Embedded garment features constrain textile waste sorting and fibre-to-fibre recycling

Textile waste management increasingly depends on sorting discarded garments into suitable reuse, resale, and recycling routes. Yet recyclability assessments often focus on fibre composition while overlooking garment-level design features that may complicate sorting, pre-processing, and preparation of recycling-compatible feedstock. Here we develop a garment-level screening framework to identify such disruptor indicators from retailer web data and apply it to 47,522 garment variants from H&M and Uniqlo in the United Kingdom and Australia. We find that these features are embedded in ordinary garment construction, not limited to visible hardware or exceptional decorative features. Overall, 55.1% of variants exhibited at least one core disruptor indicator. Retained-barrier indicators, including linings, multilayers, trims, coatings, and secondary components, were more prevalent than removable-hardware indicators, affecting 44.9% and 27.2% of variants. Among variants with at least one hardware indicator, 93.4% lacked material-specific information. These findings show that fibre composition alone is insufficient for assessing textile waste processability, and that component-level information on hardware, linings, coatings, trims, and secondary materials is needed to support sorting, pre-processing, and recycling-feedstock preparation.