The DBL Böge Textil-Service GmbH & Co. KG for rental workwear has teamed up with the textile recycler Soex Group to recycle discarded workwear in an ecologically sensible manner and thus save it from incineration, which was often the only option up to now for safety reasons and data protection.
“If individualized workwear with company emblems, name tags or patches falls into the wrong hands, unauthorized persons could pretend to be employees of a company and gain unauthorized access to companies,” explains Bärbel Fink, Managing Director of Böge Textil-Service GmbH & Co. KG, in a statement.
Now the used workwear that can no longer be worn is first sorted by color and material by the Soex Group using an infrared sorting station at the Soex plant in Wolfen. This is then reused in yarn production. The part of the workwear that is no longer suitable for this is recycled into shredded fibers and then reused as insulating material in the automotive and construction industries.
Workwear becomes yarn or shredded fibers
A number of professional groups are dependent on being equipped with special work clothing, which not only serves as a uniform for certain professional groups, but often also meets high protection requirements and serves a special purpose. However, the valuable material resources used are mostly discarded and the worn textiles destroyed.
The cooperation between the Soex Group and DBL Böge began a few months ago as a pilot project and has now been consolidated in order to add these resources back to the textile cycle and reduce the mountains of rubbish. In this way, 25 tons of clothing are to be put to sustainable use every year.
Fink will present the project to the other DBL plants and has already won DBL Wulff in Kiel and DBL Richter in Gochsheim to work with Soex. Other DBL plants are to follow.