TexCycle in Bulgaria: textile sorting, recycling and upcycling under one roof
How can fashion truly be kept in circulation? A visit to the TexCycle sorting and recycling plant in the Bulgarian port city of Varna showed what it means to sort
60 tons
To help picture how much 60 tons are: A heavy household washing machine weighs about 100 kilograms; ten of those make up a ton and 600(!) of those 60 tons.
FashionUnited took a look at the process at the textile sorting and recycling facility, which employs 250 people. Sirma Zheleva, a circular economy expert and head of sustainability at TexCycle, gave FashionUnited a guided tour of the facility.
The sorting flow
The process begins where the materials come in - collected from the company’s containers that are distributed all over the country but this is the smallest percentage - about 5 percent. The bulk comes from markets like Scandinavia, Germany, the Netherlands, which next to the US market also supply some of the best quality post-consumer garments. TexCycle also works with a few brands and takes their unsold goods or unsold returns.
At the first-stage sorting station on the first floor, the collected garments are sorted by type of item - t-shirts, pants, dresses, and so on. „We don't check for quality here, that is done at fine sorting,“ explains Zheleva and points to a conveyor belt that transports the items from the first floor to the main factory floor, which employs the largest amount of people. While transporting the items may be automated, sorting cannot be as it is very detailed.
“Training each person how to sort efficiently and correctly to our own coding system, which uses colours for easy identification, takes about three to six months,” says Zheleva. “Only a trained person can recognise if an item is reusable, for which market it is reusable, and what quality it is,” she adds. “We finish with something like 450 different articles, according to the season, according to the vendor.”
Can AI help? Zheleva laughs. “We also tried some new machineries with artificial intelligence, but at this stage, it is only a human who can decide. It has been determined that artificial intelligence needs to develop a little bit more.”
After all, this is sorting for reuse; about 50 percent of the 60 tons can be reused - in second-hand stores and wherever the distributors that TexCycle sells to may use them. “We also have a few second-hand shops in Bulgaria, under the name of Shano, but we are mainly focused on wholesale,“ explains Zheleva.
While it helps when a label is still attached to a garment or textile, many times it has become unreadable after too many washes. Plus, reading it is time-consuming. After all, each sorter has only seconds to spend with each item, not minutes. “In the future, we may rely more on digital product passports (DPPs). We currently have some pilot projects to test different technologies because DPPs will be more useful for sorting and recycling, we can check more information with them, digitally, which is less time-consuming,” reveals Zheleva.
A tangible nugget of information is the quality check - a good sorter will know just by the feel of a garment if its quality is good enough for reuse or not. “Quality is something which one just feels, we do not check this in the label. It is invisible,” states Zheleva.
It is at the fine sorting stage also where white textiles that are unfit for reuse are kept aside for recycling. “White is very in demand for recycling,” shares Zheleva. Apart from the highly skilled sorters, there are also quality controllers who verify the sorting and check for specifics.
Despite the large amount of garments and textiles and the hot day in late summer, the sorting hall is cool and airy. The high ceiling helps but also the air conditioning.
After sorting, there is the packaging area where items are packed in bags of about 15 to 25 kilograms each for the local market - “local” meaning not only Bulgaria, but also Greece, Romania and the rest of Europe as Zheleva explains. Turkey, though a neighbouring country, is missing from this list due to legal limitations that forbid the import of secondhand clothing to Turkey.
Then there is the baling of items, which is used for those that go for longer distances - to Africa, Chile, and Asia. To be clear - this is specific second-hand clothing that has been requested by wholesale clients, not textile waste to be dumped in landfills.
“Provide customers with exactly what they need”
In fact, none of the textiles processed here goes to landfill, which has to do with TexCycle’s business philosophy: “Provide the customers with exactly what they need,” says the sustainability expert.
“Our main clients are distributors or second-hand retail shops. Let’s say one product we sell to them is ‘women’s summer clothes, in XXL sizes, extra quality’. They know they will get a certain weight of clothes that match these criteria and are able to sell them to their customers. If we provide our clients with just a bag of mixed clothing, they do not need half of it. This would then be an issue for them and us,” illustrates Zheleva.
