A textile recycling facility will launch in Qatar early next year, the first in a global franchise led by Rieter Group that wants to produce certified recycled yarns “at an unprecedented scale.”
It will serve as a global reference model, according to venture Recycling Powerhouse, which is putting up the facility with Suhail Industrial Holding Group. It will demonstrate how industrial-scale textile recycling can become commercially viable.
Newly established this month, Recycling Powerhouse is supported by three companies, namely: Rieter Group, the world’s leading system supplier for natural and man-made fibers, Säntis Textiles, a Swiss textile engineering company, and Valvan, a Belgian sorting technology company.
“With Recycling Powerhouse Ltd., we are bringing our greatest strengths to one of the world’s most pressing issues: textile waste,” said Thomas Oetterli, CEO of Rieter Group, in a statement.
“By combining leading-edge spinning technology, decades of recycling expertise and advanced traceability solutions, the venture creates a strategic platform to unlock new growth opportunities across machinery sales, engineering services, recycling technologies and recycled yarn markets,” he added.
Despite rising volumes of textile waste and a growing demand for sustainable products, only less than 1 percent of used textiles gets recycled back into new ones, the venture noted.
There are various factors that contribute to this extremely low recycling rate, the venture said, such as technological complexity and availability of low-cost virgin materials, not to mention the “hard-to-verify recycling claims in the market.”
Recycling Powerhouse plans to address this by industrializing, standardizing and scaling textile recycling through a global network of textile recycling plants that can convert post- and pre-consumer textile waste into recycled yarns.
Recycling Powerhouse said it will act as a global integrator and franchisor across the textile recycling value chain. Franchise partners like Suhail Industrial Holding Group will gain access to Recycling Powerhouse’s proven recycling solutions, engineering know-how, training programs and operational support systems.
Yarns produced by franchisees will be marketed under an established brand, it added. Recycling Powerhouse will ensure quality through auditing, certification and full end-to-end traceability across the value chain.
“Recycling Powerhouse brings together deep textile expertise and cutting-edge engineering to help us realize our vision of a sustainable, competitive and resilient future where there is no textile waste,” said Sheikh Khalid Ahmed Mubarak Al Thani, Chairman of Suhail Industrial Holding Group.
