Renewcell
Assembly Line
This Startup Promised to Help Fashion Go Green. Brands Didn’t Want to Pay for It.
Last month, the company, Renewcell, filed for bankruptcy. While some big retailers, including H&M and Zara, were enthusiastic backers, not enough brands committed to buying its material. Having misjudged how quickly the fashion industry would switch to more sustainable sourcing, the company was left with a costly factory running far below capacity.
The plight of Renewcell illustrates the fashion industry’s hesitancy in adopting new materials that may be better for the environment but typically cost more, at least in the short term. It is also another sign of how some companies are putting less emphasis on green initiatives amid a more challenging economic climate.
ABB’s Paper Mill Technology Helps Renewcell Turn Old Clothes Into New Fabrics
In recent years, the pulp and paper industry has gone from having a reputation of being dirty and environmentally unfriendly to being a leader in sustainability and pollution control. Now the technologies that enabled that transition are being used to help the textile industry too. And the players involved are restarting a shuttered paper mill in Sweden to make it happen, once more providing good-paying jobs for the area.
Renewcell is the Sweden-based scaleup at the center of it all. The company developed a sustainable process that recycles waste textiles into a product called Circulose, whose name is the tip-off that it’s aimed at making fashion circular.