Before a shirt is worn for the first time it has been through more steps than most customers realize. Often one producer makes the yarn, another knits or weaves it into textile fabric, and a third makes the shirt from the fabric. Now it’s ready for the customer to wear.
When garments are worn out or no longer wanted some are sold second-hand or used as hand-me-downs, but the vast majority end up in landfills or are incinerated. Much too few are recycled due to the fact that cotton and viscose can’t be recycled with satisfactory quality on a large enough scale. The cycle stops, because there is a hole in the loop, a crucial part is missing. Until now.
Our recycling technology dissolves used cotton and other natural fibers into a new, biodegradable raw material, Circulose® pulp. Our customers use it to make biodegradable virgin quality viscose or lyocell textile fibers. This is the link that has been missing from the cycle. We have closed the loop. The way fashion is produced and consumed can finally be transformed into a never-ending loop.
We receive used garments and textile production waste with high cellulosic content, like cotton or viscose.
The textiles are shredded, de-buttoned, de-zipped, de-colored and turned into a slurry.
Contaminants and other non-cellulosic content are separated from the slurry.
The slurry is dried to produce a pure, natural Circulose® branded dissolving pulp made from 100% recycled textiles.
The sheets of Circulose® are finally packaged into bales and fed back into the textile production value chain as a replacement for virgin materials like cotton, oil and wood.