Dutch-based but Turkish owned textile-to-textile recycler Re&Up had a booth opposite Ecotextile News in the exhibition hall in Pasadena. Established in 2023, it’s processing 80 tonnes of recycled fibres a year, and aiming for 200,000 tonnes within 12 months.
“The long term aim is a million tonnes, which sounds a lot but keep in mind global fibre production of 124 million tonnes per year. It’s peanuts, it’s not enough,” said Re&Up managing director Andreas Dorner.
Owned by the Sanko Group, Re&Up has two plants in Turkey, at Bursa and Gaziantep, and recently set up a subsidiary in Madrid with a view to expanding its operations into Europe.
This would capitalise on new European legislation including extended producer responsibility (EPR) for textiles and the revised Waste Framework Directive (WFD) which will make separate collections of textile waste mandatory from next year..
“We have made investigations for further expansion in Europe,” Dorner told us. “So we are really on the way to making some commitments there. On one side, it’s a big consumer market with a high quality of raw material. Plus, of course, legislation is a big driver. And the reality is that the brands and retailers are looking for a solution.”
Re&Up focuses on recycling post-consumer polyester and cotton waste, including blends. Its process claims to decolourise and separate cotton and polyester fibres, offering cost-neutral, virgin-like materials which are certified by GRS and Bluesign, and offered to brands without a green premium.
“This is the economy of scale factor,” explained Dorner. “If you start at this scale, the overhead cost compared to the output is that our fibres are cost neutral to the market.
A recyclable product, a sustainable product, is good. But if you have a green premium which is too high, forget it
“I think this is a big criteria, a green premium is not acceptable to really large brands in our industry. A recyclable product, a sustainable product, is good. But if you have a green premium which is too high, forget it.”
Re&Up recently secured a €70 million ($76m) loan from French development finance institution Proparco to upscale its next-gen recycled fibre production, in Turkey and – potentially – in Spain.
Dorner added: “We have a third party LCA, and the numbers are looking fantastic. We save 80% of water. We save 80% of land usage. All our chemicals are Bluesign-certified. Plus all our fibres have a physical tracer so brands can prove their sourcing policies.”
Eventually, Re&Up hopes to further expand its recycling operations into Asia, to be closer to most of the world’s textile production and processing, as well as garment manufacturing.
Dorner explains: “Brands and retailers ask us to provide fibres to their suppliers in countries like Bangladesh, India and Vietnam. But, for us, it makes no sense to make a recycled fibre and send it around the world because the CO2 savings will be diluted.
“It would make sense to have an Asian hub, and even to have a US hub, because the US has the same huge amount of consumer textiles. Legislation is not so much driver there, although California is moving.”
