The textile industry and Catalan fashion coordinate to promote a more circular fashion

Within the framework of the Pact for Circular Fashion of Catalonia, six companies associated with the Catalan Fashion Cluster (Modacc) and 8 companies in the Catalan textile industrial sector will start a project for the industrialization of the post-consumer recycled textile value chain thanks to a grant received from the Catalan Waste Agency, from the Department of Climate Action, Food and Rural Agenda (DACC) of the Generalitat de Catalunya, as part of the circular economy promotion call recently awarded.

The companies Mango, Boboli, Simorra, Sita Murt/, System Action and Yerse will focus on including secondary material in their new collections working in collaboration with the entire value chain of the Catalan textile industry, which will be responsible to make this reality possible, that is to say, take advantage of post-consumer textile waste and use it to make a product that will eventually go on the market.

The industrial process to be developed will begin with the collection of used clothing by Solidança and its classification using Picvisa technology operated by Coleo. Subsequently, the clothing will be shredded and turned into lint in Triturats la Canya, and then the spinning process will be carried out by various companies such as Hilaturas Jesús Rubio, Hilosa, Pagès Valentí and Planafil. Finally, Textil BCH will be the company in charge of manufacturing the fabrics and the finishing will be carried out by Estampados DAMF, and the manufacturing will be carried out at the Coleo company.
Modacc, the Catalan Fashion Cluster, a non-profit organization that integrates almost 150 companies that carry out their activity around the fashion business in Catalonia and represents 6,000 workers and 2,000 million euros of aggregate turnover; It has been a fundamental part of the development of the project and will be one of the driving agents.

Datambient, the consulting company specialized in the field of waste, has also been a key player in the development of this initiative and will be in charge of managing the industrial process of the project.

The main objective for fashion brands is to obtain products made with secondary textile material of sufficient quality to be introduced into the market. For this reason, products likely to incorporate secondary raw material, obtained from clothing collected in containers, will be studied and analyzed to replace the virgin material currently used. The most appropriate strategies will also be worked on depending on each product to be developed. For brands that are in the initial phases in the world of circularity, a team of experts will advise and accompany them with the aim of ecodesign becoming a systemic practice of design teams.

Thanks to this initiative, some of the participating brands will begin a process of collecting post-consumer clothing items at their points of sale, which will be used in these new design processes, called 'Take Back'.

In relation to the industrial aspect, the objective of this project is to categorize, standardize and homogenize the industrialization process of post-consumer textile recycling throughout its chain, integrating all phases and actors, in order to allow a significant, constant and recurring secondary raw material. This will facilitate the placing of 10,000 pieces of clothing on the consumer market in this first phase, as a result of the execution of the project.
The incorporation of these changes will allow companies not only to position themselves in terms of circularity, but also to adapt their design, industrial and commercial management processes to the new legislative requirements linked to Extended Producer Responsibility, the Ecodesign directive and the Green Claim .

The inaugural meeting of the project took place last Friday, December 15 at the Mango facilities and was attended by the ARC and other DACC officials, as well as representatives of all the companies and brands participating in the project. The session began this initiative that is scheduled to end in December 2025 and that will promote the development of the post-consumer textile value chain as a secondary raw material for the fashion industry in Catalonia.

This project has been generated within the framework of the Pact for Circular Fashion in Catalonia, promoted by the DACC, which has the will to add and coordinate the efforts of all actors in the textile value chain to respond jointly and effective to the challenges of the sector, establishing common objectives and generating instruments that make the transformation towards a circular model possible.