Lounais-Suomen Jätehuolto (LSJH) is planning a refinement plant that will process all of Finland’s post-consumer textiles and will enable household textile recycling in Finland.

End-of-life textile refinement will be started on the pilot-stage processing line, which will be opened in Paimio’s Green Field Hub in June 2021. Rester Oy, a company that processes industrial end-of-life textiles, will operate under the same roof.

LSJH’s processing line can process as many as five million kilos of textile per year. Recycled fibres are used for making new products, such as clothes, non-woven fabric, or insulating material. Part of the collected end-of-life textiles end up in reuse by, for example, small manufacturers. The end-of-life textiles that cannot be recycled will be used in energy production.

Refining end-of-life textile into recycled fibres enables versatile partnerships in end-of-life textile collection, sorting, and use of recycled fibres.

In the first stage, the collection has expanded from the LSJH operating area to four other municipal waste management companies’ areas in Southern Finland. Research and development have been conducted in extensive cooperation with the Telaketju network and many other operators in Finland and Europe.

In the second stage, the collection is expanded further to other waste management companies’ areas. Additionally, LSJH will pilot supplementary collections, such as the KAMU collection at shopping centres, clothing stores, and flea markets during 2021.

Collected end-of-life textiles will be processed on Paimio’s pilot-stage processing line, which will start operating in 2021. Test runs and pilot projects with businesses will be conducted on the pilot-stage processing line, aiming for product development using recycled fibres.

The third stage will involve preparing to launch a refinement plant in the Topinpuisto circular economy hub in Turku. The aim is to make end-of-life textile collection national by 2023 and to make the refinement plant’s capacity meet Finland’s entire post-consumer end-of-life textile processing needs. Additionally, the aim is to offer processing services for other areas in the Baltic Sea region.

Read the report here (in Finnish).