Upparel Opens Its Largest Onshore Textile Recycling Facility Yet

Australia, like the rest of the world, has a big problem with waste. It often feels like an insurmountable issue, one that many businesses turn away from. Upparel isn’t one of them. 

What started as a husband-and-wife sock subscription company back in 2016 became Upparel in 2020. Now it’s Australia’s largest textile recycling company. In November, Upparel opened its new premises – a 10,500-square-metre facility in Melbourne’s Cranbourne West. The warehouse is able to process more than 10,000 tonnes of material each year, making it the highest-capacity textile recycling facility currently up and running in Australia. 

“Upparel’s onshore recycling facility offers important promises. Bringing textile recycling onshore at scale is a significant achievement and demonstrates Australia’s growing capacity for fibre recovery and recycling,” says Dr Yassie Samie, postdoctoral researcher at RMIT School of Fashion and Textiles.

“It also promises to address long-standing operational and technical barriers to large-scale recycling, including volumes, operational efficiency and transparency, fibre composition, and the ability to make and market secondary products from recycled materials.”

This is the company’s ninth move in six years, co-founder and CEO Michael Elias says. The mammoth task of textile recycling isn’t a one-person job. Rather, Upparel partners with various contract manufacturers in Australia and New Zealand to fulfil its operations. But this new site marks a fresh chapter. 

One of the most notable additions is a fully automated textile recycling line that Upparel says can process any textile type. There’s also an increased focus on traceability and transparency. “Everything that comes into our facility is monitored from the door and tracked … to [its] final position,” Elias says, adding that the company also monitors energy consumption. 

Commercial retailers and manufacturers are Upparel’s biggest customers. Brands work with Upparel for on-site solutions, repurposing, stock recycling, secure destruction, digital solutions and more. Four years ago, consumer donations made up 80 per cent of the business. 

“Today, 80 per cent is commercial,” Elias says. “We started with a pick-up service from your front door, and what we’ve learned is that actually the power and impact is through partnership.” 

Upparel works with organisations varying from global fast-fashion brands and global fast-food chains to national service industry companies and international high-end brands. “Their needs are all very, very different … Everyone’s needs have been showcased to us. Everyone is doing something that is right for them,” Elias says.

A large portion of what Upparel does is facilitate reuse. “We support over 450 charities, social enterprises and not-for-profits around the country, where we give them whatever they want, whenever they want it, as long as they don’t send it offshore. And if they don't need it, they bring it back. We have an open-door policy,” he says. Some commercial partners will partake in reuse. Some won’t, like airline companies (for safety reasons) and luxury brands (for brand image reasons). 

Textiles deemed not fit for wear are recycled and made into new fibres. Upparel’s first process post-sorting and decommissioning textiles is breaking them down and “tearing [them] into a super-fine fluffy fibre”. They call this Fill Up, and it can be used in place of virgin polyester fill for products like cushion and stuffed toys.

Fill Up can be further processed and compressed into a fibre called Uptex, which is used for things like packaging, signage and homewares. Elias shares that Uptex is mainly being used in the construction and commercial fit-out space. 

Upparel is growing rapidly, with everyone from Bunnings and Bendigo Bank to Cotton On and Boeing getting onboard. To sceptics, Upparel has been able to grow as quickly and as largely as it has because of its partner companies’ propensity for mass production. Does Upparel help alleviate the root issue of overproduction?

“Every brand that is using us and doing the right thing is taking ownership and responsibility for any overproduction, any customer returns, any faulty items,” Elias says. “I think they should be put on a pedestal, because if they didn’t give a shit, they would do what was cheaper and easier and put it into landfill.

“We’ve got over 1000 brands, retailers and corporations that work with us today. They’ve chosen to come and work with us, and they’ve chosen to pay more to do the right thing. So how do I feel about them? They are the pioneers here.”

Textile recycling is an essential cog in our circular fashion system. But it’s not the only cog that matters.

“Recycling only ever addresses the symptoms of linear systems that overproduce and over-consume,” Samie says. “Unless it is paired with measures that curb overproduction and the accelerated pace of fashion, the challenge of textile waste will persist and may merely reconfigure the issue rather than resolve it.”