The textile industry is among the most polluting and environmentally hurtful industries in the world, attributed for up to 10% of our global emissions. And while incentives for a green transition are increasing (Danish legislation for collection by summer 2023, EU by 2025), the industry still lacks technologies and industrial capacities to realize large scale recycling. Resultingly, only a few percent of the yearly produced textiles are recycled into new textile products. Meanwhile, most of our donated textiles for re-use are often of such a bad quality, that they cannot be resold in Europe, and instead they end up in African landfills, where they cause environmental threaths.
One of the main reasons why so little is recycled, is due to a lack of sorting capacity. Textiles come in many different colors, shapes, materials and with different accessories sewed unto them. This poses a huge challenge for recycling, as the recycling processes require very well sorted fraction, for them to recycle the old textiles. This is where NewRetex come into play with our innovative sorting technologies, which we use to sort waste textiles for recycling. Using a mixture of specialized sensors and intelligent algorithms, we are able to detect more than 30 different material compositions while also sorting into different color categories. All this is done without human hands, using our robot technologies.
While our pilot plant can process around 10t textile waste per week, we will be receiving a larger sorting line in early autumn, making us able to process 10t per day. And while plans are in store for a yearly capacity of 20.000 tonnes of waste textiles only in Denmark, we are beginning to look out towards the European market. In two years, (almost) all European member states will be required to conduct municipal collection of textile waste, with the aim of recycling. We have the technologies ready to rollout, and are in the process of proving our business case. However, we are still trying to figure out the best strategy for our European expansion. And for this reason, we are looking for fresh minds with interesting perspectives and strong capabilities within business strategy and the field of circular economy.
Hopefully, we can stitch together a plan which will make us able to increase the recycling of waste textiles throughout all of Europe in the coming years!
What are the problems we wish to solve? What challenges do we have?
What conditions must be considered and included in the idea/solution for it to be useful for your company/organization? (Maximum 10 lines)
• Analysis of the current and future markets for fibers and yarn products in the EU.
• Analysis of the current and future legislation throughout the EU member states.
• Analysis of the current and future industrial hubs for the textile industry.
• Construction of one or more multi-phase rollout strategies, based on the analyses above.
o Which countries should we target first, and why? What about the next phase?
o Mapping of advantages/disadvantages and opportunities/threats for each proposed strategy.
• Financial evaluations to support the strategies, which can be incorporated into a business plan.
• Evaluations of environmental impacts of the strategies – how do we minimize our emissions from collection, transport and production?
What are the problems we wish to solve? What challenges do we have?
The market for recycled fibers is still very immature with little to no standardization.
The textile industry contains quite long and complicated value chains. Textile are often manufactured in different locations before finished products are achieved.
How can all the knowledge from the above questions be combined and analyzed in a meaningful way to come up with a strategy for rolling out or sorting lines in Europe.
NewRetex A/S has specialists within:
Municipalities and regional waste collection companies:
Legislators:
Others:
Relevant methods of financial analysis
We can provide data on the contents of textile waste and our current and expected future costs and prices. Environmental analysis and considerations of the proposed rollouts.
We hope that the perspectives and analyzes can help us navigate our rollout and build a solid business plan, upon which we can build the needed investor setup for increasing the textile recycling within Europe!
We know that it is impossible to cover all of the suggested aspects, but we encourage students to find their own perspectives and pursue the angles which they find must relevant!
Furthermore, we hope to be able to meets some bright students, who would be interested in working further together with us and maybe eventually become a part of our fast growing team!
Having achieved a strategy and overall business plan, we need to further refine, collect investors and roll out our technology to as many countries as possible, in the smartest possible way!
All educations related to:
We prefer masters students or students on their last semesters of their bachelor’s degree.
