What Reju’s Team-Up With Goodwill and WM Says About Its US Plans
Reju may have barely thrown open the doors of its spanking new textile-to-textile polyester recycling demonstration plant in the central German city of Frankfurt, but already it has its eyes on the United States.
And more than just eyes. The Paris-headquartered firm revealed Tuesday that it’s working with the waste management experts at Goodwill and WM to develop a multi-year “collaborative model” for collecting, sorting, reusing and recycling textiles—particularly the nonwearable kind—so that they become grist for a new generation of materials rather than fodder for landfills and incinerators.
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It’s about creating the infrastructure that can underpin a “new pipeline” for fulfilling Reju’s ambitions in North America, said Patrik Frisk, its CEO. The post-consumer textiles it needs to keep its machines thrumming aren’t being captured in an effective way: they’re either lost to the general waste stream or collected in piecemeal volumes through donations. Teaming up with a for-profit company—WM—and a charitable network—Goodwill—makes sense to cover the most ground “in a way that is ultimately scalable,” he said.
Goodwill, whose individual and independent affiliates operate 3,300 locations across the United States and Canada, has also been exploring regional textile hubs for sorting and graded castoff clothing and linens to meet textile-to-textile recyclers’ specifications. Jennifer Lake, CEO and president of Goodwill of the Finger Lakes, which serves the Rochester, Syracuse and Finger Lakes areas in upstate New York, previously told Sourcing Journal that Goodwill wants to be seen as “more than a store” but a key spoke in the circular fashion machinery as material innovations like Reju’s rev up from pilot to commercial volumes. While there’s no shortage of unwanted textiles, getting it where it needs to go when reverse logistics aren’t set up that way is an existential challenge.
And the trick, Frisk said, is to do this quickly and efficiently, allowing for the necessary economies of scale. “This is about looking at all of the different levels, from the household level to the aggregation level to the sorting for reuse and rewear to sorting for fiber content to the preparation for recycling, and then ultimately, for the regeneration itself,” he said. What’s important at every step is to “extract the value from that waste at the highest level.”