Two years ago, Swedish recycler Renewcell filed for bankruptcy, shuttering its chemical textile recycling plant in the coastal city of Sundsvall, and dashing the fashion industry’s hopes of commercial-scale textile-to-textile recycling at the final hurdle. The site has been dormant ever since, as the company awaited new ownership, a new name (Circulose), and a shift in leadership strategy to attract enough support to restart production. That day finally arrived: last week, Circulose announced it will reopen the Sundsvall plant this year, with new pulp expected to roll out by the end of 2026.
In the wake of Renewcell’s bankruptcy, questions were raised over whether Sweden was the most sensible spot for such recycling infrastructure. While, at the time, Europe may have had incoming regulations mandating the collection of post-consumer textile waste — which will eventually be the bulk of Circulose’s feedstock — the actual infrastructure to collect and sort that waste is still a long way off, and it might have been smarter, critics suggested, to house production closer to brand supply chains in Asia, where there is more access to post-industrial waste and where lower labor costs can balance out the financial burden of integrating a fledgling innovation.
Circulose is doubling down. “The first decision when choosing where to place a recycling factory is always: do you place it in the consumer markets, where there is a lot of post-consumer waste, or in production markets, where there is post-industrial waste?” says CEO Jonatan Janmark, who joined the company in November 2024. “This choice was made by Renewcell, but it still makes sense for Circulose. It’s good to repurpose existing infrastructure instead of building [it] completely new, because it saves on capital expenditure. Also, our process is very similar to that of a traditional paper pulp mill, which is what existed on this site before, so we have access to relevant personnel and capabilities. There are other benefits too, namely access to a port and railroads, and access to green electricity at a reasonable cost. But yes, we could have gotten the cost down faster if we had been in Asia.”
It’s not just Circulose debating this question of where to place critical recycling infrastructure. In May 2025, US-based textile recycling firm Circ unveiled plans to build a $500 million plant at Saint-Avold in northeastern France, hoping to process 70,000 metric tons of recycled polycotton per year from 2028. Earlier this month, French textile-to-textile regeneration company Reju announced an industrial-scale Regeneration Hub in Lacq, a small village and burgeoning industrial complex in the Pyrénées-Atlantiques department of southwestern France. This will complement Reju’s existing Regeneration Hub Zero site in Frankfurt, alongside further plans at Sittard-Geleen in the Netherlands and Rochester, New York, in the US. Others are at various stages of development in China (Reo Eco), Türkiye (Re&Up), Spain (Coleo), and Vietnam (Syre).
Choosing the wrong location can be a costly mistake, but choosing the right one can catapult a textile recycler to commercial scale faster than its competitors, while creating more favorable conditions for others to piggyback off. Vogue Business spoke to the innovators leading the way on the strategies behind the locations.
Around the world in 80 waste shipments
Fashion operates complex global supply chains, and textile-to-textile recycling is not exempt from this, despite positioning itself as an environmental solution.
With limited infrastructure to collect and sort post-consumer textiles, many startups designed to deal with post-consumer waste are currently supplementing this with post-industrial waste. This can have a profound effect on location scouting, says Katrin Ley, managing director at innovation platform Fashion for Good, which has been attempting to consolidate textile waste deposit data into a “living map”, called World of Waste.
Research is underway. So far, it seems as though the largest textile waste deposits are in the US (15.4 million tons annually), India (7.79 million tons), Canada (1.14 million tons) and Germany (one million tons), but this will likely shift when the results for China and Türkiye come through later this year. Likewise, World of Waste is trying to account for the huge swathes of textile waste that are shipped to the Global South under the guise of secondhand clothing, which she expects to be “significant”.
As for the current data, she says: “The US and Europe are among the largest waste deposit regions, but the waste is primarily post-consumer. Others are located in manufacturing regions like China and India, where the major waste quantities available for recycling are primarily post-industrial. That distinction matters, because most recyclers start with post-industrial waste as they ramp up operations, before working their processes towards post-consumer waste. This creates an interesting mismatch between where the facility sits and where the early-stage feedstock actually comes from.”
Circulose, for example, imports waste from Türkiye, Bangladesh, North Africa, and Central America, says Janmark. Despite these far-flung sources, the financial cost and environmental footprint of land transportation from the port in Rotterdam to the recycling plant in Sundsvall can be just as high as the initial shipping, he adds. “Hopefully, this is temporary, but it depends on how the landscape develops. There are a lot of uncertainties involved.”
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The ability of companies like Circulose to import feedstock depends on waste shipment regulations, which can be a thorny issue for circular fashion. Some countries — including those in the EU — have limitations on the export of textile waste, while others — such as China and Vietnam — will not accept incoming textile waste shipments.
H&M-backed polyester recycler Syre says plans for its gigascale recycling plant finally got the greenlight from Vietnam’s prime minister, Phạm Minh Chính, in January, after a years-long campaign to secure an exemption to the country’s ban on importing textile waste. “We had a list of over 100 criteria for the site, including existing value chains, access to green energy, and good transportation. Vietnam was the perfect choice, apart from this one challenge,” says Syre CEO Dennis Nobelius. Syre has now narrowed its search to two potential sites, which it hopes to start construction on in 2027 and production around two years later.
