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Recover™: the recycled cotton manufacturer's scaling pre- and post-consumer waste recycling.

Last updated: Aug 16, 2022

Summary

Recover™ is a leading material sciences company and global producer of low-impact, high-quality recycled cotton fiber, and cotton fiber blends. Despite the barriers to scalability in the circular textile industry, Recover™ is innovating and scaling its production of recycled cotton fiber, to achieve circular fashion for all.

Problem

The fashion industry has one of the biggest negative impacts on the environment and the amount of textile waste produced is a huge problem. Currently, only 25% of all discarded textiles are collected separately, and only <1% are recycled into new textile products.

Solution

Recover™ is working together with partners to scale pre-and post-consumer waste (PCW) recycling to validate the process from PCW feedstock to recycled fiber to new garments at scale. Recover™ has been doing this for years for denim but is now intensifying its efforts and aims to have PCW represent more than 40% of its inputs by 2025.

Outcome

If PCW represents more than 40% of Recover's inputs in 2025, this could mean the recycling of ±425 million garments to produce fiber to create ±700 million new garments.