• Galician companies, technology centers and universities join this initiative, which seeks to promote research activity and provide Galicia with a pilot plant, to verify innovative technology that can provide a solution to the problem of post-consumer textile waste.
Ence Energía y Celulosa promotes the creation of the “Galego Consortium for Post-consumer Textile Chemical Recycling” from the town of As Pontes in A Coruña, where the company is developing a pilot project for the recycling of textiles, as part of its bioplant project for the production of recycled and bleached cellulose.
The company is committed to promoting an Industrial Innovation Pole in As Pontes. In this sense, this regional consortium will bring together the knowledge and experience of different Galician companies, technology centers and universities, to jointly develop I+D+i activities focused on the chemical recycling of post-consumer textiles.
Specifically, the entities that will initially be part of this Galician Consortium are the Swedish startup ShareTex (with which Ence has recently signed a memorandum of understanding for the development of its textile recycling process project on a pilot scale), the Research Center Interdisciplinary in Environmental Technologies of the University of Santiago de Compostela (CRETUS), the EQ2 group of the University of Vigo, CETIM Technological Center, AIMEN Technological Center and the companies in the textile recycling sector Insertega and Coleo.
Chemical recycling makes it possible to recover a greater range of materials than mechanical recycling, such as those whose composition presents a mixture of components (as happens in most textile products), integrating them back into the textile value chain or into high-quality products. value added. Therefore, the activity of this Galician consortium, as well as the initiative in As Pontes, complement other existing recycling processes, creating a way to increase recycling capacity in the region (and the country) in order to meet environmental objectives. of the European Union, for example directive 2018/51, and offer a broader solution to the growing generation of textile waste.
The fundamental objective of this initiative is, therefore, to promote research activity to solve this problem and provide Galicia with a pilot plant to verify the viability of scaling these innovative and sustainable recycling technologies. This technology also opens the door to the possibility of building a commercial plant in the future that absorbs the regional impact of the current increase in the generation of textile waste that cannot be recycled using other technologies already implemented in the industry.
The project is also aligned with the strategy of the Ence group, which is committed to minimizing the use of natural resources in all its projects and developments. In fact, the bioplant that the company is developing in As Pontes follows these same premises and, thus, occupies an industrial land (without affecting natural spaces and guaranteeing the protection of biodiversity), does not use wood (without therefore increasing the demand for eucalyptus surface, in line with the demands of society) and has minimal water consumption (fifteen times less than that of a virgin pulp mill). Likewise, this facility will be self-sufficient in renewable energy and presents new potential thanks to the recovery of biogenic CO2 for use in the production of biofuels.
