European Commission. He said: “Without massive investment, it remains a dream and not the reality. So there is a need to rethink the way to finance this industrialisation by filling the gap between existing market conditions, helping circular textile industries to move to a sustainable situation.” He returned to the issue of price


Maria Arkerfeldt (left) from H&M Group speaking during a panel discussion, alongside Patricia Moñino Amorós from Accelerating Circularity. Image: AMI


sorting,” she said. Reju is one company that is already heading down the recycling road and has strong financial help for its journey in polyester recycling from its owner Technip Energies. Patrick Frisk, CEO of Reju, said “enormous amounts of capital” are needed to build the textiles recycling industry, along with multiple technical skills to make the recycling value chain work. “If you go into this thinking you are


going to get there without being commit- ted to the whole system, from waste aggregation all the way to reintroduction into the supply chain, you would fail, you would absolutely fail,” he said. Frisk’s colleague Alain Poincheval – who is COO at Reju, but made an address as Chairman of the ReHubs industry collabora- tion platform – spoke of the opportunity and challenge in textile recycling’s develop- ment, but also the responsibility to change from a linear model to a circular one. This will not be easy as the linear model is very cost-efficient. “From the oil well to the bin, you cannot imagine the level of technology humankind has developed,” he said.


Stakeholder collaboration To change the model “the key players in circularity have to work in a collaborative mode, not like today,” said Poincheval. “Collaboration means creating win-win situations between all the stakeholders, between the upstream parts, between the recycling parts, between the brands parts, between the yarns, the fabrics. All that is possible if we install and create an environment of collaboration.” But this high level of collaboration needs to be incentivised and stimulated, which is the responsibility of policymakers like the


disparity between virgin and recycled materials. Recycled polyester is “competing against a commodity heavily subsidised for 50 years by the oil and gas industry at the level of hundreds of billions of dollars”. Financial support for recycling is currently coming from the private sector, he said, but “it cannot continue like that. There is a need for Europe to leverage all the mechanisms to generate the pool of money which will be a trigger to this industrialisation and to build this infrastructure.”


Brand views Clothing retail brands H&M Group and Decathlon took part in a panel discussion on the second day of the conference. Maria Arkerfeldt, Global Public Affairs Lead for Circularity and Chemicals at H&M, said that in 2024, the group had reached a level of 29.5% of recycled materials in its products and expects that to reach 50% in 2030. In order to achieve this, it is investing in companies to help fill gaps in the recycling sector.


On the panel, Louisa Hoyes, Segment


Director at sorting technology company Tomra, referred to the “hype cycle” graph and that textiles recycling had been on an upward curve in recent years. “We kind of got to the top of that ramp when we realised there is a lot of investment that’s needed, there is a lot of change that needs to happen, there is a completely new infra- structure that needs to be set up,” she said. Ana Rodes, Head of Sustainability at


Recover said brands are waiting for EU policy to be implemented, which she said was frustrating. “My call to action to brands that are here in the room today is, let’s just start because this is not something you can


“We’re looking at recycled content as an ecodesign measure, which we feel is a critical step to drive demand for recycled content”


Maria Arkerfeldt, H&M Group


achieve overnight.” Panel moderator Patricia Moñino


Amorós, EU Program Director at Accelerat- ing Circularity, wondered: is this an opportunity for brands to show leadership and to differentiate through their sustain- ability agenda and embed recycled content into their core collections? Arkerfeldt said H&M is not diverging


from its sustainability agenda, even with trade and economic uncertainties around the world. “We need it for our business resilience – that’s important to remember.”


Regulatory concerns She also warned that EU regulation should not be rushed. “I’d like to point out that the EU Green Deal has still not been properly implemented in our sector,” she said. “So we are still working on its implementation actively. That will still come. What I see now is that we have a moment to pause and make sure we get all the components right. I think we are all in a rush to get it in place as soon as possible, but it is critical that it comes right.” H&M is actively contributing to work on


the EU Green Deal focussing on parts of the textile value chain not covered before. “We’re looking at recycled content as an ecodesign measure, for example, which we feel is a critical step to drive demand for recycled content,” said Arkerfeldt. “We think it should be done preferably on a company portfolio level as a target and it should include post-industrial waste as well. This is to make sure that the targets actually push it in the right way.” Bouraoui Kechiche, Textile to Textile


Project Manager at Decathlon France, stressed that recycled materials need to be competitive. “Consumers today are not ready to pay for sustainability, they are looking for the price. As brands, we need to find solutions in the textiles industry to make it affordable for the consumer,” he said. Hoyes said: “I think the biggest challenge is that there are so many different moving pieces. Someone asked the question, who should take action first? I don’t think there should be one person to go first. That’s the challenge, everybody needs to move at the same time, everybody needs to be co-ordi- nated. If a recycling technology scales a plant, then a sorting plant scales simultane- ously to provide the feedstock.” “I agree,” said Akerfeldt. “It is the complexity itself that is challenging.”


Textiles Loop • Autumn 2025 23


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