Rester and Lindström launch cooperation on Nordic’s first industrial-scale waste textile refining business
Touchpoint's daughter company Rester will start processing Lindström’s workwear clothes, restaurant textiles, and possibly also cotton towel rolls for industrial reuse at the Paimio processing plant in Finland in early 2021. The cooperation will cover all of Lindström’s Finnish business units. The annual amount of waste textile processed through Rester will be about 500 tons per year, of which 4/5 consists of workwear.
The cooperation between Lindström and Rester on the processing of waste textiles is a kick-start for the systemic change in the textile industry and unique in the entire Nordics. At the heart of the agreement are Lindström’s end-of-life workwear clothes. About 400 tons of Lindström’s workwear in Finland end up as waste textiles every year, of which only 5% can currently be recycled. Clothing is challenging to recycle because of the many different fibers and materials used in it, as well as the buttons, snaps, and zippers. Most of the waste textiles end up in incineration, i.e. are disposed mainly through energy recovery.
The Rester collaboration provides a solution to the challenge of recycling workwear: through it, almost 100% of workwear disposal textiles can be recycled. At Rester’s Paimio processing plant, textile fibers are made from waste textiles for use in the textile industry for the production of yarn and further fabric or technical textiles, or in the construction industry for the production of insulation and composite materials and acoustic panels.
“We want to be a leader in our industry in terms of sustainable development. We are happy to beat the forefront of creating a competitive circular economy business model and accelerating systemic change in the entire industry. This cooperation is a strategic partnership for us, which not only guarantees reliable, responsible, and transparent recycling of our waste textiles, but also that the optimal use of recycled fibers is actively and innovatively developed for different industries”, says Anna-Kaisa Huttunen, SVP, Ecosystems in LindströmGroup.
“Rester aims to make a decisive contribution to increasing the use of recycled textile fibers, thus replacing the use of virgin fibers. Together with third parties, we make companies’ disposal textiles recycled in an optimal way for each fraction of the raw material, and the operators who use the raw material gain added value from the circular economy through environmental savings. The Lindström partnership plays a significant role for Rester in building this value chain; the predictability of material flows and the uniformity of recyclable waste textiles provide an excellent basis for developing circular economy operations”, says Outi Luukko, Chairman of the Board of Rester, who became the company’s CEO at the beginning of January 2021.
