Waste is an inevitable corporate byproduct that spans industry and geographic boundaries. This externality contributes substantially to greenhouse gas emissions while simultaneously highlighting the glaring disparity of undernourished individuals worldwide. In relation, the textiles industry is regularly criticized for poor working conditions, promoting wasteful consumption, and utilizing toxic and virgin materials. Additionally, water use, carbon emissions, and pollution from manufacturing textiles causes irreparable environmental degradation, stress, and damage. These two industries are globally relevant and substantial. By connecting them through a circular economy, their negative dimensions transform into positive markets and opportunities. Waste is an abundant, renewable resource that can be efficiently exploited by the textiles industry to produce sustainable, profitable outcomes. Promoting the valorization of waste through textiles poses a creative execution of resource reclamation in a circular economy. We examine a dominant international business foundation, resource-based theory, to illustrate a shifting landscape that challenges traditional frameworks. We explore waste as a feedstock in the context of textiles to demonstrate how circularly leveraging waste as a resource is both important and necessary to address wicked problems for economic, environmental, and societal advancements.