#Recycling / Circular Economy
Infinited Fiber Company and SOEX sign agreement on textile waste feedstock for Infinited Fiber´s Flagship factory
One of Infinited Fiber´s key suppliers and a major player in the recycling market, SOEX is well positioned to provide the Flagship factory with an annual supply of up to 5000 tons of post-consumer textile waste. Infinited Fiber´s patented technology turns cotton-rich textile waste into high-quality, circular textile fiber Infinna™ for world´s leading apparel brands.
SOEX collects post-consumer textile waste mainly from Germany through municipal and commercial street collection, as well as the I:CO Take-Back System that enables fashion houses and retailers collect pre-loved clothing back from their customers in their stores or online. For used textiles unfit to for second hand sale, SOEX has a groundbreaking, fully automated sorting for recycling set-up, where artificial intelligence recognizes individual garments and sorts them by materials or colors.
“We are not only building a factory, but an ecosystem, and SOEX and its team matches our passion for advancing circularity in the textile industry through cutting-edge technology. This contract with SOEX is another great advancement in building the partner infrastructure for our flagship factory. This collaboration will also bring our brand customers new opportunities to loop textile waste from their supply chains into Infinna™´s raw material“, says Jari Ekblad, Chief Supply Chain Officer at Infinited Fiber Company.
“SOEX is a promoter of secondary raw material value streams and sustainability solutions. Together with Infinited Fiber we share the same vision and values for circular infrastructure for textile industry”, says Walter J. Thomsen, CEO at SOEX.
Infinited Fiber Company transforms textile waste otherwise destined to landfills or inceneration into a versatile, premium textile fiber called Infinna™, which looks and feels like cotton. The new factory, at the site of a discontinued paper mill in Kemi, Finland, will process approximately 37 000 tons of textile waste to produce 30,000 metric tons of Infinna™ annually – equivalent to the fiber needed for about 100 million T-shirts. Most of the future factory’s production capacity has already been sold out for several years.
