No chemicals, no landfill – Envoy Textiles in Bangladesh recycles 700 tons of fabric waste monthly

The denim industry generates a lot of waste. Yarn offcuts, fabric scraps, rejected rolls most of it ends up somewhere it shouldn’t. Envoy Textiles, Bangladesh’s largest denim manufacturer, decided a few years ago to deal with that differently.

The company runs two mechanical recycling plants at its Bhaluka facility in Mymensingh. Together, they process between 600 and 700 metric tons of material per month.

“We have two recycling plants. It is fully mechanical based. Total capacity is 600 to 700 metric tons,” says Nanda Dulal Biswas, Plant Head at Envoy Textiles. “Fibre demand is increasing. For this reason, we are thinking how to increase our capacity and how to improve automation so that the product will be more perfect and higher quality.“

The process is entirely mechanical, no chemicals involved. Fabric waste gets shredded, pulled apart fibre by fibre, and turned back into usable raw material. The output feeds back into yarn production. It’s a closed loop, at least partially, within the factory itself.

What pushed the leadership toward this investment wasn’t just an internal decision. Mohammed Al Tauhidul Islam, Additional General Manager for Sustainability at Envoy Textiles, explains that the trigger came from watching how global markets were shifting. Policies around circular waste management were tightening across Europe and North America. Buyers were asking harder questions. The company read those signals early.

“The leadership is very important to understand what changes are happening globally in relation to circular waste management,” Tauhidul Islam says. “We observed different countries’ market policies very precisely, and we felt the need to find ways to convert all wastage into a product.” That two-recycling unit, he notes, has a capacity of 750 metric tons per month on its own and now they are planning to increase it to 1000 tons per month. It handles multiple categories of output different fibre types, different end uses. The aim is to meet the quality thresholds that global buyers now expect from recycled content, not just supply it.

And buyers are watching closely. Tauhidul Islam names H&M, Levi’s, and Kontoor among the brands working alongside Envoy on recycling development. More than ten brands in total, he says, are actively engaged with the company around recycled and sustainable material sourcing.

This fits a wider pattern in denim. Brands have made public commitments to increase their use of recycled fibres, and they need suppliers who can actually deliver at scale, consistently, with verified quality. That’s what makes the mechanical process at Envoy’s plants significant. Mechanical recycling preserves fibre integrity better than chemical alternatives in many cases, though it still has limitations around fibre length degradation.

Nanda Dulal Biswas is candid about where things stand. The capacity is real, but it needs to grow. Automation needs to improve. Quality is good, but it can be better. These aren’t problems being hidden, they’re the next phase of the work.

For a country that exports over $40 billion worth of garments annually, the question of what happens to production waste is not a small one. Most textile waste from Bangladeshi factories still ends up in landfill or informal recycling channels. What Envoy is doing at scale is relatively rare in the local industry.

It won’t solve everything. No single facility does. But the plants in Bhaluka show that the infrastructure for handling this waste properly, mechanically, at volume can exist here. The demand is there. The capacity is being built. The rest, as Biswas puts it, is a matter of improving what’s already running.