We are part of the building of circular economy plant in Finland

The Finnish circular economy company, Rester Ltd. is building a removal textile plant to Paimio and will be completed in the beginning of 2021. The plant will enable closed-loop services for the customers’ removal textiles and also the manufacturing of new raw material from the removal textiles. Behind the initiative, stands a group of textile industry’s forerunners such as workwear company Touchpoint and Pure Waste which manufactures garments from cutting waste.

Similarly, as globally, in Finland the enormous amount of removal textile is caused. Annually in Scandinavia, the estimated amount of removal textile which is ending up to waste is approximately 350 million kilos. Finland’s account for this is approximately 100 million kilos, from which approximately 80% ends up to incinerated. These numbers include both consumers’ and companies’ removal textiles. Along with the EU directive, in 2025 reforming waste act obliges public actors to attend to households’ removal textile recycling. The aim of Rester Ltd.’s forthcoming plant is to ensure the processing of companies’ removal textile by sustainable development methods. The circular economy plant is focusing on manufacturing new raw material and its processing capacity is 6,000 ton of removal textile per annum.

The forthcoming circular economy plant is a considerable initiative in entire Nordic countries and a great investment to sustainable development.

– We are striving for solution by building a new type of circular economy plant in order to be able to exploit the removal textiles as a new raw material instead of discarding them as environment polluting wastes. The aim is to create secondary market for the waste which has been economically untapped until now, states Outi Luukko the CEO of Touchpoint and the Chairman of the Board of Rester Ltd.

From the workwear company Touchpoint’s viewpoint, the circular economy plant is not only wisdom in resource but also necessary in terms of sustainable life cycle workwear collections.

– The fact that in future we are able to recycle the manufactured garments “just around the corner”, in Finland, into new raw material, is in our opinion an enormous stride into right direction, Luukko continues.

As the part of the forthcoming plant in Paimio, is becoming also a pilot project by waste management of southwest Finland (LSJH), wherein the removal textile collected from the households will be processed likewise into industrial raw material to develop new recycling products. The aim is that in phases every public waste processing plant will be attending to this pilot project. The collection network for removal textile will be expanded to nationwide within 2020-2022. LSJH’s and Rester Ltd.’s initiatives are striving for speeding up and enabling the circular economy service models more widely. Processed raw material can be exploited in various industries as a production material.

– The city of Paimio is warmly welcoming Rester Ltd. to Paimio. The work done by Rester as developing textile recycling technology is one of the solutions how the climate change is strived to control in the future. The city of Paimio is also strongly committed to finding sustainable development solutions in its operations, states the city manager Jari Jussinmäki.