Recycled cotton fiber producer Recover announced a new partnership agreement Wednesday with textile sorting company Sysav 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 percent 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 PCW, the companies said.
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 PCM recycling. The company has set a goal of having PCW represent more than 40 percent of its inputs by 2025, which would amount to more than 85,000 tons of used garments.
“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,” Helene Smits, chief sustainability officer at Recover, said. “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.”
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Sysav is a recycling company in southern Sweden focused on recovering materials and energy while keeping goods out of the landfill. Sysav’s Siptex facility offers automated high-speed sorting of textiles by fiber composition and delivers quality-assured products. ReFab by Sysav is a product family of defined fiber types, colors and purity.
The two partners aim to close the loop on fashion while upholding high quality and sustainability standards.
“With the ReFab products, we are in the process to set a new industry standard for postconsumer textiles,” Stefan Poldrugac, business developer at Sysav, said. “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.”
Recover is a materials sciences company and global producer of low-impact, high-quality recycled cotton fiber and cotton fiber blends. Recover is on a mission to scale its proprietary technology to make a lasting positive impact on the environment and partner with brands and retailers and other change-makers to meet the industry’s sustainability targets.