Industry organizations, working on related circularity projects, are aligning efforts to create the infrastructure to enable the recycling of post-consumer textile waste. Through their own projects and together through pre-competitive industry-wide collaboration, Accelerating Circularity, Fashion for Good, Global Fashion Agenda’s Circular Fashion Partnership, Reverse Resources, SMART, and WRAP are supporting the scaling of digital solutions to create the infrastructure for textile recycling. Reverse Resources is launching one such platform for collectors, sorters, and pre-processors – its goal is to facilitate textile-to-textile recycling.
The Reverse Resources platform will now be able to house information on collectors, sorters, pre-processors, locations, services, and volumes. The tool is designed to be open access, allowing circular system actors to find the required services. Reverse Resource’s initial digital platform made significant headway in the post-industrial textile waste industry – linking recyclers with manufacturer’s information to increase the transparency of availability of post-industrial materials – thus leading to greater circularity. The expanded digital platform will develop information on the availability and access to post-consumer materials for all industry stakeholders.
“Reverse Resources is a tracking and trading platform for textile and post-consumer waste, providing 360-degree transparency of waste flows. We match supply and demand, break down market barriers, shorten supply chains, thereby increasing value along the way.” said Ann Runnel, Founder & CEO of Reverse Resources. “Our mission is to help to bring down the cost of recycling to support the scale-up of the circular economy. The more industry members that participate, the more we can create economies of scale.”
The platform is being piloted with several large collectors, sorters and pre processors who have been participating in the Accelerating Circularity Project Europe, Global Fashion Agenda’s Circular Fashion Partnership in Bangladesh and Fashion for Good’s Sorting for Circularity India Project. Ultimately the goal of the platform is to in a more effective and economical way allow for the recycling of the estimated 17 million tons in the USA and 5 million tons in Europe of post consumer waste that goes to landfills annually.
