We Have Solved The Puzzle Of The Business Case With Industrial Waste
Reverse Resources is an innovative platform that streamlines and digitises waste management within the textile industry. It connects various stakeholders, including waste suppliers, handlers, recyclers, and brands, fostering transparency, efficiency, and collaboration in handling textile waste. In an interview with Fibre2Fashion, CEO & Founder Ann Runnel discusses why a digital platform is critical to further promote textile waste recycling.
In the context of the fashion and textile industry, what are the most pressing challenges related to sustainability and resource management that need to be addressed?
One of the textile industry’s biggest challenges is the impact created by the choice of materials. Many brands today have set targets around increased recycled fibre content, prioritising this over organic cotton. But the global system for capturing textile waste and managing efficient supply chains of waste to recycling is yet to be built, making textile recycling quite expensive, and the recycling capacity is still low.
How do you see the concept of a circular economy transforming the fashion and textile industry? What are the key benefits and opportunities it presents?
The transition to the circular economy brings enormous new business opportunities for the industry. We have often been asked if the industry is doing this because of better marketing or greenwashing. The answer is ‘no’. In the context of climate change, several global crises and changing policies and regulations, the frontrunners in the industry have understood that textile waste is the key strategic resource. Recreating value and repeatedly earning revenues from the same fibre, fabric, or product is any industry’s new era of business. And textile and fashion sector is innovating at high speed to find scalable solutions to perform even better than the fast fashion business model has. In 5-10 years, we will see a fundamental shift in the industry from the old system to the new one.
Are there any emerging technologies or innovative practices within the industry that you believe have the potential to revolutionise sustainability and resource efficiency?
It is amazing to see how many different recycling technologies are about to enter the market or investing already in scaleup. Full circulation has been achieved for 100 per cent cotton, mostly at the pilot level. But technically, it is possible to recycle 85 per cent of any textiles today into high-quality fibres, yarns and fabric again and close the loop of textile waste. If we also include using textile waste to downcycled products in other industries (isolation panels, stuffing materials, black plastics), we could, in principle, reach 100 per cent use for textile waste. It is not so much of a technological challenge anymore, but a matter of sufficient (and balanced) capex investments, establishing feasible (data-driven) supply chains, digitisation to achieve efficiency of the fractured material flows (avoiding all unnecessary processes), and global collaboration to coordinate the best possible movement of these material flows.
What role do you think collaboration and partnerships play in driving sustainable practices within the fashion and textile sector?
Collaboration and partnerships can help in “balancing the grid”. What I mean is that we need to plan carefully which recycling technologies we use in the context of global material flows so that we do not create hyper-competition for certain fibres in one place and end up suffocating the potential of recycling while other waste flows or regions that may have recycling potential stay out of focus. Top-level planning that starts from access to global data of textile flows (by composition and material type) is essential for a success story of circular textiles. But to get such access to data, we also need to take ground-up action of mapping and digitising textile flows, helping companies see the benefit of the data exchange between themselves and building trust in collaboration.
From your perspective, what are some of the most promising trends or developments in sustainable fashion that you think will shape the industry’s future?
I think it is the combination of the different innovations and solutions that are popping up. One by one, they often focus on one vertical part of the bigger supply chain of the system and do not seem to create a big difference yet. But all together, there is a clear indication of a systemic change in the background. The most promising trend is moving towards a point where textile fibre maintains a positive value throughout the global circulation, and the business case of endlessly circulating textiles becomes feasible. This is where we start seeing the alternatives to fast fashion business models to scale up properly and the world to move towards wardrobe-as-a-service or fibre-as-a-service approaches. Another really interesting trend is related to the question of the ownership of the product or the fibre because the global coordination of textiles across the movement of the materials from one legal body to another brings along the questions of the governance of the data as well as the rights to access the materials. The circular economy is about to start creating all kinds of new topics and discussions in the industry we never thought about before. But first, we need to solve the basics of the business case and the process feasibility issues.
What inspired you to establish Reverse Resources? Could you share any specific challenges or opportunities that led to its inception?
For me, the story started from the frustration that, as a consumer, there isn’t much I can change by making one or another choice if these choices aren’t first made readily available and convenient. I was spending too much time trying to find better alternatives. Studying economics, I decided to do my master’s thesis on why some companies put sustainability into their core business focus and how they benefit. How can we thereby incentivise other companies to do the same? My research brought me to Bangladesh for the first time, and the initial idea I had was to create a marketplace for deadstock fabrics for upcycling fashion designers. But a few years and many learnings later, we pivoted and focused on the recycling story for two reasons. First, we discovered that deadstock fabric isn’t such a problematic waste stream, and although there is a lack of transparency and efficiency, there is already a functional market for such materials. And second, we saw that it is not so much value that we can give as a 3-rd party platform (the market barriers were too high). But we found an angle with recyclable waste where companies cannot fully solve the problem between themselves one-on-one, and a digital platform is critical to support the market scaleup.
Can you provide an overview of Reverse Resources and its mission? How does the company contribute to sustainability and resource efficiency?
Reverse Resources’ mission is to shift the textile industry towards using textile waste as a sustainable source of fibre by growing and supporting the market with a feasible business case. We do this by digitally mapping textile waste flows, building data-driven textile waste supply chains, and enabling real-time collaboration among all industry stakeholders. In practice, it means that today garment factories can use our software to register in real time how much of which waste is generated from their cutting table while segregating waste by composition and colour for recyclers. Brands can see how much of their waste is available for recycling and nominate recyclers they want to work with. Recyclers can source the waste through well-planned route with least cost and highest quality and collaborate with waste handlers to help them pick up, aggregate and check the waste quality before shipments. We have reconstructed the supply chain processes and data management in such a way that there is a win-win benefit for all sides, and the data generated from the platform can be used by industry associations and public sector to discover market barriers and support the scale-up of textile circulation. Today we trace around 800 tonnes/month of textile waste movement to textile-to-textile recyclers in real time in six countries – Bangladesh, India, Turkey, China, Indonesia and Egypt. By helping to replace virgin materials with recycled ones in fashion, last year we helped to save as much CO2 emissions as is the annual footprint of 10,000 people.