‘With a recession on the doorstep’, textiles recyclers expecting rough wetter

The global textiles recycling industry is suffering from a combination of high supply, falling quality and payment issues among some customers, according to BIR textiles division president Martin Bösschen of Switzerland-based TEXAID Textilverwertungs AG. ‘We also need to find better recycling solutions for what we can’t reuse,’ he told the BIR conference in Budapest.

‘With a recession on the doorstep, we are not foreseeing any short-term improvement and are expecting a continuing difficult situation for the textiles recycling industry for the next couple of months, which could also lead to financial problems for some market participants,’ Bösschen said.

Increased competition

Reporting for Italy, Sauro Ballerini warned that low-quality “fast fashion” from China has the potential to offer competition for used clothing in all markets. Meanwhile, there has been steady demand of late on France’s used clothing market as well as consistent export orders, according to Mehdi Zerroug of Framimex.

Collection containers

In anticipation of the European directive calling for totally separate collection of textiles by 2025, Belgian authorities are already pushing the public to put all kinds of textiles into collection containers – even material which goes directly for incineration. ‘This means that the quality of our originals is going down, and we will have a larger quantity of material for incineration, which will put a big pressure on the margins of the sorting companies,’ lamented Pol T’Jollyn of Recutex NV.