It’s not just Vietnam debating whether to allow waste to flow across borders, notes Janmark. “This is an ongoing discussion in the regulatory circuit,” he says. “But once waste is properly sorted into something we can use, it shouldn’t be classified as waste; it should be considered a raw material.”
Spanish recycler Coleo is taking a different tack. It recently established a waste sorting and pre-processing facility in Toulouse, taking advantage of the fact that France is already paying for this process under its extended producer responsibility (EPR) scheme. “You get euros for every ton of post-consumer textile waste you process,” explains head of strategy Marc Puyuelo Huguet. “Then, you get an extra success fee if you can prove that your finished product is sold to a recycler. We mostly sell to our own mechanical recycling hub in Spain, which helps.”
On the recycling side, Spain is an advantageous location, because there is already a strong culture of reuse, he adds, which makes it easier to get permits for recycling plants, and cheaper to get those plants insured.
Choosing the exact plot
Once a startup decides which country to put its roots in, it should secure a specific site. This is just as complex, says Nobelius. “We started searching for industrial parks, because they’re used to the permit process and already have the infrastructure on-site, like roads, substations, energy and potentially even residential housing,” he says. “We wanted to work with a site that has chemical plants and knows how to handle chemicals.” Nobelius has personally visited dozens of industrial parks across Vietnam, and will make a final decision in the coming weeks.
Some companies have developed an exact framework for sourcing production sites. “These decisions are not trivial,” says Circ co-founder and CEO Peter Majeranowski, who uses a system called “frontend loading” to decide. “You’re putting a lot of capital in the ground that you can’t easily move. You’re building an asset that will last at least 30 years. At every stage of the engineering and demo processes, you get more detailed into how much energy, gas and water you’re going to need, how you’re going to recycle it, the footprint and the layout. You’re looking at logistics for incoming feedstock and outgoing material, where your customers are located, what the electricity grid looks like, the rule of law in that country, the pathway to permits. There’s also a storytelling element: I love that we’re building a circular economy on top of a former coal coking facility.”
An architect’s rendering of Circ’s first commercial-scale production plant in Saint-Avold, France, which is due to open in 2028.Photo: Circ