She explains that companies like TexCycle suffer from the popular narrative of western brands dumping their clothing waste in Africa. “The reality is that more than 60 percent of the material coming to Africa is not from Europe. It comes from China, America. But unfortunately, the narrative is that Europe is disposing its waste in Africa and that is hampering business. Sometimes, for example, we start projects with brands, and they may give us this limitation, ‘do not export to Africa’. There may be a demand for exactly those clothes in Africa, but no, we cannot export what we have collected from the brand because of the limitation.”
A percentage of what cannot be put aside for reuse through second hand goes for recycling - denim, whites, filling materials. Special demand is there from other industries for non-reusable parts of clothing that have good absorbent qualities. TexCycle cuts those into pieces with special sizes, sorts them by colour and packs them in ten kilos packages, to be used by industries like the ship repair yard in Varna, car manufacturing or car repair. “They need large quantities of those recycled rags, it is better for the environment to use these than to produce new ones but it is not the most glamorous recycling story.”
Clothes and textiles that absolutely cannot be reused, repurposed, recycled or upcycled - about 15 percent - go for “energy recovery” - meaning they get burned while recovering the energy, at a cement factory close to Varna for example. “It is not the best solution, but it is still better than disposing,” says Zheleva. “After all, what can be recycled and what cannot be recycled is not up to us. It is up to the design of the product.”
Competition from China destroys margins
Other problems facing the second-hand market are that the margins for second-hand clothing are becoming slimmer. “Even in the local market, because Eastern Europe is a second-hand market with a long history, meaning second hand has always been popular due to economical reasons and also because certain brands were not available first-hand. Now, unfortunately, we see the market decreasing and we think the main reason for that is companies like Shein and Temu. Because due to their low pricing, items in second-hand shops are more expensive than new items. In Bulgaria, you can buy new items from Shein and Temu for, let’s say, one, two euros, whereas in the second-hand shops, it is two or three euros,” laments Zheleva.
“We can already feel the repercussions from that in our distribution centres - people stop buying t-shirts and dresses from us, which are Shein’s most typical items. Earlier, these categories were very much in demand. We tried to address this locally with the authorities but they said it is not up to them as the bulk of packages from Chinese online platforms comes through bigger markets like Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, France… The EU Commission announced that they are planning some measures to remove the exemption from customs duties because at the moment, they are not even paying taxes on orders under 150 euros.”
“We joke that even our sorters buy from Shein. It’s affordable, it’s stylish, you can’t blame them,” says Zheleva. “There is a need for people to express themselves through their clothes. We want to be stylish, we want to wear something new but there needs to be a better way to do this. The item does not have to be new, it does not have to be owned. I think the model needs to change, fashion needs to become more circular. If I am wearing a shirt today, somebody else can wear it tomorrow.”
For her, the solution lies in educating people about the consequences of their purchasing decisions. That is why TexCycle is planning an event for the public in Varna’s city centre with different events and interactive tools that will make people aware in a playful way, children and adults alike.
Fast fashion and ultra fast fashion lead to another problem: The decreasing quality of the garments. “That is a common complaint nowadays, the cheapness of the raw materials and cutting corners and costs everywhere,” confirms Zheleva. “This causes problems for circular textile providers like TexCycle. Reuse is the most cost-effective and environmentally beneficial way to handle discarded clothing but lower quality diminishes the lifespan - and therefore the reusability of the items and overall value.”
The upcycling atelier
For those items that are of good quality but for some reason did not make it to one of the wholesalers, there is the in-house repair and upcycling atelier. Here, expensive or good quality items get repaired and then resold or turned into jackets and bags upcycled from various high-quality items. This is also where the zippers and buttons from sorting go - everything gets reused.
“It is at small scale,” says Zheleva about the upcycling project, “it is more to raise awareness, making something beautiful out waste textiles and garments,” she adds.
The textile-to-textile recycling flow
A few hundred meters away from the sorting facility is the mechanical recycling facility. “Four years ago, we decided to invest in recycling. We ordered the technology and started pilot projects. We are still in the learning phase but financially, it is tough,” recounts Zheleva.
