Alfredo Ferre
General Manager and CEO Recover Textile Systems
Produce 2 lk MT recycled cotton fibre per year by 2025
Spain-headquartered Recover Textile Systems is a leading material sciences company and global producer of low-impact, high-performance recycled cotton fibre and cotton fibre blends. Its environment-friendly, cost-competitive products are created in partnership with supply chains of global retailers and brands, offering a sustainable solution to close the loop on fashion. General Manager and chief executive officer (CEO) Alfredo Ferre chats with Paulami Chatterjee about the company's latest partnership with Story3 Capital, the market of recycled cotton and future plans.
Why is the fashion industry lagging in achieving the climate action commitments and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)?
We have all been talking for a long time about the need for change, but large-scale action has been lagging behind. Sustainability for a long time was a 'nice to have', something extra we had to do if it was possible. Now it is a 'must have' and I do see a shift towards more action which is great. However, it will still be a huge challenge to make the changes that are needed fast enough. The 'fashion on climate' report by McKinsey shows that if we continue with the current pace of adopting sustainability, we will miss the 1.5 degrees pathway by 50 per cent. This is a reason for concern and a reason to further accelerate our actions. The report indicates that more than half of the emission reduction needed should come from decarbonising material production, processing, and minimising production waste. Many solutions, such as the one that we are offering, are already here. Now the time has come to adopt these at scale at an accelerated pace.
Seventy years is a long time and sustainability, circularity, etc were not much peddled words earlier. How did your company step into this zone so far back in time?
In many cases, innovation is born out of necessity. You can also see it happening now. In this global pandemic, we are speeding up the digital revolution and developing and applying technology like digital sampling at a rapid pace, because there is a huge need. Seventy years ago, this was the case as well. In the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, there was a shortage of materials and resources in the country and my great grandfather started to look at ways to use textile waste to be able to create new textiles again. Our family started with a very rudimentary process, to make textiles used for agricultural products, like bulk bags, and over time developed a much more refined process that could produce high quality fibres. The process has always been about sustainability, but the original driver for the Ferre family was sheer necessity.
Have you come across any new thoughts since the pandemic struck on how to accelerate this process, or maybe further innovate on this aspect?
We see that the global pandemic has created a huge mindset shift. People don't want to go back to how things were before. We are all talking about a 'new normal' or 'build back better'. It has made people think about the world we want to live in when this crisis is over. I believe this is something beautiful that I hope we can take with us into the future. We need to stay hopeful and not let the crisis divide us, we are always stronger together. I believe strongly in a new vision for the world that is based on interconnectedness with nature and each other, a circular future. Recover fits very well into this future vision and my hope is that through strong collaboration with the industry we can scale up quickly and achieve the positive impact we have set out to make.
Recover's recycled cotton fibre has the lowest environmental impact score in the world. Was this easy or difficult to achieve?
This is a process that never stops. We are constantly looking at how we can further improve: shifting to renewable energy, reducing waste from our process, reducing transport and looking at scaling the recycling of post-consumer garments. Ultimately, if we want to close the loop and make sure we effectively cycle textile fibres again and again, we need to start recycling post-consumer garments on a large scale. Currently, less than 1 per cent of used garments is being recycled back into new textiles, and we must change that.
Where do you source the industrial and pre- and post-consumer cotton waste from?
We source it from all over the world. The biggest sources of post-industrial waste are obviously the main manufacturing hubs. For pre- and post-consumer, the sources are very different. Post-consumer garments are sourced from textile sorters/recyclers that are able to sort these textiles on colour and composition, which is a requirement for us. Pre-consumer waste is currently a big issue, because the pandemic has led to a big disruption in sales. We source pre-consumer garments in dialogue with brands and retailers. We want to make sure that strategies to keep the garments in use have been exhausted first, as we do not want to destroy perfectly good garments.
How was your recycled product line Recover born? How is its recycling process unique?
