Europe’s protective clothing and performance textile industries stand at a critical inflection point. From workwear and healthcare garments to military and civil-defence apparel, the sector is expanding rapidly under the twin pressures of heightened geopolitical uncertainty and tightening sustainability expectations.
Yet amid these shifting priorities, one structural imbalance remains. While the United States enforces domestic sourcing through the Berry Amendment, Europe continues to expose its own protective textiles base to global competition without comparable protection.
High Stakes
The stakes are unusually high. Global revenues for protective textiles are valued at around €13.5 billion ($14.5 billion) in 2025, according to Vienna, Austria-based analyst MP Corporate Finance, and are projected to reach €20.4 billion ($21.8 billion) by 2034 – a steady five percent annual growth trajectory.
Industrial clothing and workwear account for 52% of the 2025 figure, followed by healthcare and medical garments at 20%, emergency response at 15%, and military and defence at 10%. The remaining 5% covers specialist niches such as pilot anti-gravity suits, motorsports gear, and anti-static clothing.
While China dominates on a global scale, Europe remains a central force within this market. Six of the world’s ten largest exporters are European, and their collective reputation for safety, performance, and quality has long underpinned the continent’s industrial credibility. What Europe lacks, however, is the policy coherence to bind its defence ambitions, sustainability agenda, and manufacturing capacity into a single strategic framework.
Fragmented Strength
In general, Europe’s wider textile industry is structurally more fragmented than that of the United States and is also more reliant on imports.
Again, according to MP Corporate Finance, the European Union’s textile sector market (excluding clothing) was worth €66.4 billion ($71 billion) in 2023, contributed to by some 64,000 companies with an average headcount of just 7.5 employees per company. This puts turnover per company at an average €1.03 million ($1.1 million). EU personal protective equipment (PPE) imports are around 65%.
By contrast, in 2023 the overall U.S. textile sector was worth €38.6 billion ($41.3 billion), spread across just 8,000 companies and employing on average 20 people each, with turnover per company of around €4.9 million ($5.2 million). U.S. PPE imports are still around 50%, but US specialists in protective clothing also have closer links to defence procurement and a more consolidated and responsive supply base, capable of scaling production under a unified sourcing mandate.
In Europe procurement is governed less by strategic autonomy than by open-market principles. The EU’s preference for competitive tendering and cross-border sourcing has driven efficiency but at the cost of resilience. The pandemic exposed those vulnerabilities brutally, as supply chains for PPE buckled under pressure. In defence and civil protection, that dependence on imported intermediates is now seen as untenable.
Camouflage Over Climate
Against the backdrop of rising defence budgets and a renewed emphasis on security, the political climate is shifting. Brussels has softened several environmental milestones, pausing parts of its Green Deal agenda in recognition of the urgent need to rebuild manufacturing capacity. Proposals to delay extended producer responsibility (EPR) and relax interim climate targets have granted industry a rare period of regulatory breathing space. But this is only a tactical pause. The longer-term direction of travel – towards circularity, traceability, and chemical stewardship – remains unchanged.
For protective textile manufacturers, this creates both opportunity and danger. The current rearmament cycle will result in a once-in-a-generation demand surge, as Europe re-equips its armed forces and emergency services. Yet the companies best placed to benefit will be those capable of reconciling short-term procurement readiness with long-term sustainability. In other words, the next decade will favour not the cheapest producers, but the most adaptable.
The Circular Advantage
One of Europe’s quiet strengths lies in the circular potential of its workwear and protective clothing systems. Unlike fashion, these garments circulate in closed, trackable loops through industrial laundries, where durability and accountability are built into the business model. Each garment can – in theory – be monitored through its service life, collected at end-of-use and channelled back into fibre-to-fibre recycling streams.
Wear Circular
This closed-loop dynamic is already producing tangible results. The Wear Circular alliance, led by Klopman in Italy and TDV Industries and 4F in France, has established Europe’s first large-scale post-consumer recycling facility for workwear. Located in Laval, France, Renaissance Textile currently processes around 9,000 tons of used garments each year and aims to expand to 12,000 tons by 2026 – enough to supply material for roughly 42 million new items annually.
Initially limited to white and unbleached fabrics, the process has now been extended to colored textiles, overcoming one of the key barriers to scaling mechanical recycling. Around 85% of usable fibre is reclaimed from each kilogram of clothing collected, and research is ongoing to raise the recycled content in yarns from 15% to 30%. Such progress demonstrates that circularity and performance are no longer opposing goals but complementary imperatives.
Rental laundries, long a staple of the European workwear market, are central to this model. With fabrics designed to withstand 50 to 100 industrial wash cycles, the economics of rental depend on durability, repairability, and controlled logistics. The laundries themselves are ideally placed to manage collection, sorting, and end-of-life recovery. The challenge, as Klopman’s marketing manager Thomas Sieber has observed, lies in maintaining that discipline at the point of disposal. Incentives for careful sorting and feedstock preparation will be crucial if recycling is to reach an industrial scale.
Procurement to Policy
If circularity offers Europe a technological and environmental edge, policy alignment remains the missing link. The USA has long recognized the strategic role of textiles in national security. Since 1941, the Berry Amendment has required that all uniforms, body armor, and related textile equipment purchased by the Department of Defense be made domestically – from raw materials to finished products. The rule has recently been tightened further under the Fiscal Year 2026 National Defense Authorization Act, closing a loophole that had permitted overseas sourcing for small contracts.
The result is a resilient, vertically integrated domestic supply chain that supports innovation, safeguards jobs, and ensures rapid response capacity. It is, in effect, an industrial policy by stealth – one that aligns procurement with manufacturing and security objectives. Europe has no equivalent mechanism. Despite its commitment to re-industrialization and strategic autonomy, its procurement frameworks remain guided by competition law rather than industrial logic. Defence and civil-protection contracts frequently go to the lowest bidder, often outside the EU, diluting both economic and strategic returns.
A European Opportunity
There are signs that attitudes in Brussels are beginning to evolve. In speeches earlier this year, Aurel Ciobanu-Dordea, the European Commission’s director for circular economy, suggested that mandatory EU-based procurement for certain textile categories could be introduced as part of the bloc’s wider sustainability reforms. Simplifying bureaucracy around recycling schemes and linking Green Deal objectives with local value creation are under active discussion. The logic is compelling – if Europe is to meet its own circularity targets, it must also guarantee a market for recycled materials.
A European equivalent of the Berry Amendment would not need to mirror the American model exactly. It could, for instance, apply to defined strategic sectors – defence, healthcare, emergency services, and critical infrastructure – where traceability, rapid availability, and high performance are paramount. It could integrate sustainability criteria directly into procurement rules, rewarding suppliers who combine domestic production with circular innovation. And it could support Europe’s goal of open strategic autonomy by favoring sourcing within the EU and trusted allies, rather than imposing rigid protectionism.
Resilience
Such an approach would transform Europe’s protective textiles sector from a fragmented supplier base into a coordinated industrial ecosystem. It would strengthen resilience against global shocks, accelerate the commercialisation of recycling technologies, and anchor environmental ambition within a robust economic framework. The Green Deal’s credibility, after all, depends not only on regulation but on the capacity to manufacture sustainably at scale.
The coming decade presents a rare alignment of opportunity, with rising defence expenditure, revived industrial policy, and a temporary easing of environmental deadlines. If Europe acts decisively, it can convert this window into a lasting competitive advantage. The path forward is clear – build regional supply capacity, anchor recycling within procurement, and legislate for the long term.
In doing so, Europe could achieve what the United States secured eight decades ago – an industry that is not only globally competitive but strategically indispensable.