“Because the second-hand business is suffering financially, it cannot cover the the losses of the recycling. I personally, of course, believe in recycling and we are doing our best to speak with both spinners and non-woven producers to find ways to continue this activity. But unfortunately, there are no government subsidies either,” laments the recycling enthusiast.
“There should be because this is future proof and the work we are doing is important. In the Netherlands, for example, the EPR system subsidises mainly local sorters and collectors. We spoke to some people who plan to extend the subsidies for all. It is a bit funny that we can take subsidies from the Netherlands but not from here. We are also as backed by the association, we are part of EURIC, the European Association of Recyclers. But that funding is more for light measures, like policy making, not for equipment. Any investment in equipment is our own,” explains Zheleva.
Around ten percent of the imported material is going to the recycling plant. Mainly white or undyed cotton is ideal for fibre-to-fibre recycling, but TexCycle is also doing trials with spinning cotton polyester or poly-cotton clothing. “The results were quite good, even when dyed over, but it was only project-based,” says Zheleva.
Pricing is also an issue. “This morning, we had a conversation with a spinner from Spain, and he gave us very good feedback for the quality, but the price becomes the problem. Because when we run this model, the capacity of the line declines from 1 ton to 400 kilograms, something like that, so then the cost goes up, plus transportation costs, etc, so it becomes too expensive,” reports Zheleva.
She suggests for brands and spinners to give coloured poly-cotton fibres a try. “In some projects, we do not sort by specific colours, only light colours and dark colours. At the end, there won't be the perfect colour at the end, a kind of greyish-blue, but it could become a new trend also. It is just again how you spin it (pun intended), how you market it. If you remember, for example, the first recycled paper, it was looking quite ugly but now it looks better, almost indistinguishable from new paper,” explains Zheleva.
“We are hoping for the ESPR (ed. Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation, which aims to significantly improve the sustainability of products placed on the EU market by improving their circularity, energy performance, recyclability and durability). With changes made right at the design of the clothing and an increase in recycled content, that should push the demand for textile-to-textile recycling. The legislation is pointing in the right direction.”
Again, Turkey with its spinning mills just a few hundred kilometres away, is not in picture due to bureaucratic reasons and legislation limitations that prevent the export of recycled fibres for spinning from Bulgaria to Turkey.
The sustainability expert affirms the question that there is much interest in the facility from potential clients in Europe who come and take tours but nobody seems to want to make the first move. “My feeling is that everybody is waiting for something to happen, while we decided to invest but we don't have a stable market at the moment, which is a bit stressful”, admits Zheleva.
Another problem is brands hiding behind complex supply chains. “Some of the brands we work with use sewing factories in Bulgaria, so we offered to contact them to take their waste, but the brands don't care, they say, ‘they are not exactly ours, they are not tier 2’. That is the standard excuse, nobody takes responsibility. Ultimately, you have to take responsibility, you definitely have influence as a buyer. Of course, there are also positive examples in the field. Some brands have decided to really control their supply chains, and have asked them to separate their production waste, which they even pay a little bit more for,” confirms Zheleva.
From 1st January next year, Bulgaria will also be introducing the euro as its official currency, doing away with the lev. For Zheleva, this is not a concern. “We have been into a currency board for years and were fixed to the euro. There will be some bureaucratic changes, like adapting our software, invoicing and the cash machines but I don't expect any problems. At the end of the day, we are a company that is very much import-/export-oriented. Our main suppliers have been paying in euros for years, some in US dollars. I think in the long run, it will make things easier, at least within Europe, to have just one currency.
TexCycle follows an open door policy, meaning anyone who is interested can come and tour the facilities. For Zheleva, education is key: “People see the containers, they see the second-hand shops, but what happens in between, they have no idea. We want to change that. When people visit the sorting centre, they are always amazed, nobody really considers what is happening inside. The reactions are very interesting for me. We want to show the reality and help people when they make that decision to give clothes for donation. As TexCycle, we also give to some NGOs but they need special types of clothing at special times. Most of the time, we are asked not to bring clothes to them but to take clothes from them because they are flooded with unnecessary items. That is something we try to explain, how to donate responsibly.”
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