Riachuelo scales cotton recycling in northeast Brazil

NATAL – The launch of the Guara Circular project in Brazil is a major development for the country’s fashion ecosystem. Housed inside the Guararapes factory in Natal, an integrated textile plant manufacturing roughly 40 per cent of Riachuelo’s merchandise and Latin America’s largest integrated textile plant, this initiative establishes Northeast Brazil’s first industrial-scale textile recycling hub.

Historically, Brazil’s vast apparel sector has struggled with domestic fibre-to-fibre infrastructure. While the nation is a global centre for cotton production, pre-consumer cutting scraps and post-consumer waste frequently bypassed local reprocessing due to technological bottlenecks. The most common problem was the difficulty of transforming rough textile waste into fine, high-quality, commercial-grade yarns.