How Renasens is solving the EU textile industry’s blended-fibre bottleneck
The Renasens team, with founder Dr. Jade Abir Bouledjouidja second from left (photo: Renasens)
Textile recycling startup Renasens has raised €10 million in seed funding to address one of the European textile industry’s most stubborn problems: how to recycle blended fabrics at industrial scale without destroying fibre quality. The round will fund a pilot plant in Borås, Sweden, and support broader commercial rollout across Europe.
The timing matters. Since 1 January 2025, EU countries have been required to set up separate collection for textiles, while the EU’s revised Waste Framework Directive now requires member states to establish extended producer responsibility (EPR) schemes for textiles within 30 months of the directive entering into force in October 2025. In practical terms, the pressure is rising on brands, manufacturers and recyclers to find workable routes for textile-to-textile recycling.
That is easier said than done. The textile waste stream is dominated by garments made from mixed fibres such as cotton and polyester, often with dyes, coatings and finishes added along the way. These blends are common because they perform well in use and are cost-effective to produce, but they are notoriously difficult to recycle. Mechanical recycling often shortens fibres to the point where they lose value. Other recycling routes can be too resource-intensive or too difficult to integrate into existing production systems. The result is a circularity gap the industry has struggled to close for years. Less than 1 per cent of clothing is currently recycled back into new textiles, underlining how little of the waste stream makes it back into production.
A recycling process aimed at the textile industry’s hardest waste stream
Renasens says its process uses modified supercritical carbon dioxide to separate and decolour blended textiles while preserving both cotton and polyester fibres for reuse. The company describes the technology as waterless and chemical-free, and says the recovered fibres can be fed back into existing spinning and textile manufacturing systems. That point is central. The textile industry does not just need a cleaner recycling method; it needs one that can work within the constraints of mills, supply chains and commercial production.
The company’s choice of Borås for its pilot plant is also telling. Borås has long been one of Sweden’s main textile centres and remains an important location for textile innovation and circularity work. Building there ties the company to an existing industrial and research ecosystem rather than isolating the technology in a laboratory setting. It is a sign of infrastructure being built where the industry can actually use it.
Renasens has also said it is already supplying recovered fibres to manufacturers in Portugal and Italy, two of Europe’s key textile production hubs. That matters because the commercial test for any textile recycling technology is not whether it works once in controlled conditions, but whether mills and manufacturers can incorporate the output into real production. The more these recovered fibres fit into existing systems, the stronger the case for scale becomes.
Why this is good news for textile recycling in Europe
The significance of the Renasens round goes beyond one company. Textile recycling has spent years caught between ambitious sustainability targets and industrial reality. Brands have made increasingly bold promises on circularity and recycled content, but the infrastructure needed to process post-consumer blended textiles has lagged far behind. The challenge has never been a shortage of interest. It has been the difficulty of moving from pilot chemistry to repeatable industrial operations.
This is why the broader European context matters. Renasens is not the only company trying to solve the blended-fibre problem. In Switzerland, Worn Again Technologies recently unveiled its Accelerator plant. The first module is designed to recover spinnable polyester from waste textiles, including post-consumer polycotton blends sourced from Switzerland, the EU and the UK. The facility is intended to prove the technical and economic feasibility of textile-to-fibre recycling at larger scale.
A second recent example is Reju, which announced on 1 April 2026 that it had secured €135 million under the Netherlands’ NIKI industrial climate programme. The funding will support an industrial-scale textile-to-textile regeneration hub at Chemelot Industrial Park in Sittard-Geleen. While Reju is focused on polyester regeneration rather than the specific cotton-polyester separation challenge Renasens addresses, the signal is similar: serious capital is now being committed to textile recycling infrastructure in Europe, not just to research projects and demonstration pilots.
Taken together, these developments suggest Europe’s textile recycling sector is moving into a more credible phase, where the emphasis is no longer only on invention, but on throughput, cost and manufacturability.
EU regulation is making textile recycling harder to ignore
Policy is one reason the sector is becoming harder to dismiss. Separate collection of textiles is now an EU requirement, even if implementation across member states remains uneven. The revised Waste Framework Directive strengthens the system further by requiring EPR schemes for textiles and footwear. In effect, producers are being pushed to bear more of the cost of collection, sorting and recycling. That shifts textile waste from being a reputational issue to being a business and compliance issue as well.
The European Commission has also launched a new €11 million call for proposals focused on advanced recycling technologies for mixed post-consumer textile waste, with particular emphasis on blended fibres. That is a useful indicator of where policymakers see the real technical bottleneck. The policy conversation is no longer about whether textiles should be collected separately; it is about how to deal with the difficult material fractions that dominate the waste stream once collection improves.
The harder truth about scaling textile recycling
That does not mean the sector’s problems are solved. Textile recycling remains difficult to scale because the challenge is not only technological. Collection systems are inconsistent. Sorting quality varies. Feedstock is contaminated. Garments are often designed with recycling as an afterthought. And virgin fibres can still be cheaper and easier to source than recycled alternatives.
This is where a degree of realism is necessary. Renasens is tackling a real bottleneck, but no single company can fix the economics of the whole system on its own. The industry still needs better garment design, stronger offtake commitments, higher-quality sorting and more predictable demand for recycled fibres. Without those conditions, even strong recycling technologies face avoidable friction.
A more credible moment for textile-to-textile recycling
Even so, the news from Renasens is important for the wider industry because it addresses the exact issue that has repeatedly held textile recycling back: the difficulty of processing blended textiles without destroying fibre value.
After years in which textile recycling was defined by its inability to scale, Europe is beginning to produce more credible signs of industrial progress. Renasens is one of them. Worn Again is another. Reju adds further weight. None of these companies makes the sector easy. But together they show that textile-to-textile recycling is starting to move from ambition to infrastructure, which is good news for an industry that has been waiting a long time for proof that circularity can work beyond the pilot stage.
Further reading on MoveTheNeedle.news:
Tackling one of fashion’s hardest climate problems — how EverDye is rethinking colour