#Recycling / Circular Economy

2022-05-05

Recover™ partners with Sysav to scale post-consumer waste recycling ambitions

Leading recycled cotton fiber producer, Recover™, has announced a new partnership agreement with textile sorting company, Sysav, in an effort to tackle the growing problem of textile waste and accelerate circularity in the textiles industry.

As part of the agreement, Sysav will start to supply post-consumer waste (PCW), made up of 95% cotton, to Recover™ in 2022, with increasingly larger volumes expected in the following years. It comes as a result of a growing relationship between the two companies that began in 2020, and is the next step in the development of high-quality apparel and other textile products using Recover™ recycled fibers from post-consumer waste (PCW).

The agreement forms part of Recover’s strategy to invest in long-term purchasing contracts worldwide to lockup waste supply and will help to scale its post-consumer waste recycling. The company has set the ambitious target of having PCW represent more than 40 percent of its inputs by 2025, which would amount to ±85.000 tons of used garments.

Helene Smits, Chief Sustainability Officer at Recover™, said “Recycling post-consumer garments at scale and with high quality is the holy grail and THE challenge to solve if we want to move to a circular textiles industry and sorting post-consumer textiles on composition and color at scale is an essential enabler to achieve that. It has been a pleasure working together with Sysav in the past year to help optimize their technology and processes based on our needs and we are happy to now take the first step in achieving the ambitious targets Recover™ has set for PCW recycling.”

Sysav’s Siptex is the world's first large-scale facility able to automatically sort textiles on composition and color whilst providing a quality-assured product.

Its solution is a key missing link in the textile value chain between collection and high-quality textile recycling, helping to overcome the challenge that the variation and quality differences of post-consumer waste poses compared with homogenous virgin raw material. By partnering together, the two companies aim to take a step closer to closing the loop on fashion, whilst upholding the highest quality and sustainability standards.

Stefan Poldrugac, Business Developer at Sysav commented, “With the ReFab® products we are in the process to set a new industry standard for postconsumer textiles. The partnership with high quality recycler Recover™ is a milestone in this endeavor. Our mutual exchange of technical expertise proves that close collaborations throughout the textile value chain is key in turning the textile waste problem into circular flows of sustainable raw material.”