It’s not just Vietnam debating whether to allow waste to flow across borders, notes Janmark. “This is an ongoing discussion in the regulatory circuit,” he says. “But once waste is properly sorted into something we can use, it shouldn’t be classified as waste; it should be considered a raw material.”
Spanish recycler Coleo is taking a different tack. It recently established a waste sorting and pre-processing facility in Toulouse, taking advantage of the fact that France is already paying for this process under its extended producer responsibility (EPR) scheme. “You get euros for every ton of post-consumer textile waste you process,” explains head of strategy Marc Puyuelo Huguet. “Then, you get an extra success fee if you can prove that your finished product is sold to a recycler. We mostly sell to our own mechanical recycling hub in Spain, which helps.”
On the recycling side, Spain is an advantageous location, because there is already a strong culture of reuse, he adds, which makes it easier to get permits for recycling plants, and cheaper to get those plants insured.
Choosing the exact plot
Once a startup decides which country to put its roots in, it should secure a specific site. This is just as complex, says Nobelius. “We started searching for industrial parks, because they’re used to the permit process and already have the infrastructure on-site, like roads, substations, energy and potentially even residential housing,” he says. “We wanted to work with a site that has chemical plants and knows how to handle chemicals.” Nobelius has personally visited dozens of industrial parks across Vietnam, and will make a final decision in the coming weeks.
Some companies have developed an exact framework for sourcing production sites. “These decisions are not trivial,” says Circ co-founder and CEO Peter Majeranowski, who uses a system called “frontend loading” to decide. “You’re putting a lot of capital in the ground that you can’t easily move. You’re building an asset that will last at least 30 years. At every stage of the engineering and demo processes, you get more detailed into how much energy, gas and water you’re going to need, how you’re going to recycle it, the footprint and the layout. You’re looking at logistics for incoming feedstock and outgoing material, where your customers are located, what the electricity grid looks like, the rule of law in that country, the pathway to permits. There’s also a storytelling element: I love that we’re building a circular economy on top of a former coal coking facility.”
In France, where Circ is building its first commercial-scale plant, there is a unique consultation process, to make sure new plants don’t have adverse effects on other stakeholder groups, he continues. “You have an open dialog with other industries, residents, community activists, environmental activists, government, and more.” Now that the consultation is done, Circ hopes to be up and running by 2028, churning through roughly 70,000 tons of polyester, cotton, and polycotton feedstock per year. “France has done a lot of work to deregulate and make it easier to get permits. The fact that the French government recognises this barrier is incredibly helpful,” adds Majeranowski.
Chinese enzymatic recycling startup Reo Eco chose Huai’an City in northern Jiangsu as its first production site, because the local government is keen to build a “green city” with a high concentration of forward-thinking fashion and textile businesses, says Reo Eco co-founder Ivan Yip. “There are other big cities nearby, which makes it easy to secure the raw material, and it’s in the middle of a river connecting Beijing and Guangzhou, which means we don’t have to use as many trucks. Local authorities are also encouraging solar and wind power, which is another positive factor.” Yip says Reo Eco has already secured enough feedstock for its first two to three years of production, thanks to a partnership with waste collectors in Guangzhou and Huai’an City.
While some recycling startups chose their location based on existing infrastructure, Reju is bringing the infrastructure with it, says CEO Patrik Frisk. “You need the technology for textile-to-textile recycling, but the technology alone is going to get you nowhere,” he says. “You also need to help set up, build and commit to the waste pipeline, and the infrastructure on either side of your value chain. That’s why we’re building regeneration hubs [rather than recycling plants], so we can also do the sorting and pre-processing, and we can support upstream with reverse logistics.”
Since Reju is intent on recycling post-consumer waste, it has chosen its sites based on the availability of feedstock. The Netherlands is home to some of the world’s largest textile waste aggregators, says Frisk, while Toulouse is conveniently located to accept feedstock from both France and nearby Spain; Rochester is able to source from the wider New England area, including the densely populated and high-consuming New York state. The latter site also benefits from a multi-year offtake agreement with charity retailer Goodwill, whose Northeast Goodwill Circularity Hub (a collective of 11 local fashion stores) will supply polyester-rich materials to the Regeneration Hub for at least its first few years of operation.
None of the startups expressed concerns over their competitors popping up in similar locations. In fact, many were keen for this cluster effect to take hold. “Textile-to-textile recycling is almost non-existent today, so the presence of other recyclers brings a lot of value,” says Syre’s Nobelius.
“Industrial clusters are very important, especially now, when the capacity for recycling is so low,” says Coleo’s Huguet. “Not everyone will work on the same waste type, so it is an advantage when you can ship bigger quantities of waste into a certain hub and have different avenues available. It makes the whole value chain more viable. Plus, there’s more than enough textile waste for everyone.”
