Wakefield-The third episode of our new five-part audio documentary explores the challenges of sourcing the right ingredients for chemical textiles to textile recycling.

Ecotextile Talks had a conversation with Niclas Berg of Södra. Niclas Berg's work involved sourcing raw materials for the company's "OnceMore" process. Elis' head of sustainable development in Sweden, Lina Wiles, is currently Södra's main supplier.

Elis supplies clothing, towels and bedding to hotels, hospitals and restaurants in 28 countries in Europe and Latin America, and collaborates with Sodra to find a second life for textiles it no longer uses.

Wiles said: "We don't want any of our textile waste to be sent for energy recovery in the next ten years, so we hope to find other solutions for it to keep the value of textiles unchanged and as long as possible."

Berg explained why Elis proved to be an ideal supply partner: "They only use cotton and polyester-cotton based textiles, so we can be pretty sure that we won't get any kind of fiber in our production today. For example, elastic Fiber or other elastic materials, which is not very good for chemical recycling," he said.

"In addition, their main raw material is white. At the moment we only want to use white textiles because we have no possibility of removing the color."

However, these restrictions mean that Södra needs to find additional suppliers, so the company has also established a relationship with the Textile Services Association (TSA), whose members meet 90-95% of the laundry needs of the NHS and the hospitality industry in the United Kingdom. 

TSA has agreed to sort and collect textile waste from its members for Södra from January 2022. It will use trucks to transport the waste to British ports and then back to Sweden.

David Stevens, Chief Executive Officer of TSA, said: "One of the challenges we face has always been the end of the product's life-how do we treat sheets that have been washed 100 times...divided into wipers , But we have been very keen to try to transform the concept of more uses into more uses.

"We are very happy to catch up with Sodra two years ago, and started the fiber-to-fiber technology journey, so that a piece of paper can have more lives. Therefore, we can take out a piece of paper, put it back in the pulp, It was re-developed into yarn and hoped to deliver another sheet of paper at the end of the process."

This episode also explores the impact of the new Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) program and EU legislation requiring separate collection of household textile waste by 2025, both of which provide a significant increase in the amount of textile waste that can be used. Potential recovery.

However, Martin Böschen, CEO of Texaid, Europe’s largest textile waste collection and sorting company, stated that he initially needed to charge chemical recyclers higher prices because their needs were more complex, at least until the industry developed. .

"Who scales up first? They can't scale up before us, but we can't scale up before them, so we need to go hand in hand," he said.

Anna Granskog, a partner at McKinsey & Company, agrees. She said: "To scale up in a certain way, we need to reduce the risk of scale so that the economic risk taken by either party will not be outrageous."

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Founded in 2006, Ecotextile News is an environmental magazine for the global textile and fashion industry, providing unparalleled daily reports, reviews and expertise in print and online formats.