Reju Taps Goodwill, Waste Management to Recycle Textiles

There are “three legs to the stool” when it comes to textile recycling—collection, sortation, and finally, the processes that turn waste into new, saleable product.

Knowing this, recently launched startup Reju has taken a different approach than its contemporaries. Instead of going after brands and retailers as partners, the Frankfurt, Germany-based innovator is forging connections with the established facilitators that stand to make up the upstream supply chain for recycled textiles.

At Sourcing Journal’s Sustainability Summit in New York, Reju’s head of North American business development, Matthew Allen, told Sourcing Journal sourcing and labor editor Jasmin Malik Chua that the material regeneration company is focused on post-consumer polyester waste—the tough-to-recycle and often trashed garments that make up a bulk of the apparel clogging up landfills.

But to get to a point where apparel and other fabrics are put through the company’s proprietary chemical recycling process, those goods have got to be gathered, separated and categorized for optimal use. To facilitate these preliminary steps, Reju has teamed with two household names: Goodwill Industries International and Waste Management (WM).

“None of the infrastructure exists today to actually supply these regeneration facilities that we’re seeking to build and get a significant amount of feedstock in order to run them… and so the ability to build that infrastructure upstream is absolutely paramount in order to get this off the ground,” Allen said. “We know that we can regenerate material and recirculate them to brand partners, but the initial process of aggregation, collection, sorting for reuse first as well as repair before recycling is really, really important.”

Asked why the international thrift was interested in jumping into bed with a nascent textile recycler, Goodwill’s sustainability manager, Sydney Muñoz, told Chua that Reju sees the organization “not just as a feedstock provider, but a partner.” According to the sustainability lead, initial discussions between the groups centered on “respecting the hierarchy of reuse and making sure that we are putting items towards reuse first and recycling second.”

The group recovered the value of 4.3 billion pounds of donated products in the United States and Canada in 2023—a result of its deep penetration across the region. “We have a Goodwill store or collection center within 10 miles of 83 percent of the U.S. population,” Muñoz said.

Much of the collection volume is made up of apparel or home textiles, and the easiest path away from a landfill is by way of a checkout counter at a Goodwill store (or the organization’s newer e-commerce platform). “But we know that not everything is designed to be reused, especially with fast fashion, and so that’s where the next leg of our journey comes into play,” she added.

Leftover products are often sold in bulk to salvage buyers who grade and sort them for other opportunities, including different resale channels, recycling or export to foreign markets—many of them developing economies in the global South that are now struggling to contend with high volumes of unsalable used textiles. “And really that’s where our interest in textile-to-textile recycling stems from, is to be able to find solutions for those items that have little reuse value after our stores,” Muñoz said.

Asked why there isn’t widespread collection and recycling of textiles—as there is with discarded paper and plastic—WM’s Randall brought up the three-legged stool analogy.

“We have to have those legs of the stool balanced in order for it to be really viable business model,” he said. “We have that ability to collect the material, we have that ability to sort it, and then there has to be an end market for it.”

Many people across the country might not realize that even when they place their discarded plastics or glass in a home recycling bin, there’s no local recycling body able to receive the waste and recycle it. The same issue has plagued textile waste: without solutions providers like Reju operating at scale, there’s nowhere for it to go.

That’s a big problem when we examine the “changes in production and consumption” within the textile industry in particular, Randall said. “People are buying more apparel. They’re wearing them less. They’re keeping them in their closet less,” he said, noting that many items are trashed within one year of purchase.

About 85 percent of that waste goes to landfill, and 15 percent is recycled—a figure that has stayed consistent since about 1980, when the Environmental Protection Agency began tracking different categories of waste. That stagnation won’t fly when consumption and waste generation has grown so dramatically. The per capita growth of textile waste has ballooned about 55 percent in the last two decades, making up about 6 percent to 8 percent of landfill waste, Randall said.

Until recently, “the weak link—the short leg of the stool—was really the end markets,” he added. “There weren’t really enough scaled technologies to really manage this at scale, given the enormity of the challenges.” Now that the textile-to-textile recycling space is accelerating, “that does start to shift the burden back to those first two legs of the stool— and that’s really our core competency: collecting and sorting at great scale.”

WM is launching curbside textile collection pilots in several cities in the Western U.S. within the coming months, as well as another locale on the East Coast. In November, the group launched a robotic, near-infrared sorting facility in South Carolina. “That’s all part of this relationship; we’re trying to figure out how can we collect textiles, have Goodwill sort out what’s really the cream of the crop that’s viable for resale, and then we’ll sort at our facility for the fiber-to-fiber recyclers like Reju.”

Asked whether he believes regulation is the key to pushing textile-to-textile recycling into realm of reality, Reju’s Allen said that while he hopes government intervention can act as a catalyst, the firm and its partners are full steam ahead with their plans.

“We’re collectively going to move forward. Our relationship together is built on trust, a lot of sharing of information,” he said. “So I do think regulation can help, but we shouldn’t wait for that. We have to keep moving forward.”