Mechanical recycling of cotton has been around for a long time and so this in itself is not unique or new. However, as a material sciences company, Recover has spent the last decades on innovating our recycling system, with all the core and supporting technologies and processes, to be able to offer the best in class recycled fibres from a quality and sustainability standpoint. In addition to recycling textile waste, Recover has created the ColorBlend system, which allows us to create any kind of coloured fibre with high accuracy without adding any water or chemicals. We use the colour that is already in the textile waste and combine it with low impact dyed synthetic carrier fibres. The products created from this fibre will already have a colour and don't need to be dyed anymore, saving a lot of water, chemicals and also costs in the manufacturing process.
Recover has the most sustainable cotton option available in the world according to the Higg Material Sustainability Index. Also, we have Oekotex standard 100, OCS and GRS certification. We have been longstanding members of Textile Exchange and recently joined SAC and work with these platforms and other partners to continually improve our process and products to adhere to the highest sustainability standards.
You have recently tied up with Story3 Capital. What are your expectations from this partnership?
This strategic partnership with Story3 Capital allows us to expand to meet the surging demand from the global fashion industry. The partnership will accelerate our efforts to transform the fashion industry by solving one of the world's biggest environmental issues. Story3 Capital brings significant investment, resources and best-in-class operators to achieve our growth initiatives.
As a result of the investment, we will increase production to 200,000 metric tonnes of recycled cotton fibre per year by 2025. This will save nearly three trillion litres of water each year, equivalent to the drinking water consumed by 3 billion people on an annual basis and allow 500,000 acres of land to be directed away from cotton cultivation for other uses.
Where is your manufacturing site located? What is your recycling capacity?
Our headquarters are based in Banyeres de Mariola, Spain. This is where it all started, and we have 12,000 metric tonnes of recycling capacity here. We are currently working on opening a second facility in Bangladesh and planning further expansion into Vietnam and Central America to increase our total capacity to 60,000 metric tonnes by mid-2022. Our goal is to have 200,000 metric tonnes of capacity by 2025.
How much of industrial and pre- and post-consumer cotton waste does Recover recycle?
Currently we recycle mostly post-industrial waste, and that is about 95 per cent of our capacity. In the future we aim to increase the percentage of pre- and post-consumer waste significantly.
Which are the most serious concerns related to the fashion industry that the industry needs to address?
There are many environmental and social concerns related to the production and consumption of apparel that the industry must address. Demand for apparel and many other products and services will grow as population grows, while the earth's capacity to produce new resources and deal with waste is stressed to the breaking point already. The main challenge for us all, not just the textile industry, is to stay within the planetary boundaries. This includes the climate crisis, but also chemical pollution, biodiversity loss and water scarcity. The impact of the production of virgin cotton and other textile fibres is a major concern and touching on all these aspects. While cotton is a great fibre, it takes a lot of water, land and chemicals to produce. As an example, a single T-shirt requires 2,700 litres of water, equivalent to what an average person drinks in three years. We are now producing over 100 billion garments each year, many of them made from cotton. In a world where by 2050 about half a billion people are likely to be subject to water-stress, this is not sustainable.
Recover recycles industrial and pre- and post-consumer cotton waste and thus has its impact in reducing the need to cultivate more virgin cotton, while also reducing the amount of textile waste in landfills and incineration. In addition, we limit the use of harmful dyes through our ColorBlend system, where we create unique coloured fibre with high accuracy by using the colour of the textile waste and combining it with low impact dyed synthetic fibres.
How biodegradable are the recovered products?
We do not make any claims about biodegradability of our recycled fibre products. Many of our recycled fibre products, like our ColorBlend products, contain synthetic fibres and, therefore, are not biodegradable.
How do you see the market of recycled cotton fibre growing in future?
On the mid- to long-term, (semi) chemical recycling technologies will enter the market. It will be great to see how these technologies develop and are applied at scale. We see a great potential for a synergy between mechanically- and chemically-recycled cotton in the future. Through the chemical process, cotton is transformed into a lycocel type fibre-a man-made cellulosic. With mechanical recycling, we can keep the cotton properties in the system for as long as possible, and then finally these fibres can be regenerated and transformed into these manmade cellulosic fibres.
What are your future plans?
Our plans include expansion in capacity and expansion to recycling pre- and post-consumer at scale.
Published on: 15/02/2021
DISCLAIMER: All views and opinions expressed in this column are solely of the interviewee, and they do not reflect in any way the opinion of Fibre2Fashion.com.
