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Oct 31, 2024

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

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.

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.”

Reju plans to establish not just one “regeneration hub” in the United States but “many” with an annual capacity of 50,000 metric tons apiece, or exponentially more than the Frankfurt plant’s 1,000. Frisk said that it’s looking at three possible locations for its first, which could be operational by 2027. It’s therefore “absolutely essential that we create this infrastructure of tomorrow to make sure that we are not promising our ultimate customer, the brand, something that we cannot deliver against,” the former Under Armour chief said.

Reju’s strategy for securing feedstock in Frankfurt and, subsequently, the rest of Europe, runs on similar tracks, but a European Union waste framework directive that will mandate separate collection systems for used textiles beginning in 2025 will make the job easier. Some member states, such as the Netherlands, have already jumped ahead of the deadline by introducing textile collection on a municipal level, making it an easier lift for materials recovery facilities to engage in the process.

Not that Frisk is overly worried about the more complex textile flow in the United States. He’s assembled a team of experts that he says understand both the “business of waste” and Reju’s glycolysis-based technology, which IBM developed with backing from Under Armour and Technip Energies. They’re calibrating the upstream feedstock stream the same way the company’s engineers are integrating the so-called “Reju polyester” into the downstream supply chain, which is to say, “seamlessly,” Frisk said. Now that Reju is “100 percent” owned by Technip Energies, Under Armour is expected to be one of its customers.

“This is the beginning of, I believe, an incredibly innovative time,” he said. “It’s the beginning of a new economy starting to form, and it will take time, but ultimately, we believe that if you do the work in the right way where everybody wins, [it has] a good opportunity to become a real business for the future.”

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