One of Spain’s leading recycled cotton fibre producers, Recover and the Swedish textile sorting company, Sysav, recently announced a new partnership agreement 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 per cent cotton, to Recover in 2022, with larger volumes expected in the following years. The agreement forms part of Recover’s strategy to invest in long-term purchasing contracts worldwide to lockup waste supply and will help scale its post-consumer waste recycling. The company has set a target of having PCW represent more than 40 per cent of its inputs by 2025, which would amount to over 85,000 tonnes 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 colour at scale is an essential enabler to achieve that. It has been a pleasure working together with Sysav in the past year to help optimise 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.”

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.”

By partnering together, the two companies aim to take a step closer to closing the loop on fashion, whilst upholding high quality and sustainability standards.