Resortecs (Regeneration BV)
Resortecs
Resortecs – REcycling, SORting, TEChnologieS – leads the circular transition in fashion with heat-dissolvable stitching threads and thermal disassembly systems that make recycling easy.
ID: 703099251590-72
Lobbying Activity
7 Jul 2025
Resortecs strongly supports the inclusion of municipal waste incineration, hazardous waste incineration, and landfilling in the EU Emissions Trading System (EU ETS). These waste management routes generate significant greenhouse gas emissions but currently operate outside of the EUs carbon pricing framework. This not only creates a distortion in the waste hierarchy, where disposal is financially favoured over reuse and recycling, but also undermines the EUs broader climate and circularity objectives. Incorporating these disposal options into the ETS would: Send a critical price signal that disposal is not the cheapest or most desirable end-of-life pathway; Make circular alternativesincluding repair, recycling, and design-for-disassemblymore economically attractive; Encourage brands and manufacturers to reduce residual waste through better product design and sourcing choices; Drive investment in infrastructure for sorting, dismantling, and advanced recycling. For circularity to scale, ETS and EPR mechanisms must work in synergy. EPR alone, while an important tool to hold producers financially accountable for the end-of-life impacts of their products, is insufficient if disposal remains economically preferable. Without a cost associated with incineration and landfilling, EPR fees risk becoming another operational cost for producers, rather than a true incentive to innovate and redesign. By pricing waste disposal under the ETS, the EU would: Reinforce the effectiveness of EPR schemes by increasing the cost differential between disposal and recycling; Enable better eco-modulation of EPR fees based on design performance (e.g., recyclability, dismantlability); Ensure producers are not only responsible for the volume of waste but are actively incentivised to reduce it. Textile waste offers a clear example. It is one of the fastest-growing municipal waste streams in Europe, yet more than half of it is incinerated. Less than 1% is recycled into new textiles. Without a cost on incineration or landfill, there is little economic motivation to scale design-for-disassembly technologies or invest in high-quality textile-to-textile recycling. Including MWI and landfill under the ETS would directly support this transition. Crucially, the ETS must not treat municipal waste as a homogenous category. Differentiating by waste stream (e.g., textiles, plastics, food waste) allows for more targeted policy outcomes. Waste types with higher circular potential, such as textiles, should be clearly recognised and tracked. This granularity is necessary for fair and effective implementation. Best practices from Member States provide real-world evidence of the effectiveness of disposal pricing. In Flanders (Belgium) and the Netherlands, where landfill bans and incineration taxes are in place, incineration rates are below 150 kg per capita. In contrast, countries without such fiscal signals, like France and Spain, exceed 200 kg per capita. These differences highlight the power of well-designed pricing tools to shift behaviour and drive upstream change. For complex waste streams, mass-balance methodologies and robust monitoring, reporting, and verification (MRV) systems can be applied to ensure accurate and equitable emissions accounting. Such systems can also prevent leakage and avoid unfair penalisation of mixed or hard-to-sort waste. To fully realise the ambitions of the EU Green Deal, the Circular Economy Action Plan, and the revised Waste Framework Directive, it is imperative that disposal is no longer the path of least resistance. A carbon price on incineration and landfilling is not only an environmental necessityit is a strategic enabler of circular innovation, industrial resilience, and fair market transformation. As a circular innovation company, Resortecs would welcome the opportunity to further contribute to this policy discussion and share insights from our design-for-disassembly pilots and industry collaboration across Europe.
Read full responseMeeting with Jakop G. Dalunde (Member of the European Parliament)
4 Dec 2023 · CLEANTECH FRIENDSHIP GROUP
Response to Waste Framework review to reduce waste and the environmental impact of waste management
20 Nov 2023
Resortecs supports the modernization of the waste management framework in the textiles industry, vital to make circularity and innovation the norm. This is an important step towards realizing the European Commissions 2030 vision for a competitive, resilient and innovative textiles sector, particularly so that all textile products placed on the EU market are ecodesigned, sustainable and with producers taking responsibility for their products along the value chain with sufficient capacities for recycling, minimal incineration and landfilling. To achieve this ambitious vision, Europe must unlock industrial-scale textile circularity. The EU currently generates 12.6 million tonnes of textile waste per year, with the most common practice being to sell for reuse on global markets or to recycle - however, these treatment methods still only account for 38% textiles collected in the EU annually. Yet, over 78% of all textile products are multi-material, combining different fabrics and including zippers and trims like elastic bands that could hinder recycling unless they are extracted and sorted in a pre-recycling disassembly process. Disassembly is still a manual and costly process, resulting in material loss, with most textile waste going to incineration, landfill in Europe or abroad whilst most new textiles products continue to be manufactured from scratch. Design for disassembly is key to unleash the full potential of textile-to-textile recycling and circularity. Even with ideal infrastructure, most textile products on the market would remain too complex or expensive to recycle, upcycle or repair once they become waste because they are not designed for disassembly. Resortecs design-for-disassembly innovations - a range of heat-dissolvable threads (Smart Stitch) and thermal disassembly system (Smart Disassembly) - helps to replace textiles designed for waste with textiles ecodesigned for disassembly, thereby enabling material recovery for high-quality recycling, upcycling, repair, and reuse as well as waste prevention. By incorporating releasable fasteners, such as Resortecs Smart Stitch, design for disassembly enables an automatic, non-destructive and economic industrial disassembly process that segregates components and materials of a product at its end-of-life, which in turn enables reuse, repair, upcycling and high-quality recycling. Resortecs supports the calls on the EU institutions to build a holistic policy framework that promotes circular textiles, design for disassembly and the scaling-up of circular innovations, the importance of which is stressed in the Transition Pathway for the Textiles Ecosystem. To achieve full textile circularity, it is vital to promote investments that scale-up textile recycling capacity, including design for disassembly, to increase material efficiency, prolong materials lifecycles, and unlock industrial-scale textiles-to-textiles and fibre-to-fibre recycling. These innovations, so-called pre-recycling techniques, should be recognised as vital to deliver the waste hierarchy principles in practice. In addition, mandatory and harmonised extended producer responsibility schemes, fostered by ecomodulation, will ensure responsibility on the producers side. Resortecs urges the European Commission to (1) swiftly introduce mandatory and harmonised Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) schemes for textile products across the EU, (2) ensure that Extended Producer Responsibility fees are eco-modulated to incentivise producers to ecodesign their products, by including design for disassembly as a criterion in the revised WFD and the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR) to ensure coherence, and (3) to recognize and support so-called pre-recycling techniques that are preconditions to effective circular operations, such as sorting and disassembly, as they will ensure implementation of the waste hierarchy principles in practice.
Read full response