes include replacing the deterministic end-of-life assumption with a probabilistic allocation to recycling (R2), energy recovery (R3), and disposal (RD) pathways, incorporates recycling quality factors, replaces penalty factors with PEFCR-based disruptor criteria, and modification of the existing normalization anchors. The new method is applied to OVS database to evaluate its practical implementation and compare the results with the previous methodology.